PULLMAN, Wash. — Emmett P. Fiske, an organizational development specialist in the department of rural sociology at Washington State University, has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to Chile during the calendar year 1999.
The award was announced recently by the U.S. Information Agency and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Fiske, a member of the WSU faculty since 1979, will be affiliated with three Chilean universities during his exchange year. He will offer Spanish language courses on environmental conflict resolution to both graduate and undergraduate students.
He also will collaborate with Chilean counterparts in the testing, further refinement and conversion of various lecture topics into Spanish and English language distance education modules for inclusion in future WSU offerings to be made available throughout the northern and southern hemispheres.
In addition, Fiske will offer workshops and intensive training sessions to representatives of Chilean non-governmental organizations and government agencies.
Fiske, a native of Mariposa, Calif., joined the WSU faculty in 1979 as an extension specialist assigned to the WSU Puyallup Research and Extension Center. He relocated to the Pullman campus in 1985.
During his tenure at the university, Fiske has helped develop programs for people injured in the workplace and trained both extension faculty and citizens interested in facilitating the resolution of natural resource-related conflicts.
In 1989 he facilitated the first mediated pesticide issue in the state, an agreement reached between Palouse area wheat growers and their non-farming neighbors over the use of pesticides to control the Russian wheat aphid.
He also was administratively responsible for the activities of the Washington Water Resources Forum, an advisory body to the governor, his executive cabinet and the legislature. The forum forged a consensus- based water policy and conservation recommendations that lessened many decades of conflict over water management in the state. The forum was honored both at the state and national level.
Fiske traveled to Chile in 1990 to assess university-level interest in collaborating with WSU. That has evolved into a broad-based program aided by a U.S. Information Agency grant to the WSU Program in Environmental Science and Regional Planning.
During 1992-1994, Fiske was a Fellow in International Development in the partners of the Americas leadership program funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
Fiske recently began providing environmental conflict resolution training to WSU students. His upper division and graduate level course allows students to apply negotiation principles to such contentious policy issues as the siting of hazardous waste facilities, endangered species and watershed pollution.
The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 under Congressional legislation introduced by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The program, sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, is designed to promote mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
More than 70,000 Americans have studied or done research abroad under the auspices of the program and more than 130,000 scholars from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States.
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