THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 10, 1996 TAG: 9608100257
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 51 lines
Old Dominion University, which touts its international outlook, has won a $178,619 grant that will send 20 high school French teachers abroad next summer to study the literature and cultural landscape of French-speaking West Africa.
The National Endowment for the Humanities grant was one of four awarded in Virginia this week and the only one in Hampton Roads. Nationwide, 105 federally funded grants worth a total of $14.4 million were handed out.
ODU geography professor Christine Drake, project director, said the five-week institute will be held in Norfolk and in Senegal, a former French colony situated on the Atlantic coast of West Africa.
Senegal, a developing country whose official language is French, is home to cobras and crocodiles but also is one of the world's leading peanut producers. Its capital, Dakar, is a modern port city of 1.7 million people.
``It's broadening people's perspective,'' said Drake, who returned this week from a six-month Fulbright Fellowship in Indonesia. ``There has been an increasing recognition of the importance of French literature coming from countries outside of France.''
Drake, who has taught for 17 years at ODU, said participating teachers will be required to conduct workshops and training for their local school districts to create a curriculum that is more multicultural and international in perspective. Teachers will be selected later.
Exposing high school students to the French-speaking world beyond France is important to enhance global understanding, Drake said.
The influence of French culture and language extends over one-fifth of the world, Drake said, including 39 countries from Canada to Vietnam, from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to Reunion in the Indian Ocean and to New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.
Surveys of U.S. schoolchildren show an alarming ignorance of world geography, and an effective way to teach it is to integrate other themes into it, Drake said.
Also, Drake said the experience should help teachers relate better to African American and other minority students.
Besides ODU, the three other sites in Virginia awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities were:
University of Richmond, $35,250, to plan an exhibit, catalog and programs on Japanese Zen painting and calligraphy as religious, aesthetic and cultural experience.
Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, $100,000, to support exhibits, a book and programs about how the Civil War changed society for women in the South.
Educational Film Center, Annandale, $50,050, to support writing a script for a 90-minute documentary on efforts of American women to win full equality after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. by CNB