Dr. Kimberly McFall, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Marshall University, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to work in Poland at the University of Wroclaw. The announcement was made Friday by Ethan Rosenzweig, deputy assistant secretary for academic programs in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
McFall said her project will deal with the integration of technology in the K-12 classroom and where technology education needs to be in the post-COVID era. She will survey teachers to determine their perceptions on what they learned about technology in their undergraduate programs, what they didn’t learn, and what they wished they had known when they started teaching. She will use the results of this research to create a Faculty Learning Community at the university in order to develop technology-rich preparation for aspiring teachers. She expects to spend most of the Spring 2023 semester in Poland.
“It is my goal to start a best practices model that can be shared with institutions that are looking to build a collaborative and productive working space,” McFall said in her project statement for the grant. She said this work is based on work that was started in Marshall’s College of Education and Professional development in 2019 with iPad integration in West Virginia schools.
A member of the Marshall faculty in the College of Education and Professional Development since 2015, McFall has specialized in teaching school library topics as well as graduate curriculum and instruction courses. She holds a B.A. in music education from Arkansas Tech University, a master’s degree in library science from Appalachian State University, and specialist and doctoral degrees in educational leadership from Arkansas State University.
Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations. Alumni include 61 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 76 MacArthur Fellows and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.