Kudos: Three assistant professors receive Provost’s Affordable Courses grant; Alumna selected to complete specialist project in Iraq

**Three assistant professors receive Provost’s Affordable Courses grant**

Three assistant professors in the Mary Frances Early College of Education received UGA’s Provost’s Affordable Courses grant to financially support students’ educational resources. Out of 13 total projects, the College had the greatest number of projects selected for funding.

Michael Barger, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, Jill Stefaniak, an assistant professor in the Department of Career and Information Studies, and Xiaoming Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science Education, will receive $5,000 to transition from costly course materials such as textbooks to educational resources that are free for students or cost less than $40. The grant program is administered by the UGA Libraries and UGA Center for Teaching and Learning.

[Read the full story on our website](https://coe.uga.edu/news/2021/02/assistant-professor-receives-affordable-courses-grant).

**Alumna selected by U.S. Department of State to complete specialist project in Iraq**

Kathleen McGovern (Ph.D. ’20), an alumna of the Department of Language and Literacy Education, was selected by the U.S. Department of State for a six-week English Language Specialist project that will focus on how to design and implement engaging online language instruction in Iraq. Her project is one of 150 that the English Language Specialist Program supports each year.

McGovern will collaborate online with a group of approximately 30 Iraqi and Kurdish university English teachers from Baghdad and Erbil to improve digital language instruction in Iraq and enhance online communicative approaches for university and faculty trainers. Additionally, the project will collaborate with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.

“Developing and leading these workshops on digital TESOL instruction with Iraqi educators means an opportunity to connect across cultures and distance,” said McGovern, who currently serves as a lecturer in the applied linguistics program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “It also means that I am able to bring the skills my education has afforded me to a region of the world that has only recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, begun implementing online instruction. I’m excited to both teach in this context and to learn from my Iraqi cohort about TESOL education in this region at this unique moment in history.”

[Read the full story on our website](https://coe.uga.edu/news/2021/03/alumna-selected-by-u-s-department-of-state-to-complete-specialist-project-in-iraq).