Highlands gets $2.9 million for tech access, culturally relevant education

Apr. 13—Mary Earick is on a mission to infuse college- and career-preparation courses for high schoolers with an unusual ingredient: joy.

As dean of New Mexico Highlands University's School of Education, Earick said she sees joy as an essential component to ensuring students are engaged in their education — particularly after the educationally tumultuous years of the pandemic — and excited to continue it.

"We want more students going into college and career, and we want more students joyful as they engage in college and career — and I use that term intentionally. We want them to love what they're going to be doing," she said.

To that end, Highlands has secured a $2.9 million grant from a new U.S. Department of Commerce program to ensure Las Vegas, N.M. high school students have the modern technology and culturally responsive curricula they need to be successful, Earick said.

Specifically, the classes will be structured around acequias and land grants, a component of Northern New Mexico culture and history organizers hope will engage students in their learning.

The technology and curricula will first be piloted in two credit recovery physics courses — designed to give students an opportunity to enroll in a physics course they didn't take or didn't pass — this summer for Las Vegas City Schools and West Las Vegas School District students, said Crystal Arias, one of the program's two coordinators for community outreach and education.

"Our goal is to be able to help the students graduate from high school but then also start looking into going into higher education — either for an associate's or a bachelor's degree or higher," Arias said. "By us offering the courses that we are offering, we're giving them an option to get introduced to higher education."

Highlands' grant funding comes from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce. The administration announced grant awardees for the Connecting Minority Communities pilot program — which is designed to upgrade technology and increase digital literacy at institutions of higher education serving minorities — in October 2022, offering more than $10 million to five universities across the U.S. Highlands' grant of nearly $3 million is the largest provided to any of the five institutions.

At Highlands, the funding will largely be directed toward two essential pieces of the program.

First, it will ensure students have the computers and internet access they need to engage in online education.

Quality internet access is the first step to ensuring institutions like Highlands, which serves large Hispanic and Native American communities, can provide educational and job-creation services to their communities, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a news release announcing the Connecting Minority Communities program.

"Minority-serving institutions are key drivers of digital skills education and workforce development programs for communities across the country. They need robust connectivity and resources to continue to provide support," Raimondo said.

Each student enrolled in Highlands' grant-funded courses will check out a "state-of-the-art computer" with the capacity to process the complex graphics integral to online courses, Earick said, as well as a service extender to enhance internet access.

That means students and their families will have access to a computer and the internet at home, Arias added.

"We're not only going to be giving access to high school students but also their families and the community members that are part of San Miguel County as well," she said.

And just in case the extender isn't strong enough, students can always download the entire content of the course to the computer's desktop.

Second, the grant will deliver culturally responsive and geographically relevant information to students, Earick said.

Through the program's pilot courses, students will learn essential concepts in physics through projects on acequias and land grants — the system of irrigation and land management instituted in New Mexico during Spanish colonial rule.

But as any Northern New Mexican can tell you, acequias aren't a thing of the past. One study from New Mexico State University's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences found about 800 acequias still transport water throughout the northern half of the state.

"Land grants and acequias are integral to our way of life as New Mexicans," U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján wrote in a 2020 tweet.

The region's strong connection to land grants and acequias — as well as a memorial passed by the state Legislature in 2020 asking that acequias and land grants be added to the school curriculum — spurred Highlands' Center for the Education and Study of Diverse Populations to develop curriculum recommendations for the Public Education and Higher Education departments.

The program's pilot courses will deliver this curriculum focused on acequias and land grants — relevant content that will engage students — without leaving out physics essentials, Earick said.

"We're not changing the goals of any of these courses. ... We're not changing the high-level content of the field. We're just looking at it through a cultural and geographic lens of acequia land grants," Earick said.

Starting with this summer's pilot program, the courses will be available in English and Spanish, Arias said. Next year, the program will additional languages spoken in the state — including Indigenous languages from Northern New Mexico — based on student needs assessments and the availability of translators.

"We want to include as many [New Mexico] languages as possible to reach the most learners," Arias said.

And that's just the beginning of what's planned for the program. In fall 2023 and 2024, more courses will become available and disseminated to other high schools and colleges across the state, Arias said.

Though the summer pilot program will begin at the course recovery level, future courses will be available as advanced placement or credit recovery classes, to appeal to students' varied needs and preferences.

All of this, Earick said, will create a model to redress some past blind spots in higher education and reengage students in their own journey toward college or a career.

"It's going to act as a national model on how to reengage youth and young adults who have experienced opportunity gaps through ... the curriculum and the technologies that are most meaningful to them," Earick said. "We're going to deliver it in ways that make sense to them."

This kind of pedagogy, she said, will lead to exploration steeped in New Mexico culture and inclusive of Earick's secret ingredient — joy.