Utah NAME

Today I had the opportunity to participate in the Utah NAME conference, which was held a Utah Valley University and I had a good experience there. The theme of the conference was Narratives of Bravery and Hope: Making my Home in Utah. A lot of immigrants here shared their stories and their dreams for the future. I was really impressed by them and their desires to do good in the world and their desire to make a difference. UVU also has some really great programs in place to improve the opportunities for Latino/a students. they have Latinos in Action and Latino Educators of Tomorrow programs that I think are so important. I also was impressed by the comments made about the university president, Matt Holland, and how much he cares about the students.

Part of what I did was share a project I have been working on. It was to write up a booklet that contains a lot of the activities that we used in our Multicultural Education class that Ramona Cutri and I co-taught. In it, I included the activity objective, how it ties into the Standards for Effective Pedagogy, the materials for the activity, how to set up and conduct the activity, how to debrief it, and then some ideas for using the same activity with different topics. I felt like it went well and I'm glad I was able to participate in it. We had my project posted online. Scroll down a little bit once you get to the screen and read the section on Lesson Plan Adaptation Activities. Then click the Download ... materials here. I decided today I would like to convert into a wiki page where many people can edit it and add their own activities. I think that would foster some additional collaboration that would enhance the project more. Overall, I was pleased with how it came out. I will play with the possibility of converting it into its own website.

It was interesting to me to participate in the conference because it made me think about my own identity as a scholar and how is used to be so much more involved than I currently am now, as I am an instructional designer and spend more of my day thinking about design and how to make whatever we are creating easier, rather than people issues.

I also thought about how much more needs to be done to work with kids who are not the mainstream. I think that is one reason I am excited to get more done on my dissertation.

Then I listened to the second half of the afternoon session of General Conference and I ran almost 15 miles today... I'm glad tomorrow is a rest day.