CU On The Air Podcast Emily Davies

The percentage of K-12 students of color has raised dramatically in Colorado in the past few years, making up near 50% of our school population. Unfortunately, the teacher population has not kept up. For nearly 11 years, the University of Colorado Denver’s Pathways2Teaching program has aimed to balance that teacher-to-student ratio. Today, on CU on the Air, we’re talking with Joselyne Garcia-Moreno, a graduate of the Pathways2Teaching program, and Margarita Bianco, associate professor of education and the program’s founder.







* Margarita discusses the origins of Pathways2Teaching and gives an overview of the program.

* Joselyne discusses her background, high school and how she learned about the program.

* Joselyne was hired as a paraprofessional before even finishing high school.

* Margarita discusses the external partners of the program and their role.

* Joselyne talks about the support and teachers who helped her on her path.

* Margarita and Joselyne discuss how the program benefits students and ultimately our state.

* Joselyne is now working on her master’s degree and hopes to teach at the high school where it all began.

* Margarita, who was interviewed on the second episode of CU on the Air in 2017, discusses how the program has grown in the past nearly five years.









* Several institutions across the country have adopted the model of grow-your-own teachers.

* Pathways2Teaching has served about 1,700 students over the years.

* Students in the program continue to research and solve challenges within their communities as part of the program. Margarita offers some spectacular success stories.

* Margarita says, yes, progress is moving slowly, but at least there is movement. Graduates and students such as Joselyne make the struggle worthwhile.

* As a graduate of the program, Joselyne discusses steps that can be taken or further support and encourage students to become involved and be successful.

* Joselyne and Margarita close their eyes and look at education in K-12 schools, and share with us their vision.

* We at CU on the Air and our listeners will continue to support that vision.



Resources



* Pathways2Teaching Scholarship Fund

* Pathways2Teaching

* CU on the Air: Margarita Bianco

* NBC News: Schools need teachers of color

* 9News: Grow your own teachers program

* CU Denver



 

Roger Martinez, associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, is using immersive virtual reality tools to recreate worlds that no longer exist. The Immersive Global Middle Ages project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, will transport viewers back in time to experience the fifth through 15th centuries.



* Five-hundred to 1500 is generally what is considered the European Middle Ages. It encapsulates the space between what was before and what is after.

* Fifteen-hundred hearkens the Early Modern Age, an outcome of the Renaissance, which is this point where new ideas are taking hold, new experimentations with culture and knowledge.

* Violence was prevalent during the Middle Ages because of the fracture of the old Roman world of the legal systems, and the application of law.

* Middle Ages period reflects a local life in that your community is where you live, and to leave the city that you live in, or the region you live in invites banditry that you walk out of your space and you’re no longer protected.

* Revisiting the Middle Ages in today’s society, we’re undergoing a repaganization of global society, meaning there’s less Christianization in the world and more acceptance of different dynamics.

* Martinez’s work on the Immersive Middle Ages project will cover two years, with the first virtual exploration becoming available this summer.

*

In many respects, we already have been experiencing immersive technology for 100 years, it’s called the movies.

* How virtual technology works and the aim of taking viewers/visitors back to the Middle Ages — adding a new kind of way of experiencing that completeness of another world.

* Broadening the view to understand what was happening across the globe during the Global Middle Ages. Other civilizations that were thriving, and deeply involved with trade.

* Seeking out academics around the world that are doing research on different civilizations and asking them to join for the next two years to talk about their research, to from the global perspective.

* The technology being used that will help take a step back to the Middle Ages is SketchUp Pro is a software made by Trimble.

* Coming is this summer 2022, the first set of scholars, about 14 folks, will descend on Colorado Springs where they will start to showcase the beginnings of their first models.

* Remember those super-cool dioramas behind glass in the museums? This virtual reality will be similar, except participants will be standing inside it.

* Participants will be able to stand alongside other people who are there at that time.

* Viewers will be able to download the content from sites such as Steam.

* The project is part of the NEH’s Global Middle Ages Institute collaboration. Collectively Martinez and his colleague Dr. Lynn Ramey at Vanderbilt University, a medievalist as well, benefited from this opportunity to create an institute around a more inclusive Global Middle Ages and technology.

* Also collaborating is alongside of them are scholars such as Geraldine Heng from the University of Texas at Austin.

* Martinez and his students have developed a model of a medieval city of Palencia, Spain, and are populating it with the synagogue, the cathedral, houses, different dioramas of different individuals.

* Meet Yosef Castano. Yosef, which is Joseph in the early 1400s, lived in the Jewish part of town and Christian knights lived in the same region. Yosef had an important job as a chainmail maker, and a plate armorer. This shows something completely new about the Middle Ages ...

A University of Colorado collaboration has crossed the Great Divide to advance educational opportunities some 350 miles into Southwest Colorado. CU Boulder and Fort Lewis College have established a partnership that leverages the strengths of both institutions, where Arts & Sciences PhD graduates teach undergraduate students for a year – or more – at Fort Lewis College.

“Fort Lewis College is in the city of Durango, which is in the Southwestern part of the state of Colorado,” explains Theresa Hernández, associate dean for research in the College of Arts & Sciences at CU Boulder, who serves as director of the partnership. “In terms of history, Fort Lewis College is well known for its strengths in teaching, especially the way in which it has small class sizes.”

The program targets the needs of each individual student and where they are in their educational journey, which benefits the FLC students as well as the fellows sent there who are learning to teach and learning from their students.

“Fort Lewis is designated as one of the six Native American serving non-tribal colleges. And because of that, it provides tuition-free education for Native Americans who qualified for this,” Hernández said. “It also awards more Native American students degrees than any other four year baccalaureate granting institution in the nation.”

Fort Lewis graduates at about 26% of all degrees awarded to Native American students and is deeply invested in addressing its early history as a boarding school. Recently, the college held a ceremony that included tribal elders, campus leaders and Native American students in which misleading images and narratives were removed from the clock tower as part of a larger ritual.

The University of Colorado is proud of the connection to this historic college, especially during this time of healing. Although the program is officially in its second year, it has seeds reaching back to about 2019 when Dean James White, arts and sciences, and Associate Dean Hernández met with Fort Lewis College faculty and leadership.

Callie Cole is an associate professor of chemistry at Fort Lewis College, a CU Boulder alumna, and a strong advocate for the partnership.

“It started when I was a student at CU Boulder back from 2010 to 2015, and my PhD mentor at CU Boulder, Dr. Veronica Bierbaum, helped build the foundation for all of the skills that I still use today in education and in research,” Cole said. “And so, because I had such a good training at CU Boulder, I was able to get a position as a faculty member at Fort Lewis College in 2015.”

Cole realized quickly that this pipeline from CU Boulder to Fort Lewis was already taking shape.

“There were CU alum all over the place here at Fort Lewis. And we started to put our heads together and just chat about like, what, what can we do to help our students learn more about awesome graduate programs like those at CU Boulder? What can we do to break down those boundaries and get them to start applying,” Cole said. “And then it was Dr. Theresa Hernández at CU who reached out to me.”

They clicked and the University of Colorado and Fort Lewis College Partnership was born.

“The way the program was initially developed is, we thought of a one-year in residence program, and that’s basically how we built the budget model, but now we’re refining it,” Hernández said. “We’re engaged in additional fundraising for this program, we are keeping that in mind so that the teaching fellows have the possibility of a s...

Happy holidays, CU on the Air listeners! As the end of the year draws near, we reflect on our top podcasts of 2021. It was a tough choice, as we spoke again this year with some of the most leading-edge and fascinating faculty and researchers at the University of Colorado.

 

At No. 5, we had the Research Experience for Community College Students, or RECCS. This is a paid summer research internship program at CU Boulder open to all Colorado community college students interested in STEM. We had the opportunity this fall to talk with Alicia Christianson, program manager for RECCS program, and Anne Gold, director of this year’s education outreach program. We discuss how the program began, who is invited and the impacts on their college careers.

 

For many families in the Metro area, safe, adequate housing is a dream and limited access to transportation is a nightmare. We talked with CU Denver’s Carrie Makarewicz, associate professor of urban and regional planning in the college of architecture and planning, about the housing and commuting crises. It came in at No. 4 in our most popular podcasts of 2021. Carrie discusses the work underway by a partnership across Denver to solve these decades-old problems – starting with the Valverde neighborhood in Denver.

 

As of Sept. 21, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported that 44,647 wildfires in the United States had burned 5.6 million acres of land. In our No. 3 podcast of 2021, we talked in September with CU Boulder researcher Natasha Stavros, a data and fire scientist and director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub. We discussed the effects of centuries of land mismanagement, technology in fire mitigation, and what it will take to preserve the land and save structures, wildlife and human lives.

 

Burnout among health care workers is at an all-time high. And while there has been progress in curbing the COVID pandemic, there seems to be no respite for those working in health care. In the No. 2 episode of CU on the Air, we spoke with Dr. Marc Moss from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who studies burnout syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder and wellness among critical care health professionals, specifically ICU nurses. He tells CU on the Air listeners how the new variants and continued high hospitalizations are wearing our health care workers and what they can do to continue to support them.

And our No. 1 podcast of 2021 was an experience as much as an interview. Ben Kwitek, director of innovation at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, immersed us in innovation. He understands that innovation is critical to solving the problems our society faces. At UCCS, he is also the innovator of the world’s first Bachelor of Innovation. He tells us what innovation truly is, why UCCS is a prime location for the birth of ingenuity and what graduates bring to innovation acr...

Burnout among health care workers is at an all-time high. And while there has been progress in curbing the COVID pandemic, there seems to be no respite for those working in health care. On this episode of CU on the Air, host Emily Davies talks with Dr. Marc Moss from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who studies burnout syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder and wellness among critical care health professionals, specifically ICU nurses.

Dr. Moss is also the Roger S. Mitchell Professor of Medicine and head of the Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and the director of the Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab.



* At the start of the pandemic, people realized that health care providers are there to help; the providers realized this is what they’ve been training for. Everyone bonded together behind that common vision.

* Fatigue with the month-over-month continuation of the pandemic has left people disillusioned. Providers are still battling COVID-19 at high levels; the public is weary of hearing about it.

* Health provider burnout is exacerbated by uncertainty. The need for ER care and intensive care units can fluctuate daily or hourly.

* Health care professionals are threatening to leave – and some are leaving – the profession. This puts more strain on the remaining professionals to cover critical care patients.

* The CU College of Nursing graduates about 500 nurses annually, which – along with other CU Anschutz graduates entering the profession – is very helpful to the pipeline.

* Moss discusses the symptoms of burnout: what to look for in a loved one, colleague and oneself and some helpful steps to take.

* The Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab (or CORAL) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine blends arts and medicine for better outcomes, such as creative art therapies.

* As the Roger S. Mitchell Professor of Medicine and head of the Division, Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Moss researches and treats acute respiratory distress syndrome, neuromuscular dysfunction in critically ill patients who require mechanical ventilation and more.

* Dr. Moss outlines some advancements in treating people with ARDS, including some that have come from the COVID-19 pandemic.

* How can you help our health care workers? “People want to feel appreciated and supported in anything. If you know, people that are health care professionals, I think just reaching out to him and ask him how you’re doing and letting people know you’re thinking about them. And that’s an easy first step and gets back a little bit to those signs in neighborhoods at the beginning of the pandemic,” Dr. Moss.



Resources



* Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab

* University of Colorado School of Medicine

* CU College of Nursing

* CU Anschutz Medical Campus

* Reddit Q&A with Dr. Marc Moss

November is National Veterans and Military Families Month, one of the 12 months each year that the University of Colorado prioritizes and supports the needs of those who have served our country. Today on CU on the Air, we talk to Lisa Buckman, director of veteran and military affairs at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and Yvonne Dinsmore, interim director, and Colton Johannesen, transition and support coordinator, at the CU Denver and CU Anschutz Medical Campuses.

The University of Colorado has a long history of serving veterans, as well as their families, and helping veterans reach their educational goals. Whether through Boots to Suits community mentorships, student mentors, new veteran centers, extensive services for vets and their families on the campuses, or mental health guidance, CU is there for the veteran and military communities.

Resources



* UCCS Veteran and Military Services

* CU Denver Veteran and Military Services

* CU Anschutz Veteran and Military Student Services

* UCCS Boots to Suits

* CU Denver | Anschutz Boots to Suits

* CU System Military Resources

* University of Colorado Colorado Springs

* University of Colorado Denver

* University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus