By Brianna Bohland, Staff Writer
OCU plans to host the Connecting Across Cultures Conference for the second consecutive year to educate teachers on multicultural education.
Multicultural education is a field of study whose major aim is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds.
“The purpose is to recruit education majors to teach where there is a diverse population, and recruit teachers from a minority population,” said Liz Willner, associate professor of education.
The education department is hosting the event with a grant from the Oklahoma State Regents For Higher Education.
“Today, classrooms are very diverse,” said visiting professor Lisa Lawter. “The presentation is going to talk about addressing the needs of all the types of learners and making all those people feel welcome.”
This conference has been in the making since July, when the department first received the grant.
Several campus groups such as Phi Kappa Phi, The Office of Multicultural Affairs, SOEA, and Kappa Delta Pi helped plan the conference.
The event is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. February 8 in Tom and Brenda McDaniel University Center.
The speaker, Donna Gollnic, has made many contributions to the field of multi-cultural education, including co-writing the textbook Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society.
Along with the guest speaker, several OCU students will lead discussion groups.
“We’ve invited all the universities across Oklahoma, and the majority of them are coming,” Lawter said.
There will be 13 students from 13 different universities as well as high school students from Oklahoma City schools in attendance.
“We received great responses from last year’s students,” Willner said.
The main goal of the Connecting Across Cultures Conference is to be interactive for pre-service teachers, so they can become more prepared to teach the students that they will have in their classrooms.
“It is an area that you can just never know enough about,” Lawter said.
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