A Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science teacher from Columbus is among 12 U.S. educators chosen to study in Russia this summer under a Fulbright-Hays grant.
Margaret Mary Henry won the fellowship in a national competition among university and K-12 teachers of Russian. It is the second Fulbright-Hays for the Columbus native, who joined MSMS six years ago and is Mississippi’s only high school teacher of Russian.
The American Councils Summer Russian Language Teachers program, which will take place from June 24 to Aug. 8 at Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, will include advanced course work in Russian language, studies in contemporary Russian society and culture, cultural excursions, discussions with Russian peers, and professional seminars.
Henry successfully completed the 2014 version of the program, which was held at Moscow State University.
This year the 12 participants come from 11 different states. Half come from pre-college institutions; the other half are at institutions of higher education, either as graduate students preparing to teach Russian, or as faculty already teaching Russian.
The six-week program is administered with the assistance of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad. The grant covers international airfare, and all related in-country expenses, such as tuition, housing, cultural excursions and regional field studies, along with a stipend and materials allowance for participants. Participants receive 10 graduate hours of credit from Bryn Mawr College upon completion.
The program is among an array of federal initiatives to foster the study of Russian and other languages that the U.S. government categorizes as critical. Last year, two of Henry’s students won scholarships through the National Security Language Initiative for Youth and studied Russian in the former Soviet Union in an intensive summer program. Three of her students have won grants to participate in Russian immersion workshops in the U.S. through the federal Startalk initiative. In summer 2015 Henry herself completed a teacher workshop on Startalk methodology.
Henry serves as the Mississippi Foreign Language Association’s committee chair for less commonly taught languages. In 2015, Henry, who also teaches Spanish, received the Bostick Award for dedication to professional development from the Southern Conference on Language Teaching.
About Henry
Henry is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in Russian and also specialized in Spanish. She has studied in Spain and Argentina. The teacher holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and combined her skills in language and writing at The Moscow Times, the Dutch-owned newspaper in the Russian capital, where Henry lived from 1992-1999. After four years in Boston as an editor at The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, she returned to Mississippi, where she taught at MUW as the Harriet Stark Gibbons Distinguished Chair in journalism.
At MSMS, Henry four years ago re-launched Russian, which had been taught briefly in the past. Seventy percent of her graduates have continued studying the Slavic language at universities including the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, Emory University and Georgetown University.
MSMS is Mississippi’s only public residential high school specifically designed to meet the needs of Mississippi’s most academically talented students. The school, which is located on the campus of MUW, serves high school juniors and seniors from every corner of the Magnolia State. In 2014, the school was named the 57th best high school in America by the Daily Beast and was named the 24th best high school in the American Southeast by the same publication.
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