Glennis Nagel
Director, Media Communications, 308.865.8454
Dr. Kieran Egan, an internationally acclaimed author and leading educational theorist, will be the keynote speaker for the James E. Smith Midwest Conference on World Affairs, set for March 7-8 on the UNK campus.
The annual three-day conference is sponsored on a rotating basis by the four colleges, coordinated through the Office of International Education and planned around a central theme. This year the conference, which is sponsored by the College of Education, is built on the theme “Connecting With the ‘Other’: Education’s Global Role.”
“A committee of College of Education faculty representatives from each department has been busy this fall planning the program, so that the program will meet needs and interests of students in our programs as well as programs in other colleges,” said Dr. Marilyn Hadley, dean of the College of Education.
Dr. Egan, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, heads the Imaginative Education Research Group. The author of more than 10 books, several of which have been translated into more than a half-dozen European and Asian languages, Dr. Egan is the only person from outside the United States to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Education. He is also recipient of the prestigious Killiam Award, a national research fellowship.
The Imaginative Education Research Group was founded in 2001 as the result of funds attached to the Canada Research Chair in Education, which was awarded to Dr. Egan.