Featured Speaker
Homer Montgomery, Ph.D.
Education in the midst of a civil war; teaching teacher mentors in Somalia
Saturday 10:45-12:00, Ballroom E/F
Wars in several countries in Africa continue to devastate the colonial and post-colonial educational infrastructure. Somalia is staggering through its sixteenth year of civil war with no functioning government. Numerous teachers and students are internally displaced refugees and some have been tortured. Teachers with no introduction to modern educational theory, little knowledge of best practices, no materials, and no encouragement to attempt improve learning are prone to deliver a dogmatic lecture-based curriculum. Workshops staged by foreign non-governmental organizations are often a series of intensive efforts to introduce methods-based learning to the teachers of math, science, social studies, Arabic, English, Islamic studies, education, and physical education – all in one classroom. Even the best teachers have had little to no introduction to learning styles, Bloom’s taxonomy, and alternate forms of assessment. Dr. Montgomery is an associate professor of science education and an affiliate professor of geology at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also co-director of UTeach Dallas. Dr. Montgomery’s current research projects include studying the dynamics of instructor-student interactions in undergraduate classrooms in Africa and tracking down clues to the origin of the Caribbean plate. He and his students have discovered several dinosaurs in west Texas, among them some of the smallest and the largest sauropods known in Texas.
