Inspirational women through the eyes of Fulbrighters #7
For International Women's Month, we invited Fulbrighters to share stories of some of the most inspirational women they encountered during their Fulbright grant.
Dr Linda F. Robertson
Speaking from my experience as an international scholar at Kent State University, Kent Ohio on seven trips, I feel it is my moral duty to pay tribute to all the faculty who welcomed me with open arms and who contributed to making me part of their intercultural education programmes inviting me to be their Distinguished Lecturer more than six times and those who gave me precious opportunities to speak to their students in host schools. There were several women teachers and faculty who contributed to shaping my professional and academic personality but the most influential person was, and still is, Dr. Linda F. Robertson, the former director of the Gerald Read Center for International and Intercultural Education at KSU. Dr. Robertson is a living example of faculty who provided all the necessary means for her students, visiting scholars, and graduate assistants to do academic research in a serene atmosphere, to share their cultures and get involved in cultural activities with students and faculty coming from most countries of the world, and to perform their religious duties with no stereotypes nor any kind of prejudice. Dr. Robertson’s contributions ranged from providing transportation to/from airports and places of worship, to offering invitations to restaurants and stores which serve and sell Halal food, to providing prayer mats in her office rooms and celebrating Muslim Holidays, to organizing cultural talk seminars to which she invited students and faculty from all specialties and departments, through kind invitations to concerts and cultural events and community celebrations. There is no surprise in what she was doing, and is still doing in her retirement commitment with migrants across Ohio State. Dr. Robertson traveled in several Muslim countries and one of her academic commitments was to annihilate the distance between cultures and dissipate misunderstanding about other religions to both American and international visiting scholars. Her office was a real and a pioneer melting pot of world races, cultures, schools of thought, and religions where intergroup contact and knowledge of the Other are the key to conflict resolution and the spread of understanding and acceptance of the Other, regardless of their ethnicities, origins, culinary and musical tastes, or religions. Having been inspired by Dr. Robertson’s strong personality and selfless commitment to international and intercultural education, my dream is to set up a center for international students in my working place.
- Keltouma Guerch is a Fulbright Alumna from Morocco. She first visited the USA as an ILEP Fulbright Scholar in 2007 and three more times as a researcher. Currently, she is a teacher trainer at the English Department in the Regional Center for Education and Training in Oujda, Morocco.