WEB NEWS RELEASE
COLLEGE PARK, MD (March 2010) - 'Providing new tools for a new generation' is a prime focal point of the March 11-12 national conference for mathematics educators, organized by the College of Education's Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education (MIMAUE).
Hosted at the UMUC Inn and Conference Center from March 11-12, the invitation-only event is designed to help mathematics teachers add knowledge and skill to their quest of becoming 'culturally competent' educators. According to the conference co-chairs, MIMAUE Executive Director Stephanie Timmons Brown and Professor Emeritus Martin L. Johnson, many students and teachers have been exposed to the concept of Culturally Relevant Teaching, but the ideas remain purely as theory.
"Translating the theory into practice is difficult," notes Johnson, founding director of MIMAUE. "It is even more difficult for mathematics teachers to see how a CULTURE impacts how a student learns and should influence how a teacher plans and teaches. This conference is designed to give about 100 elementary, middle and high school mathematics teachers an opportunity to explore this subject with experts and leave with workable ideas of how to incorporate a culturally relevant pedagogy into their existing methodologies."
The co-chairs state the inspiration for the conference theme was based on the mounting evidence in the research literature, and from their own experience at MIMAUE, that teachers who can find ways to make mathematics "relevant" to their students report more interest and higher achievement. At this event, participants will have the chance to explore the connections between culture and school mathematics in focused workshops led by the conference's major speakersexperts in the field who have found ways to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in mathematics classrooms:
Gloria Ladson Billings
Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education & Professor, Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies
Dept. of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Marta Civil
Professor
Dept. of Mathematics
University of Arizona
Jacqueline Leonard ('97)
Assoc. Professor, Mathematics Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education
College of Education
Temple University
Arthur B. Powell, Jr.
Assoc. Professor, Mathematics Educ.
Dept. of Urban Education
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (Newark)
The two-day event is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. To learn more about the MIMAUE Conference, please email mimaueinfo@umd.edu, or visit the MIMAUE web site: www.education.umd.edu/MIMAUE.
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For more information on the College of Education, visit: www.education.umd.edu
or contact
Halima Cherif, Assistant Director for Communications, at: hcherif@umd.edu
