Arts Missoula GLOBAL director sharing knowledge in three presentations at the 2022 Montana Educator Conference in Helena, October 20 and 21. 

Posted on October 28, 2022

Arts Missoula’s Mission is to connect Art and Culture through Education, Advocacy, and Community. A significant part of the “education” mission is fulfilled by Arts Missoula GLOBAL (AMG), which promotes intercultural awareness and global competence development through professional, individual cultural seminars and complete educational programs, among other programming, events and activities.   

AMG director Dr. Udo Fluck has presented seminars for hundreds of educators at the annual Montana Educator Conference during the last decade. For the first time, for one of his talks, Udo co-presented with a teacher from Missoula County Public Schools. Rae Baerlocher, a 7^th grade educator from Meadow Hill Middle School. Rae and Udo have collaborated since 2018 in Udo’s Global and Cultural Competence program, which helps 3rd, 7^th and 11^th grade students, in four local school districts, to develop global and cultural competence, by identifying a variety of similarities and differences between diverse continents, countries and regions. 

Udo and Rae shared their presentation titled: From Ancient Histories to Global Communities – Bridging the Gap. The main goal of their presentation was highlighting that history enriches experiences and encourages a sense of belonging, for young people. Both speakers emphasized that finding connections of life and common themes of past and present is critical, in educating teenagers. 

In addition, Udo offered two solo presentations titled: Cultural Competence Through Language Instruction and The Post COVID Classroom Teaching, Learning and Supporting, the latter attracting a record crowd of teachers. “I am very grateful that there was so much audience interest in these diverse presentation topics. A strong listener base of teachers from across Montana means that there is a desire for sharing knowledge and experiences on important topics that currently matter to educators and these kinds of annual gatherings are a great way to do exactly that, collaborating with others in the field”, Fluck stated.