Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education
Annual Colloquium Series continues March 28

Theme: "Educating Maryland’s African-American Males ~ Issues and Promising Practices"

COLLEGE PARK, MD (March 2007) –The support of family and community play a very important role in students' educational development. On Wednesday, March 28, Professor Courtland Lee, Department of Counseling and Personnel Services, and Heber Brown, III, Maryland Mentoring Partnership, will explore the prospect of funding, structuring and recruiting mentors for programs in which one-to-one and group mentoring is provided to African-American males. This is the third colloquium in a series of four hosted this spring by the College of Education's Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education (MIMAUE). The session is scheduled for 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in 0220 Benjamin Building.

Courtland Lee

Director of the College's Counselor Education Program, Lee is the author, editor, or co-editor of books on counseling African-American males, counseling and social justice, and multicultural counseling. In addition, he has published numerous book chapters and articles on counseling cross cultures. Lee is former editor of the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development and the Journal of African American Men. He currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal for the Advancement of Counseling and is an associate editor of the Journal of Counseling and Development. He has held top leadership roles in the American Counseling Association, the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development, and Chi Sigma Iota—the international counseling honor society. The current president of the International Association for Counseling, Lee has been named a Fellow of the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, the first American to receive this honor. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he held faculty positions as a counselor educator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia. A former teacher and school counselor, Lee has also served as an educational consultant in both the United States and abroad.

Heber Brown, III

In his role as manager of government and higher education partnerships at the Maryland Mentoring Partnership (MMP) in Baltimore, Brown connects institutions of higher learning with local communities, leads MMP's public policy campaign, and has organized a diverse, statewide network that aggressively advocates for youth mentoring legislation. Brown frequently returns to his high school to speak to students in the African-American Male Mentoring Program and has organized other young professionals to reach out to young males in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services. He has been a featured speaker at numerous events hosted by such organizations as Upward Bound, the National Society of Black Engineers, Kids C.A.N. of Maryland, and the NAACP-Baltimore Branch. Brown is the host of BrothaSpeak—an online roundtable dialogue for African American men. He was recently identified by the Afro American Newspaper as one of "25 Under 40 Emerging Black History Leaders." Brown holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Morgan State University and a Master of Divinity degree from Virginia Union University. He is also an ordained minister, serving for the past seven years as the Minister to Youth at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore County.

This semester's colloquia sessions have focused on recommendations made by the Task Force on the Education of Maryland's African-American males in a report issued December 2006 by the Maryland K-16 Council. "The plight of African American males must be a part of the educational discussion," said Martin L. Johnson, Associate Dean for Research, Urban and Minority Education, and director of MIMAUE. "The K-16 Task Force Report is emphatic in detailing the work that needs to be done if we are going to provide a quality education for this group of students."

The final MIMAUE colloquium on April 18 will focus on High Standards and Academic Opportunity for African-American males. All are invited and encouraged to attend. For further information, contact Associate Dean Martin L. Johnson at 301.405.0246 or email mljohnso@umd.edu.

About the Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education

Founded in 2001, the Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education links the faculty and resources of the nationally ranked College of Education with area school districts to support a unified, research-based approach to working with individual school districts to address the minority achievement gap and issues in urban education. Comprehensive initiatives are developed in partnership with local administrators and teachers to target at real-world problems.

The Institute taps into the extensive intellectual capital of the College of Education and focuses faculty research and outreach to support teachers and administrators. The goals of the Institute are to:

• Develop large-scale research programs to evaluate, implement and improve promising practices for increasing student achievement and improving urban schools
• Provide outreach services to help schools identify, implement and evaluate strategies to improve student achievement
• Disseminate research-proven best practices across the nation
• Provide a structure to involve faculty from other colleges and campuses, including historically black institutions, in research collaboration and coordinated research-based K-12 outreach

Through a process of collaborative school reform, the Institute works with schools and teachers to build robust educational climates that support high achievement. Efforts to date have included programs to develop innovative strategies to increase achievement, along with professional development to improve teachers' knowledge and skills and administrators' school management proficiency.

The Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education is an integral component of the research and outreach mission of the University of Maryland College of Education, which ranks 22nd among the top colleges of education in the most recent survey by U.S. News & World Report for 2006. Offering undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees, the College of Education provides research- and practice-oriented programs through its six departments: Counseling and Personnel Services, Curriculum and Instruction, Education Policy and Leadership, Human Development, Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation, and Special Education.

Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education
University of Maryland
College of Education
3119 Benjamin Building
College Park, MD 20742

www.education.umd.edu/MIMAUE