SALEM — A Salem State College professor is headed to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship.
Michelle Pierce, an associate professor of education, has been awarded a 2008 visiting scholars grant from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
She will travel to Chile for three months next year to do teacher training for English Opens Doors, a program requiring all students in the country to pass a standardized English reading and listening test. It is part of a national effort to make all Chileans fluent in English within a generation.
Pierce "will be joining the ranks of distinguished scholars and professors worldwide who are leaders in the educational, political, economic, social and cultural lives of their countries," M. Denise Saint-Jean, executive director of Fulbright Chile, said in a press release.
This is the second Fulbright award for the Salem State education faculty this academic year. At the start of the year, assistant professor Cletus Cervoni received a Fulbright to conduct research at the University of Cardiff in Wales.
Pierce, a Salem resident, was the 2005 recipient of the Salem State College Outstanding Faculty Award.
She is fluent in French and Spanish, teaches courses in language and literacy development, and has done research on the challenges faced by English language learners of all ages.
A native of Pennsylvania, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College, received a master's degree in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from Boston University. She joined the faculty at Salem State in 2000 after working for nearly a decade in the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts public schools. In addition, she is coordinator of the Massachusetts Children's Book Award program.
