Fulbright in hand, she's off to mentor teachers in Chile

Salem State College professor Michelle Pierce will spend three months next year in a corner of the globe she recently had to Google.

Arica, Chile, as she learned, is a port city at the northern end of the coastal South American country, about 10 miles from the Peruvian border.

It will be a long way from home for Pierce, a native of rural Pennsylvania, who has been a member of the Salem State faculty for eight years.

She's going to Chile as a 2008 recipient of one of the academic world's most prestigious honors, the Fulbright scholarship grant for international educational exchange.

It's an opportunity of a lifetime for the teacher, an associate professor in the college's education department, who specializes in training future teachers in foreign language and English as a second language. In Chile, she will work on an ESL initiative called English Opens Doors.

Fulbright scholars, as Pierce noted recently, sitting in a conference room on the Salem State campus, are cultural ambassadors. It's a responsibility in which she takes great pride.

"It's important that they're sending people who are obviously bringing good will," she said.

Pierce, who is fluent in Spanish and French, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College and earned her doctorate in literacy, language and cultural studies at Boston University. Language, she said, is a critical part of international relations.

"My view is that it should not be solely about what's practical," she said. "It's a gesture of courtesy and understanding," one that helps put across the idea that Americans, despite our image abroad, are not overwhelmingly ethnocentric.

In Europe, where she has traveled extensively, she is still dismayed when people express amazement that she can speak their language so well.

"It bothers me that this is our image," she said. As a Fulbrighter, she'll have a chance to do her part to dispel it.

Pierce, 38, grew up about two hours north of Pittsburgh, in an old oil town. "It was a lovely town," she said, "but not multilingual or multicultural."

As the daughter of a career high school history teacher, she was inclined from an early age toward education, and she soon developed a particular interest in language.

"I loved it from the beginning," she said, "and I liked the idea of travel."

At first, she made vague plans about putting her language studies to use. "I saw myself, as funny as it seems now, in the government or the CIA," she said with a smile. "I even had some grand vision of working at the United Nations."

Settling on her career in teacher training, she earned her master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh before returning to Boston for the doctoral program at BU. She taught in the Chelsea school system for several years before joining the Salem State faculty.

Some of her students over the years have been products of immigrant families from Central and South America. Her current classes, she said, are excited about her impending undertaking.

"I was eager to tell them," she said. "I like to encourage them to travel and study abroad."

The Fulbright program, founded after World War II by US Senator William J. Fulbright, features a large association of illustrious members, among them 37 Nobel laureates.

"It's definitely exciting to be among that group," said Pierce, who will follow another recently named Fulbright recipient from the Salem State education department into the program. Assistant professor Cleti Cervoni, a Salem native and Salem State graduate, is conducting research at the University of Cardiff in Wales.

"I'm very proud," said Mary-Lou Breitborde, associate dean of the School of Education, who hired both Pierce and Cervoni. The department, she noted, has just 17 professors.

"We're not an especially big school, and we're a public college. This is one external affirmation of the quality of our faculty."

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