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K-State Today

April 22, 2011

College of Education students raise awareness for World Malaria Day

Submitted by Tonnie Martinez

EDCI 740 Students

Students in associate professor Kevin Murry's EDCI 740 class recently participated in a photo op to fight malaria.

With the collaborative facilitation of assistant professor Tonnie Martinez and instructor Cristina Fanning, the students participated in the Tony Blair Faith Foundation's world malaria campaign to provide life-saving mosquito nets to families in Africa. Malaria is a deadly mosquito-born disease, which took 781,000 African lives in 2009 alone. It afflicts as many as half a billion people in 106 countries around the world, including  Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

One of the goals of EDCI 740, Culture and Language in Classroom Practice, is to build preservice teachers' capacities for accommodation readiness, especially readiness to effectively advocate for culturally and linguistically diverse students and their families. 

Colleagues in the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy in the College of Education, Murry and Martinez have long sought to promote advocacy perspectives and skills among preservice and in-service teachers in Kansas.

"It's hard to believe in this time of modern medicine that a child dies of malaria every 45 seconds," Martinez said. "This was a way for future teachers to appreciate some of the simple ways that they can inspire advocacy in their own students with impacts that extend well beyond the walls of the classrooms."

The global community of advocates to prevent malaria will raise worldwide awareness Tuesday, April 26.  Their work emphasizes fundraising for and the delivery of a wide variety of malaria interventions, including the three protective nets for children that will be donated through the foundation in response the advocacy efforts of these K-State undergraduates. For every 10 of these students photographed wearing the foundation's advocacy symbol, a blue ribbon, a bed net was donated.