Impact Report 2021–2022

Center for Innovation in the Liberal & Creative Arts (CILCA)

• Documenting Colorado’s Hidden Voices

  Documenting Colorado’s Hidden Voices provides training and support for University of Denver students to collect oral histories from Coloradans across the state. The collections are focused on populations that are often absent from our histories and narratives, such as farmers, day laborers, domestic workers, and people who are experiencing homelessness, who have been incarcerated, or who are undocumented. In its first year, 20 students participated in the program. Along with preserving the student-created stories at History Colorado, the project recently launched a podcast, “Hear, Allá, Presente,” to share the stories more widely with the community. Students cap their experience by participating in a paid internship with a community partner. This year, Documenting Colorado’s Hidden Voices is working on adding an interdisciplinary micro-credential program. The program will support students with the Spanish and multimedia skills needed to collaborate with the group’s community partners.

  Learn about the podcast

• Spanish Program for Heritage/Bilingual Student Keystone Project

  The Spanish Program for Heritage/Bilingual Students invites students with personal, familial or community connections to Spanish to develop their academic and professional Spanish skills in a culturally relevant environment. Students engage with U.S. Latinx culture and language with a community of Spanish learners. This year, CILCA funding enabled the program to develop an internship component. This internship builds upon and puts into practice the skills students learn in the Heritage/Bilingual program, while also giving students the opportunity to engage with Spanish speakers in the Denver community. Director Lina Reznicek-Parrado, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Spanish Language, Literary & Cultural Studies, is collaborating with local organizations and the Documenting Colorado’s Hidden Voices project to support career-relevant internship opportunities where students’ Spanish skills are essential.

• The Center for International Mountain Area Studies

  The Center for International Mountain Area Studies (CIMAS) supports high-impact experiential learning and research opportunities specific to mountainous spaces and the people who inhabit them by funding students’ and faculty members’ social science, humanities-focused research or creative ventures. This year CILCA helped fund the research of Professor of Andean & Quechua Studies Alison Krögel. Her work explored carvings on aspen trees (arborglyphs) in northwestern Colorado’s Routt National Forest and the long-standing links between sheep ranches in northwestern Colorado and herders from rural high-country communities in northern New Mexico, México, and Perú that the carvings illuminate. Krögel has brought her research to life by curating a multilingual (Spanish-English-Quechua) exhibit. The physical portion of the exhibit debuted this fall at the Davis Gallery in the Shwayder Art Building with over 200 guests, many from the Denver-Aurora Peruvian community. The exhibit now travels back toward the research sites, and will open Dec. 2 at the Tread of the Pioneers museum in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Learn more and explore the digital exhibit at The Aspen Archives website.

  Explore the Aspen Archives Exhibit

• Classroom to Careers

  Classroom to Careers helps faculty and departments identify, highlight and communicate the career-relevant competencies that undergraduates develop in their arts and humanities majors, for the purpose of supporting students in capitalizing on those skills and articulating them to future employers. In the 2021–22 academic year, 12 faculty members from six departments formed the first cohort. Together they attended trainings and met to provide peer support and development opportunities. Each faculty member taught a course optimized to feature the career relevant competencies students acquire through the work of the course. In addition, students from the highlighted courses were recruited for fully guided internship experiences to apply their knowledge. This innovative program helps students connect the dots between their classroom learning and their professional trajectories.