Professor Robert Anderson (third from left) visits with the WSSU and UNCC students studying at CELIN/UFPR in Curitiba.
Winston-Salem State University students will have the opportunity to see the colorful historic towns, the famous rainforests, the huge urban center of Rio de Janerio and meet student peers in Brazil, thanks to a federal grant WSSU will share with the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC) to foster student exchange and faculty collaboration with three Brazilian universities.
WSSU and UNCC will share a four-year, $249,896 U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to foster student exchange and faculty collaboration with three Brazilian universities.
The initiative called “Legacies of the African Diaspora in Brazil and the United States: Persistent Inequalities,” began July 1, 2009 and will end June 30, 2013. FIPSE funds pay for 100 percent of student, faculty and staff mobility, while nongovernmental sources will cover almost all salary and material costs. The Brazilian counterparts receive federal funds from the Brazilian government’s Office of Higher Education Training to cover their portion of the activities.
Through the consortium grant, WSSU will receive $88,814 over four years, $45,000 of which will go to direct support for student stipends to study in Brazil, approximately three per year in academic years 2010-2011, 2011-2012, and 2012-2013. WSSU expects to receive an equivalent number of Brazilian exchange students during that period. Grant funds will also pay for $31,181 in faculty and staff travel, especially for professional development and presentation in capstone conferences.
Dr. Robert Anderson, WSSU associate professor of Portuguese, is the project director and will develop and conduct instruction in Portuguese Language and Brazilian Studies. WSSU faculty collaborators in the activities are Dr. Bryan M. Jack, assistant professor of African American History, Department of Social Sciences; and Andrea Patterson, instructor of Speech and Cross-Cultural Communication, Department of English and Foreign Languages. WSSU’s Office of International Programs, under the direction of Dr. Joti Sekhon, will oversee the project and manage student services and advising.
The theme of the four-year project builds on that of a previous FIPSE U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortium that also included the University of South Carolina at Columbia, called “The African Diaspora in Brazil and the United States: A Comparative Approach.” The earlier project ended on Aug. 31, 2009, after exchanging 25 U.S. and 22 Brazilian students and conducting seven conferences or symposia in the two countries. The last group of students on this exchange included two WSSU and seven UNCC students who completed an intensive five-week course in Portuguese language and Afro-Brazilian history and Culture at the Universidade Federal de Paraná’s Center for Language and Intercultural Studies (CELIN) in Curitiba, Brazil.
In the new FIPSE project, UNCC (U.S. lead) and WSSU are collaborating with the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil lead), the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in a four-year consortium to develop a student exchange program that will support a shared curriculum situating the United States and Brazil within the Africana Diaspora, examining twentieth- and twenty-first century legacies of slavery and the quest for inclusion. The project will also bring institutions from both countries together for faculty collaboration.
Student exchanges between the U.S. and Brazilian partner institutions is the primary focus of the project, providing training in the theme of the project in Portuguese and English language respectively. An intensive pre-semester Portuguese language program for U.S. students is built into the exchange.
The consortium total goal is sending 24 students from each country to spend one or two semesters in the host country. The target population is advanced undergraduates and, in the U.S., master’s degree students specializing in the social sciences or humanities with an interest in the following areas: African-American/Afro-Brazilian history, literature and culture; comparative race relations; civil rights; history of race and ethnicity; and public policy regarding questions of race.
In both countries, optional internship opportunities in museums and other local cultural institutions can be arranged for participants who have specific professional interests. In these courses, students examine the legacies of the Africana Diaspora as they manifest themselves outside of their host country and develop language and communication skills. There is also a required core course in comparative African Diaspora studies. This interdisciplinary seminar includes an Internet-based discussion group, a joint reading list, and student- and partner faculty-led discussion.
A second important focus of the grant activity is faculty interaction between U.S. and Brazilian institutions in the form one or two capstone conferences per year. These not only support the student exchanges but also foster and enrich the dialogue that is the central desired outcome of the grant proposal.
The goals for the “Persistent Inequalities” consortium are:
- To create a new interdisciplinary, curricular focus at all participating universities that has at its center a core course in comparative twentieth- and twenty-first century African American and Afro-Brazilian Studies, and to train students in this area.
- To foster dialogue among scholars at participating institutions around the topic of legacies of the African Diaspora.
- To enable a total of 48 students to participate in the exchange program for at least a semester.
- To enable students and faculty who participate in the project to attend at least one of the capstone conferences.
- To create a minor in Brazilian Studies at UNCC and to reinforce the existing Portuguese minor and African and African American Studies major programs at WSSU, and to train students in Portuguese language and Brazilian culture.
