Veritas Forums are university events that engage the community in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life. Started at Harvard in 1992, Veritas Forums are now hosted at dozens of leading schools in the United States and Europe. This will be the 2nd Veritas Forum at Iowa State University:
Mary Poplin is a professor of education at Claremont Graduate University where she has been, at different times, Director of the Masters program in teacher education and Dean of the school of education.
She has taught in public schools and received her Ph.D from the University of Texas in 1978. After many years of what she calls “searching the spiritual net,” she began to follow Christ in 1993. Her compelling conversion is a testimony to the power, faithfulness, and love of God in Christ to forgive, clean and transform us.
In 1996, she spent two months volunteering with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta to understand why Mother Teresa said her work was religious work and not social work. InterVarsity Press published her book ‘Finding Calcutta’ (2008) on what she learned from the experience with Mother Teresa, and her own struggle to find what Mother Teresa called “your Calcutta”.
Her recent education research was a five year study of 31 high performing teachers in nine low performing urban school in Los Angeles, the findings of which suggest that teachers who succeed most use traditional methods of instruction, are highly disciplined, strict, and believe their students can do much more. Over one half of these teachers said their Christian faith was central to their work in challenging schools and neighborhoods. She is the author of "Voices from the Inside: A Report on Schooling from Inside the Classroom" (1992).
More recently, Poplin has begun to work on the application of the intellectual, social, and psychological principles of the Judeo-Christian worldview as they apply to higher education, particularly among culturally and linguistically diverse peoples and the poor.
http://www.veritas.org/Campus/Schedule.aspx?cid=31
