Laurie deBettencourt, the faculty lead of special education programs at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award to Budapest, Hungary.
deBettencourt will conduct research and teach for four months beginning in January in the Special Education Institute of Atypical Behaviour and Cognition at the Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Eötvös Loránd University.
The Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Education of Eötvös Loránd University, during its more than 100-year history, has had an international reputation for training and research in the field of working with people with disabilities. For more than nine decades, it was the only higher education institution in Hungary providing training in special needs education. It is still the only establishment in Hungary offering study programs in eight fields of disabilities.
“We are especially interested in Dr. deBettencourt’s experience in the field of the education of children with mild and high-incidence disabilities,” said Dean Péter Zászkaliczky, “and have plans for collaborative research projects related to these issues.”
At the Johns Hopkins School of Education, deBettencourt oversees all master’s programs and certificates within the special education programs. She has also overseen several Maryland state-funded grant programs supporting special educators in the areas of autism, applied behavior analysis, STEM education and how to provide instruction in math. She recently completed directing a doctoral training grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs.
deBettencourt is editor of Teacher Education and Special Education, the journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), and has co-authored several textbooks and written numerous articles related to the instruction of students with mild to moderate disabilities.
Her most recent co-authored article, “Educating Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners: The Need for Continued Advocacy,” was published in the journal Exceptionality. She is currently chair of the American Educational Research Association’s Special Interest Group (SIG) in Special Education, and past president of the CEC’s Division for Learning Disabilities.
The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, has provided more than 370,000 participants with the opportunity to study, teach, conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international problems.