2019 LACS-CMENAS Teacher Training Workshop

This workshop will introduce Grade 5-12 teachers (but all are welcome), to the complex issues of Middle Eastern migration to and religions in Latin America, helping participants to contextualize these issues within both regions’ history and current events. The program will contextualize the political, historical, and economic relationship between Latin America and the Middle East, exploring the concepts of diaspora, migration, asylum, and religion, as well as the representation of these themes in art. The workshop will highlight immigrant populations in Latin America and explore the socioeconomic and demographic situations in their home countries that contribute to historical and contemporary migration flows and how this is represented in art, media, and popular discourse. Teachers will leave with a more nuanced understanding of these topics and ideas for how to make stories of migration and religious persecution more approachable for a young audience.

All participants will be eligible to:

• receive 3 State Continuing Education Clock Hours (SCECHs)
• apply for a curriculum development grant of up to $200 for books and materials. Applications for these grants will be made available to participants after the workshop.

Included in cost: Dinner, coffee and snacks, a full lesson plan and resource guide, and copies of the following books:

• Lucky Broken Girl, by Ruth Behar
• An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, by Ruth Behar (illustrated by Humberto Mayol)
• So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico, by Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp
• Arabs in the Americas: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora, by Darcy A. Zabel

For SCECH credits, teachers must bring an additional $10 (payable by cash or check) on the day of the workshop.

Middle East and Latin America - Historical Ties. Bryon Maxey, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan

Learning through Art: Reimagining the Migrant Experience. Dr. Pamela Reister, Curator for Museum Learning and Training, University of MIchigan Museum of Art

Jewish Cuba. Dr. Ruth Behar, Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan

Arabs and Muslims in Latin America. Dr. Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan

Instructional Design Workshop. Dr. Darin Stockdill, Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research, University of Michigan

Ruth Behar is Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Ruth was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in New York. She has worked as an ethnographer in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, and is known for her humanistic approach to understanding identity, immigration, and the search for home in our global era. Her many books include Lucky Broken Girl, a Pura Belpré Prize-winning middle-grade novel, and among her anthropological works, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys. Her documentary, Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic Journey, has been shown in festivals around the world.

Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Juan has worked for three and a half decades to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. He also authored Engaging the Muslim World, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East, and many other books.

Bryon Maxey is a graduate student in the Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies Program, at the University of Michigan. Bryon’s professional and academic career includes multifaceted experiences as a pre-college educator, multi-faith community organizer and project facilitator of digital learning at the University of Michigan. Most formative to Bryon’s role as an educator were his first teaching experiences in Chicago and Detroit in secondary social studies. At the postsecondary level, Bryon has played a key role in the launch of a number of groundbreaking learning initiatives at U-M including: the U-M led Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC), IKHLAS: A Research Initiative Studying Islamic Knowledge, Histories & Languages, Arts & Sciences, the Youth Civil Rights Academy (YCRA), and the U-M Teach-Out Series amongst several others.

Pamela Reister  is the Curator for Museum Teaching and Learning at the University of Michigan Museum of Art where her portfolio includes training docents who are responsible for K-12 education in the galleries, creating professional development opportunities for local teachers, and overseeing the student docent program, among others.

Darin Stockdill is the design coordinator for the University of Michigan’s Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) and is responsible for managing the instructional and program design projects of CEDER. Before joining the staff of CEDER, Darin was the content area literacy consultant for the Oakland (Michigan) Schools ISD for four years. He was a graduate student in education at Michigan prior to this, and taught content area literacy methods courses to pre-service teachers and also researched adolescent literacy. His academic interests revolve around the connections between problem-based instruction and education for social justice, as well as the intersections of youth literacy practices and disciplinary literacies.