Sally Howell, assistant professor of history, recently received the Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri Award, which honors the founder of the Islamic Center of America. Howell’s teaching focuses on Arab American and Muslim American history and culture, and she helped launch University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Arab American studies minor. She is curator of the multimedia exhibition Building Islam in Detroit: Foundations/Forms/Futures. Howell authored Old Islam in Detroit: Reframing the Muslim American Past (forthcoming), edited Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade and coauthored Citizenship and Crisis. She also supports the Bentley Historical Library’s Arab, Chaldean and Muslim American collections at UM-Ann Arbor.
Dorothy McLeer, program coordinator at the Environmental Interpretive Center, delivered a presentation at the Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative’s Place-based Education Conference at Michigan State’s Kellogg Conference Center. McLeer’s presentation, “Students Outstanding in the Field—and Forest and Pond!,” featured UM-Dearborn’s Field Biology 320 course, its focus on southeast Michigan flora and fauna, and the students who’ve taken the course who go on to teach what they’ve learned to the 14,000 schoolchildren who visit the EIC each year. This two-day meeting brings together practitioners and teachers from formal and non-formal education, local partners from communities across the region, and other organizations that provide vital leadership and resources to the cause of developing environmental stewards of the Great Lakes and its ecosystems.
