Summary: <br> A University of Colorado collaboration has crossed the Great Divide to advance educational opportunities some 350 miles into Southwest Colorado. <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/artsandsciences/research/student-resources/flc-cu-partnership">CU Boulder and Fort Lewis College have established a partnership</a> that leverages the strengths of both institutions, where Arts & Sciences PhD graduates teach undergraduate students for a year – or more – at Fort Lewis College.<br> “Fort Lewis College is in the city of Durango, which is in the Southwestern part of the state of Colorado,” explains <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/psych-neuro/theresa-d-hern%C3%A1ndez">Theresa Hernández</a>, 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.”<br> 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.<br> “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.”<br> 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.<br> 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 <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/artsandsciences/james-wc-white">James White</a>, arts and sciences, and Associate Dean Hernández met with Fort Lewis College faculty and leadership.<br> <a href="https://www.fortlewis.edu/academics/schools-departments/faculty-directory/cole">Callie Cole</a> is an associate professor of chemistry at Fort Lewis College, a CU Boulder alumna, and a strong advocate for the partnership.<br> “It started when I was a student at CU Boulder back from 2010 to 2015, and my PhD mentor at CU Boulder, Dr. <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/chemistry/veronica-bierbaum">Veronica Bierbaum,</a> 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.”<br> Cole realized quickly that this pipeline from CU Boulder to Fort Lewis was already taking shape.<br> “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.”<br> They clicked and the University of Colorado and Fort Lewis College Partnership was born.<br> “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...
