2014 Winner

The ELL Center Professional Development Program Claflin University,
Nan Li Director

ELL Center Program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education ($1,466,668) with additional funding from state funds. The mission and goals of this program reflect attention to multiple facets of diversity. This ELL Center Program combines the service and research into the project to engage the pre-service teachers at Claflin University and in-service teachers in four school districts for professional training so that they can provide instruction that accelerates ELL students’ acquisition of English, including academic English skills, literacy, and content knowledge. The ELL Center collaborates with four school districts that are all listed as having schools of High Priority Points, i.e., and ranked as At Risk and Below Average. These school districts are also challenged in that they serve a growing number of ELLs with limited resources.

ELL Center is hosted at Claflin University, which is a Historically Black College and University with over 95 percent of students being African-Americans and many of them are the first generations at college. The ELL Center also provides service to K-12 ELLs, who are mostly Hispanic-speaking students with low SES status and low literacy family backgrounds. During three years in operation (2011-2014), the Program prepared nearly 300 pre-service and in-service teachers and served over 600 ELLs. Teacher participants all demonstrated improvement in the basic L2 knowledge and teaching strategies through on-campus training and field-based practice with positive results. The ELL Center also produced a positive impact on K-12 ELLs with service provided by the pre-service and in-service teacher participants. ELL students have all shown improvement in literacy skills and content knowledge as measured by assessment data. With the positive results, the ELL Center Program leverages the professional training of teachers that takes an innovative approach to meet the immediate needs of under-served English Language Learners.

2013 Winner

Teach Tomorrow in Oakland

&

Maryland Education That Is Multicultural and Achievement Network (ETMA)

Teach Tomorrow in Oakland in Oakland, begun in 2008, guides adults from the city as they fulfill credential requirements, pass their licensing tests, navigate the hiring process, and—crucially—negotiate the tumultuous first few years in the classroom.

Its manager, Rachelle Rogers-Ard, calls TTO a teacher-development program—a distinction underscoring that the initiative is not focused only, or even primarily, on recruiting teachers. In fact, the program requires recruits to commit to teaching in the district for at least five years. Since its inception, TTO has succeeded in helping a diverse mix of 70 adults become teachers in the 37,000-student Oakland district. It currently has a retention rate of 89 percent.

Maryland Education That Is Multicultural and Achievement Network (ETMA) was established in 2000 to provide a forum for the exchange of best practices and to reinforce the statewide implementation of multicultural education. The ETMA network addresses NAME goals for programs meeting the needs of diverse populations statewide and within school districts. Maryland is one of the 10 most ethnically and racially diverse states in the nation.

 

2012 Winner

Grow Your Own Teachers – Northeastern Illinois University College of Education

Receiving the award on behalf of the program––Maureen D. Gillette

Dean, College of Education, Northeastern Illinois University

Grow Your Own Teachers (GYO), a program in the College of Education at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), is a community-centered teacher education program. It is part of Grow Your Own Teachers Illinois, a coalition of such partnerships across the state whose mission is to improve teaching and learning in high needs schools by recruiting and preparing community-based teachers, and returning them to their local schools to teach. This effort is improving teacher quality and retention, and thus, student learning in some of the most challenged schools in Chicago.

2010 Winner

Rose Duhon Sells Multicultural Program Award

E3: Educational Excellence & Equity
San Rafael CA

E3–Educational Excellence & Equity strives for deep institutional-level change in Bay Area educational systems.  E3 trains and supports Bay Area teachers, administrators and students in a “strength-based approach”, educational culture and curriculum that empower youth to use their personal experience to recognize that they already possess critical skills needed for success in the 21st century global market.  Through this approach, students develop the following 5 essential 21st century skills:  Critical Analysis: The ability to arrive at conclusions by analyzing various perspectives, observations, and evidence.  Adaptability and Agility: effectively navigating a continually changing environment; Social Capital & Teamwork: to effectively influence and be influenced while successfully collaborating with others;  Cross-Cultural Communication: to effectively communicate with individuals from different cultural backgrounds; and, Innovation and Imagination: to form multiple answers to a problem.  E3 promotes this systems-level change through its Innovative student cohort–providing academic and leadership workshops to a cohort of students statistically least likely to graduate, empowering them to graduate. Training Teachers–utilizing the principles, experiences, and lessons from the successful student cohort initiative, E3 trains teachers to more effectively engage low-achieving youth and teach 21st century skills.  A School Community Identification Assessment–Train school community to assess and identify student engagement and teacher effectiveness.   Together, these strategies increase high school graduation and college retention rates among low-achieving youth, creating a successful strength-based educational model, and forging a paradigm shift in Bay Area educational systems.

Rose Duhon-Sells Local Multicultural Program Award

Center for Academic Enrichment & Outreach (CAEO)
University of Nevada-Las Vegas
William Sullivan, Director and Vice President for Retention & Outreach

This award recognizes an outstanding program in the NAME Conference host city. Under the direction of NAME member William Sullivan, the Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach at UNLV is responsible for ensuring an academic culture that is amenable to students of diverse backgrounds or high-risk populations, as well as overseeing 13 TRIO and two GEAR-UP programs to support students’ academic and personal success.

2009 Winner

Lincoln (NE) Public School
Multicultural Office
Thomas Christie, Director

For almost 20 years, the Lincoln Public School’s Multicultural Education Program has provided essential multicultural services and diversity institutes at the local, statewide, and national levels. Thomas Christie, Director of Multicultural Educations Programs believes that multicultural education goes far beyond the holidays, celebrations, and heroes that many classroom teachers highlight at special times of the year. Thomas has always demonstrated that multicultural education is an extension of one’s lived experiences.

2008 Winner
Exploring the Indigenous Ways of Knowing of the Ojibwe
Bruce D. Martin
Penn State University

“Exploring the Indigenous Ways of Knowing of the Ojibwe” is a survey course developed by Bruce Martin. The course is designed to cultivate understanding and appreciation of the world-view of the Ojibwe, one of the largest aboriginal communities in North America. It helps students think critically about their own history and culture, and identify assumptions and values that shape their own world-views while introducing them to philosophies of indigenous people. Martin teaches this five seminar course through the Outreach Office in the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State University.

Past Winners
1994 – Yakima Tribal School
1995 – Grow Your Own Teacher Project — Wichita Public Schools
1997 – Salem-Keizer Public Schools, Oregon
1998 – California State University, San Marcos — Middle Level Teacher Education Program
1999 – Multicultural Opportunities Branch — Kentucky Department of Education
2000 – Prince George’s County Maryland (School District)
2000 – Empire Consortium (Heritage College) (Higher Education)
2001 – The New Jersey Project
2002 – Rethinking Urban Poverty: A Philadelphia Field Project
2003 – Center for Multicultural Education, College of Education, University of Washington
2004 – University of Georgia and Clarke County School District, University of Georgia,
Athens, GA
2005 – White Bear Lake Area School District’s Diversity & Integration Program
2006 – PMAC – Principal’s Multicultural Advisory Committee Program, Pinellas Co. Schools, Largo, FL
2007 – English Acquisition National, Claflin University