As I wrap up my experience as an Undergraduate Research Intern with The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP, it’s crucial that I take a moment to reflect on my experiences throughout the years.
It's funny what food reveals about who were and who we are. It's even funnier to realize how a humanities research project can have the capacity to reveal this basic truth that we rarely think about.
As an assignment, we watched the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, the title instantly catching my attention because it made me stop and think what the true meaning behind this documentary is about. After all, “The Indians Who Rocked the World” is a phrase that really makes an impact when one first reads it.
A significant challenge facing any instructor who finds herself shifting her teaching duties from a four-year university to a two-year community college is the possibility of having to adopt new teaching styles. As an instructor who has taught history at both El Paso Community College and The University of Texas at El Paso, I can say that at both institutions, instructors who teach humanities courses often have the same struggle in convincing students of the importance of these courses even if they are not majoring in them.
On Wednesday, April 17, 2019, Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP Undergraduate Research Fellow Katelynn Hernandez and I made our first visit to Barrón Elementary School in Northeast El Paso, Texas, and had a wonderful time working with two of Ms. Rosalinda Walker’s fifth-grade classes. After our months of planning, researching, and developing ideas with scholars at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, U.K., it was a great pleasure finally to be underway with our first groups of students, about 50 in all.