It could be his Southern hospitality coming through, or his memory of growing up in an urban area attending a school with very few resources. In either case, when Dr. Chance W. Lewis selects the cities for where the International Conference on Urban Education (ICUE) will take place, he makes sure he gives back to the host community.
Dr. Chance Lewis, Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor in Urban Education at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and director of the Urban Education Collaborative.
First held in 2014, the conference gathers K-12 urban teachers, policy makers, social workers and other community stakeholders for solutions-based discussions and presentations. This year, ICUE returns after a four-year hiatus due to COVID-19, this time in Cancun, Mexico from November 2 to 5. The excitement of attendees, said Lewis, is already palpable, So far, he has received over 290 applications for presentations, and registration to attend is currently open. ETS is one of the official sponsors.
As the Collaborative goes through all its proposals, some high schools (usually those who have worked with the Collaborative before) are also hard at work, selecting a diverse group of rising seniors who will study the culture in Cancun, the needs of the local people, and what it takes to create supply drives in a foreign country. Then, in November, the high schoolers and their chaperones will travel to Cancun with the ICUE conference and turn all their planning into reality.
This program, the International Student Fellows Academy (ISFA), has included past projects like finding and securing and transporting Spanish language books to Puerto Rico to create a library for elementary school children living in an orphanage. Another project, during the ICUE conference in the Bahamas, focused on gathering school supplies and bringing over sewing machines to build out a home economics program.
“The first thing we do is reach out to faculty partners in universities in each location,” said Dr. Stephen Hancock, an associate professor of reading and elementary education at UNC Charlotte, associate director of the Collaborative, and director of ICUE. “In that space, we ask faculty there what school you feel is in the most need of supply drive. Then I visit the school and meet with the leaders, and we sit down and discuss, ‘We’re coming in, and we don’t want to leave here without having an impact on you, and you on us.’”
The high school students cap off their work with a presentation, one of Lewis’s favorite parts of the convention.
