Dr. Lucinda “Cindi” Spaulding, director of the University of Lynchburg’s special education programs, will travel to Cairo, Egypt, later this month. There, she’ll work with Egypt’s National Center for Educational Research and Development on a monthlong project, “Strategies for Teaching People with Disabilities.”
Spaulding will be there under a Fulbright Specialist Program award, which she received in April 2024.
As described in Fulbright’s press release announcing the award, the Fulbright Specialist Program, administered by the U.S. Department of State, is the “flagship international educational exchange program” and is “designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”
NCERD’s goal is to create schools in Egypt where students with mild disabilities — autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, visual impairment, etc. — are fully integrated into classrooms with students without disabilities.
“They have sought the support of someone with expertise from the United States who can help them develop the system and best practices and strategies for teachers to teach large classrooms of students with mixed abilities,” Spaulding said in early November.
She added that in Egypt she’ll provide academic support, along with “social and behavioral” guidance that will enable Egyptian educators to develop best practices and strategies to deal with bullying and “to address … the stigma that can be associated with disability.”
Spaulding further described her work as a “training-the-trainers type thing” that will involve “16 days of workshops, where I’ll be collaborating with researchers from Egypt to teach strategies and best practices for inclusive education.”
Workshop topics will include, among other things, the “medical vs. social model of disability,” writing lesson plans for differentiated instruction, and “strategies for cooperative and peer-assisted learning among students.”
Before traveling to Egypt, Spaulding developed what she described as a “100-page tool kit” of resources for NCERD researchers to share with teachers across the country. It and the presentations she’ll give in Egypt are currently being translated into Arabic.
She said her “biggest goal,” however, “is to ensure that what I share is sustainable.”
Spaulding is co-founder and co-director of Lynchburg’s Fulbright Council and serves as a University-designated Fulbright Program Advisor with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
In that position, she has supported multiple students — Rick Smallshaw ’23, Wrenn Cleary ’20, and others — in successful Fulbright applications. Spaulding said she is looking forward to representing Lynchburg in Egypt as a Fulbrighter herself.
