The impact of immigration on local communities is the subject of the Rosel Schewel Lecture in Education and Human Diversity on March 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the Memorial Ballroom of Hall Campus Center at Lynchburg College.
"Future teachers will be facing increasingly diverse classrooms," said Jan Stennette, dean of the School of Education and Human Development at LC.
"International Migration: Community Impacts of Immigrant Families and Children" will be addressed by two speakers from James Madison University.
Laura Zarrugh, a cultural anthropologist, will discuss how immigration has transformed Harrisonburg from a typical, rural "small town" to a globalizing city. The presentation will address who the immigrants are, why they have come, and what impacts they have on the local community.
Zarrugh received her doctoral degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation and much of her subsequent research have focused on immigrant, refugee, and ethnic groups in the United States. For the past 10 years, she has been engaged in long-term, ethnographic research on recent immigrants in the Central Shenandoah Valley.
Zarrugh is an adjunct professor in Women's Studies and the Cross-Disciplinary Studies Program at James Madison University and also teaches at Blue Ridge Community College. At both institutions she teaches a course titled, "Immigrants in American Society."
She has published articles on Latino immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley and is co-author, with researchers from the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, of a book in progress on Latino immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley. She is also currently conducting research on the Kurdish community in the Harrisonburg area.
She is a member of Board of Directors of Skyline Literacy, a local NGO (non-governmental organization) that provides ESL to adult immigrant learners, as well as a member of the Harrisonburg/Rockingham Co. Hispanic Services Council.
Lisa Schick is director of 21st Century Community Learning Centers at JMU, which offer academic enrichment and remediation, family literacy, and adult English classes. She is also coordinator of the ESOL Career Development Academy at the university. In 2006, she began work with the newly established Career Development Academy.
Schick taught elementary school for 10 years in Texas and Virginia. From 2000-2005 she taught for Harrisonburg City Public Schools and participated in the research, development, and implementation of the city's sheltered English program - Language Enrichment for Academic Progress or LEAP.
While teaching elementary school, Schick participated in the implementation and instruction of English classes for parents and served on the Harrisonburg City Schools' Parents as Educational Partners (PEP) advisory board.
She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Child Day Care Center. She is vice chair of the Harrisonburg Education Foundation and serves as chair of the Diversity Committee for the foundation.
The Rosel Schewel Lecture in Education and Human Diversity is brought annually to the campus and community by an endowment established by Elliot and Rosel Schewel. The purpose of the event is to help educate citizens and focus discussion on a topic that is important to all Americans.
For more information, contact Dixie McClain at 544-8381.