Fulbright Fellowship Lecture at CSU by Dr Kate Crowe

Dr Kate Crowe has just returned from the US following her Fulbright Fellowship. She has been a PhD student, postdoctoral scholar, and sessional lecturer at Charles Sturt University (CSU) over a number of years.

Today Kate presented a lecture to CSU titled:
Why potatoes aren’t vegetables: Things I’ve learnt from my Fulbright Fellowship 
Participants attended in person in Bathurst, and via video conference from Albury, Shepparton, Newcastle, Blue Mountains, and other parts of the state.

Head of School Carol Burgess presenting Dr Kate Crowe with
a gift from CSU to congratulate her on her Fulbright Fellowship

Here is the abstract of her presentation

Dr Kate Crowe left Charles Sturt University in August 2016 to become a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology (NY). The Fulbright program is the flagship international educational exchange program of the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. After spending nearly a year immersed in U.S. culture, Kate has returned to share her experiences of life and research. In this talk she will describe the research she has conducted to better understand how students with hearing loss process language and how the Fulbright program encourages collaborative research and understanding. She will also share stories about creating cultural bridges, and what happens when these bridges don’t quite meet in the middle. For example, why a potato may not be a vegetable (and how this confuses your research results)? What happens to squirrels in winter? What exactly is a cheesehead?

Kate is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University (Australia) and a member of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech. Kate has worked as a speech pathologist, academic, and researcher in a range of early childhood, school, and tertiary settings. Her research and clinical interests include communication choice and development for children with hearing loss, particularly children who use sign, live in multilingual environments, and/or have complex communication needs. Kate currently works with college-aged students who are deaf and is exploring linguistic and cognitive factors which inform how we teach deaf learners.