For my doctoral dissertation fieldwork, I worked with a documentary filmmaker and a Garifuna language teacher to fund and design the website for this documentary and language revitalization project. 

The website hosts the videos of the wanaragua song and dances from across Belize and Honduras. We use these videos, trilingual song booklets to bolster Garifuna language revitalization across the transnational Garifuna Nation.

This project works in partnership with another nationwide project in Honduras called Diplomado en Enseñanza de Lenguas Indígenas: Garifuna y Miskito, which provides hard drives to Garifuna language teachers across Honduras loaded with curated language learning and teaching materials. These hard drives work without constant internet access, providing teachers in rural areas with much needed resources to continue to teach their language and cultural practices. 

See the full project here:

www.wanaraguadoc.com 

In the months after the release of Chat-GPT, a group of educators, higher ed administrators, students, futurists, and designers came together amid in rural New Mexico, where we dreamed, designed and implemented a futurist, storytelling methodology to engage educators in critical conversations about the future of higher ed and where, or even how, educational technology fits into that future. 

We grew the methodology to a much larger scale, bringing together hundreds of futurists, educators, and learners from across the country to engage in our digital storytelling methodology at annual design summits to build the future of higher ed today. 

I have facilitated working groups with this methodology at conferences at Arizona State University and University of Texas, San Antonio, and the stories we produce can be found in the annual guides we produce based on conference proceedings. 

The full guides are available here and here. 

The Exploring Health Beliefs for Community Engagement and Diversity in Clinical Trials (EXPLORE) Toolkit is a resource designed to support researchers, frontline workers, and community members in a holistic approach to addressing substance use and medical research in the Southwest Borderlands of the United states.

I led the design, development, and UX testing of the toolkit, working with an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, epidemiologists, social workers, and community health workers to create an educational resource that is freely available in English and Spanish here. 

We rigorously tested the toolkit and also assessed internal dynamics to our interdisciplinary team. Read more about our methods and insights on the Publications page.  

I have collaborated with StoryCenter for years on digital storytelling projects to generate discussions, facilitate workshops, and imagine the future of education (See 100 Year EdTech above for another example of this.)

This video is a digital story I created in a StoryCenter workshop called "Voices of the Future Present." We crafted digital stories with AI generated images to engage in critical, futurist conversations about how AI will shape our world in the decades to come. 

This video immerses you in a world where closed borders push people to greater digital integration, combining land-based practices and Indigenous languages with digital tech to overcome closed borders. Grounded in a personal narrative, it's an example of how we can work today by projecting into a hopeful, if complicated, future. 

In 2014, two Jesuit universities signed a memorandum of understanding in Managua, Nicaragua. The hope, in the eyes of the presidents of Seattle University and the Universidad Centroamericana, was to foster intercultural education across both campuses that shared Jesuit values of educating the whole person and combining compassionate service with critical scholarship.

In April 2018, a civic uprising in Nicaragua put that relationship to the test. Our solidarity campaign showed us the power of networks forged between international institutional partners and how they may be activated to protect free speech, academic research, and democratic values across the Americas. 

Working with a team of professors, administrators, and students in Seattle, Washington and Managua, we connected Jesuit schools from across the world to bring attention to how the UCA bore the brunt of authoritarian attacks on its students and staff and the entire country during the April 2018 crisis.

Through social media, teach ins, media appearances, and formal statements, we ensured thousands of eyes witnessed the violence in Nicaragua that major media often ignored.  In the edited volume Higher Education, State Repression, and Neoliberal Reform in Nicaragua: Reflections from a University under Fire, we showed how auto-ethnographic vignettes could complement analytical rigor to humanize political conflicts and show that scholars can still publish critical scholarship even when under attack (see Publications page for more). 

As we adjusted to the realities of the pandemic, a group of urban planners, filmmakers, and social science researchers launched a state-wide digital story telling project to capture how New Mexicans embodied resilience in their communities in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We designed a website, conducted dozens of interviews, accepted artist submissions, and compiled a storytelling report and booklet that we shared with policy makers, urban planners, and educators. We also caught the eye of local new outlets who covered our work.

Check out our local media coverage below:

KOAT News

UNM Newsroom

KUNM

Check out a presentation of the report here

That question drove me to create this portfolio project with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The portfolio includes a lesson plan is intentionally created for a language learning classroom, as the inherent limitations of expression in a language learning setting become a key learning point for students as they explore the process of migrants who seek political asylum. 

The portfolio also includes educator resources for teaching the complex issues of the US border and the people who live along it. 

Full lesson plan available upon request. 

Working with a group of administrators, fellow educators, and students, we co-authored a narrative about the opportunities, challenges, and unimaginable magic of this radical idea, incorporating insights from students, faculty, administrators, and the school archives to produce a visionary commnity narrative.

This narrative grounded the strategic vision of the school as it celebrated its 30th anniversary, setting the stage for what the school and its mission could look like for its 50th anniversary.

The full narrative available here.