Namita Mehta is a Learning Experience Designer with the Office of Information Technology at CU Boulder.  She has over 15 years of experience in education and holds an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity. Lauren Storz is an Academic Experience Analyst on the Academic Technology Design Team, and a PhD student in cultural anthropology at CU Boulder.   Traditionally, teaching and learning in higher education has implemented “the banking model of education” as coined by Paulo Freire. Freire (2018) describes this model as one in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (p. 72).  This model reinforces that instructors should hold the power of what goes on in the classroom while students remain passive learners of their education. Through the years, there has been a greater emphasis on student-centered approaches (e.g. connected learning) that entail empowering students to be active learners who d

Nick Havey Looking (for research participants)? Consider “the Apps”  If you’re familiar with the HBO series Looking, which explores very white queer life in San Francisco, or have used a dating app in the last 10 years, you might know “looking” as a one-word interrogative that says a lot. It mostly is meant as a lazy (or efficient) way of asking another user if they’re interested in casual sex, but you might be “looking” for research participants! Having a baseline understanding of how dating apps work is prerequisite for using them for research purposes, as understanding terms like “looking” and app-based norms can help researchers navigate confusing virtual spaces and build trust and rapport with potential participants.  I have used proximity-based dating apps as recruitment sites for two different research projects. One considers the state of queer sexual education and how queer collegians are responding to sex educations that were not inclusive of their experiences or desires, comp

Brianna R. Ramirez, PhD Student University of California, San Diego Through this blog post, I begin to engage the following question that as an emergent Chicana higher education scholar I constantly reflect on and will continue doing so throughout my research journey- In what ways can higher education scholarship center the knowledge of Students of Color [i] ? So much scholarship has been conducted on or about , less with and alongside of the students and communities that many of us hope our scholarship will serve. In addressing this question, I draw from Chicana feminist theories, that as a Chicana scholar has become my epistemological and methodological home as I sought a research grounding that not only validated the ways of knowing and lived experiences of my students and their families, but also my own cultural intuition and contribution to scholarship and academia as the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrants. Chicana feminist and critical race scholar, Delgado Bernal (2002) rem

Dea Marx Ed.D., Program Director,  Student Success and Academic Assurance, University of Missouri-Kansas City Jessica Flinkman, Graduate Assistant, Student Success and Academic Assurance, University of Missouri-Kansas City The proposed federal budget for the 2020 fiscal year includes massive cuts to the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program. President Trump’s budget proposal decreases FWS funds by 50 percent, $630 million less than 2019 (Nguyen, 2019), and restricts the disbursement of funds to only undergraduate students. While the proposed budget includes drastic cuts, the Trump Administration is also calling for the FWS program to be revamped, focusing on apprenticeships and internship opportunities for students (Busta, 2019). In support of this, Jim Blew, the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy development, exhorted a new direction for FWS programs that emphasized career-building opportunities for students instead of a subsidized wo