The J. William Fulbright Scholarship promotes traveling to a foreign country and teaching while also learning. Tonight at 7, Philip Bushby, a Mississippi State University professor and former Fulbright scholar, will lecture about his experiences as a Fulbright Scholar and the program itself. Sigma Xi, the international scientific research society, sponsors the lecture, which will take place in the Wise Center seminar room. Mississippi State University’s faculty organized their Sigma Xi chapter in 1939.
The Fulbright Scholarship Program is “an international program that funds exchanges of university faculty in the United States to participate in projects in foreign countries and vice-versa,” Bushby said.
The program was designed to “help expand cultural understanding between the people of the United States and other countries,” according to a press release. Since its establishment in 1946, the program has given some 234,000 people the opportunity to learn and teach in other countries.
Bushby is an MSU professor of veterinary medicine, and in 1993, he helped execute the educational method of problem-based learning into MSU’s veterinary medicine program. When Bushy went to the University College of Dublin, Ireland, with the Fulbright Scholarship Program in 2000, he went to introduce the idea of problem-based learning.
Problem-based learning is an educational method that promotes student research rather than faculty teaching. It is “student-centered and promotes active involvement of the student, not just sitting in lectures,” Bushby said.
It also promotes small group discussion, which in turn promotes the idea of more student responsibility.
The method was slowly introduced into MSU’s veterinary medicine program; however, when Bushby took the method to the University College of Dublin, the process was much quicker. Bushby said it was a quick, dramatic shift from traditional education.
In the lecture, Bushby will discuss exactly what the Fulbright Scholarship Program is and how one can become involved. Secondly, he will tell of his own experience with the program.
He will also show a photographic tour of Ireland. Bushby said he found the atmosphere of Ireland beautiful and added, “It is very rewarding to live somewhere else and to experience another culture.”
Bushby will also discuss the personal value it had upon his life.
“The Fulbright program is extremely rewarding, both professionally and personally. It was extremely beneficial to interact with new faculty and different students and to experience their reactions to a different kind of learning,” Bushby said.