An international scholarship allowed a Missouri Southern business instructor to share his expertise with the rest of the world.

Dr. Brad Kleindl, assistant dean of the school of business, returned in March from 22 days of teaching at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His trip was made possible by the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program.

Fulbright is an international exchange program that allows professionals and educators to work with professional counterparts in other countries on curriculum and faculty development.

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Under a cooperative agreement with the Bureau, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars assists in the administration of the program for faculty and professionals.

The program was proposed to Congress in 1945 by Sen. J. William Fulbright as a vehicle for promoting “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world.”

“The Fulbright, in higher education, is a very well known and respected program,” Kleindl said. “It sends large numbers of people around the world every year to basically foster international relationships, have U.S. faculty members become more internationally in-tuned and allows for very interesting international experiences.”

Kleindl chose the scholarship to South Africa because he had never been to the country and the program offered was in his area of specialty.

“I had received another Fulbright request to see if I was willing to go to a school in Uganda,” Kleindl said. “While I had no objective to going there, given the political problems that exist right now, and their proximity to Somalia, I didn’t feel it was probably the best place to go. But South Africa was a long way from any conflict.”

While in South Africa, Kleindl taught undergraduate, MBA and post-graduate classes in e-commerce and e-business.

Teaching international students provided several challenges for Kleindl.

“The major difference between American students and many other international students is the lack of interaction in the classroom,” he said. “They are accustomed to a lecture mode where the instructor just lectures, and they rarely ask questions.”

Another potential problem was the language barrier. Most of the students spoke English, but for some of them, Africaans is their primary language.

The purpose of the trip was educational, but Kleindl still fit in time for sightseeing.

“They told me I needed to see some of the country,” he said.

He traveled 2,000 miles from Bloemfontein to Port Elizabeth and then on to Knysna and visited several tourist attractions including the Addo Elephant Park.

Despite Kleindl’s other private travels around the world, he was surprised by the level of development in the wealthier African world and the level of poverty in the poorer black African world. Ten years out of apartheid, the mixture of the first and third world is similar to the racial turmoil the U.S. experienced during the ’70s and ’80s.

“The Fulbright is a very valuable experience for both parties,” Kleindl said. “Not only because I was able to take my expertise down there, but it does allow Americans to see other parts of the world and even though I’ve traveled over a lot of this world and seen a lot of places, what I saw in South Africa was somewhat unique in terms of the diversity or as far as the difference between the two different cultures that live side by side there. It will be interesting to watch over the next 20 years how those two different cultures reconcile there lives together.”