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CORVALLIS - Chris Southers, an associate professor of education at Oregon State University, has received a Fulbright grant to work with education students in Latvia.

She will leave next week for Liepaja, Latvia, where she will help students develop curricula, learn new teaching methodologies, and better understand education reform in the U.S.

Southers will spend five months at Liepaja Pedagogical University.

Teacher educators in Latvia are pursuing educational reform, Southers said. She hopes to share with them various models of educational reform in the U.S. that were developed based on "best practices" research.

Southers is a former president of the National Association of Teacher Educators for Family and Consumer Sciences Education, and spent a summer working as a fellow in the Washington, D.C. office of then-U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield.

She has been on the OSU faculty since 1986.

The Fulbright program is sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. Southers is one of about 2,000 U.S. grantees who will travel abroad during the 1998-99 academic year.