BOONE—Two Appalachian State University professors will soon travel half way around the world thanks to awards from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Laurie Williamson, coordinator of the professional school counseling program in the Reich College of Education has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct research and teach at the University of Balamand in Lebanon for 10 months, beginning later this summer.

Victoria Cox, an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will travel to the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, Germany, in Spring 2008 to research the work of Argentinean playwright Robert Arlt. She received a Senior Scholar Fulbright Award.

Williamson’s appointment to the University of Balamand (UOB) was a perfect match for Williamson’s expertise in school counseling and her interest in the Middle East. The private university is located outside Tripoli and overlooks the Mediterranean. The university enrolls approximately 3,300 students

While there, Williamson will teach and work on a research project comparing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) profiles of education students from Appalachian with their counterparts at UOB. “It gives you an idea as far as career counseling as to what types of personalities are best matches for occupational fields,” she said of the MBTI. She also is interested in learning how much culture impacts someone’s personality.

Williamson spoke of the benefits the experience will bring to her students at Appalachian. “Research projects, and in some respect sharing personal experiences, drive your teaching,” she said. She also hopes to have her students in Lebanon communicate and work with students at Appalachian through a Web-based project, and establish a relationship between students in Appalachian’s Professional School Counseling Program and education students from the Department of Education at UOB.

Williamson also will teach an undergraduate and graduate course on professional school counseling, and will work with UOB on development of a counseling center for students and staff. “School counseling is relatively new at this university. They don’t have a master’s level program,” she said.

She also plans to take on the role of a student, learning Arabic while she is in Lebanon, which along with French and English are the primary languages there.

“It is so important to understand culture through a grasp of language,” she said. “Multiculturalism is extremely important in this global world we live in,” says Williamson. “I am very honored and grateful to have this opportunity to further develop my multicultural skills.”

The Ibero-American Institute houses Europe’s largest collection related to Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese culture. The time abroad will allow Cox to continue research for a book she is writing titled “Immigrant Voices from South America: Ethnic Identities in the Argentine and Uruguayan Popular Theatre (1880-1940)” in which she uses theatre to understand the culture and historical period of the two countries.

“It works well with my teaching,” she said of the award. “All foreign language is taught from a cultural and historical perspective. By studying popular theatre and literature, students learn about the issues people were thinking about during a particular period.”

Cox said that few dictators in Argentina during the 19th and early 20th centuries were interested in preserving their country’s history and culture. Berlin became a repository for many materials thanks to private collections donated to the institute by scholars and a Latin American diplomat who was assigned a post in Berlin. Also, the early 1900s was a time of growing trade relations between Germany and Latin America. It also was a time many Germans were immigrating to Latin America.

Cox said Arlt, who lived from 1900-1942, is known in Latin America for his creative use of the Spanish language and irony to portray social issues of the time.

While in Berlin, Cox will visit museum collections related to the Andes, about which she teaches in her classes, and attend the Berlin Film Festival.

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