News

The Silver City CLAY Festival is an annual event held every July since 2011, but this year’s festival looked different from previous years’, with many of the events taking place on the WNMU campus, July 10-16. The university is one of the major sponsors of the festival. The festival brought together artists, educators, families and collectors for a week of activities and exhibitions that explored and celebrated clay. Participants had an opportunity to take part in hands-on workshops with prominent clay artists, and children were welcomed to WNMU Museum as well as the Silver City Museum, where they had a chance to participate in clay-based activities. Demonstrations, lectures, exhibitions and gallery talks were held throughout the week, and the festival concluded with a ceramic-glaze-inspired brunch at Bear Mountain Lodge. Headlining the event this year was WNMU Visiting Artist George Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a sculptor whose work addresses themes of culture and community,...

WNMU Assistant Professor Heather Frankland is publishing a new chapbook of poetry, soon to be released by Finishing Line Press, a widely respected publisher in literary circles. The chapbook, “Midwest Musings,” collects together poems completed recently as well as some from earlier in Frankland’s career that she has since revised. The chapbook came together as Frankland, a native of Muncie, Indiana, reflected on the connections between her various poems.  “I realized I had a lot of poems that were interrogating the Midwest, family, loss, and identity,” she said, “I had never put all together before, but when I did, I realized that there was a theme that was running through them.” This new collection, Frankland said, is about “identity, regionality, and connections to land and landscape.”  She uses an analogy about fruit from a farmer’s market to describe the relationship between her poetry and place. “If you buy fruit from the farmer’s market,”...

History teacher Amy Page, who earned her MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at WNMU in 2016, is well familiar with awards. Serving at Moriarty High School, she has been named New Mexico’s National History Day Teacher of the Year multiple times, and she attended WNMU as a James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow, the most prestigious fellowship in the country for secondary teachers in constitutional history and government. Most recently, she spent a week as a fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Kansas, which allowed her to work with the organization’s staff as well as other nationally celebrated teachers to explore new approaches in project-based learning. This kind of experiential, project-based learning is what Page is passionate about, and her success in applying this approach in the classroom has earned her national acclaim.  Over the years, she has taken over 80 teams of students to the National History Day competition, and they have won numerous awards...

WNMU will begin enrolling graduate students in its Master of Science in Nursing in Community and Rural/Frontier Health program starting fall 2023. All of the classes in the program will be taught online, making the program available to working nurses across the nation. Students will be able to begin their coursework in any semester and complete their clinical work in their own communities.  Graduates from the program will emerge prepared to become Family Nurse Practitioners. This newly relaunched program is the only one in New Mexico and one of very few in the United States to focus on community and rural/frontier care. Health care providers in this field are in very high demand, not only in New Mexico, but in other states with large rural populations. The online program at WNMU is designed to help satisfy the need for more health care providers in underserved communities. Required coursework for the degree can be completed in as little as one year. In addition, the program...

Kathryn Sanchez has long known that she wanted a career devoted to helping others. But the path toward that career has not always been straightforward for the Silver City native. When Sanchez started at WNMU as a young adult, her “heart wasn’t in it,” she said. After taking time away from higher education to work as a title clerk and to start a family, she decided to return to the university to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Social Work. Now, she has not only accomplished that, but she is in her second year of the master’s program in Social Work at WNMU. Her desire to work in the field was prompted by her experience with grief counseling as a teenager and it was strengthened by her observations as an adult. “While working I longed to return to school to earn my degree,” she said, “and was truly led to social work after witnessing the foster-adopt process my mom went through in achieving guardianship of a friend's daughter, after tragically passed...

Western New Mexico University hosted the Bi-National Indigenous Expo/Encuentro: Multi-Faced Expressions of Indigenous Cultures from Both Mexicos on June 15-17. The event, which was coordinated by the Division of External Affairs and open to both students and the public, was designed to acknowledge and better understand the historical and current experience of Indigenous cultures that define the borderlands region. The Expo/Encuentro brought together members of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, whose ancestral lands span much of what is now southwest New Mexico as well as parts of Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, along with other Indigenous scholars, artists, and musicians. Featured participants included Hugo Morales (Mixtec), co-founder and executive producer of Radio Bilingüe, Andi Murphy (Diné), host of the Toasted Sister Podcast, Cayuga actor and musician Gary Farmer, Zapotec textile artist Porfirio Gutiérrez, WNMU Assistant Professor Melissa Teller (Diné) and the dance troupe...

Since 2011, mariachi music has been included on the list of “Intangible Cultural Heritages in Need of Safeguarding,” published by UNESCO, the education, science and culture arm of the United Nations. This summer, the WNMU music program took action to safeguard this heritage by hosting high school mariachi ensembles in a four-day conference, the inaugural event in what it expects to be an annual tradition. El Son de la Gila: Exploring Culture through Mariachi was held on campus June 12-15. Drawing students and their mariachi directors from across the southwest, the conference provided an opportunity for high school musicians to learn from master mariachis and each other. The idea for the conference came from a recognition that the rich cultural and musical heritage of mariachi deserves to be highlighted, celebrated, and passed down to future generations. Mariachi music is engrained in the identity of WNMU, a Hispanic Serving Institution, and the continued legacy of the art...

When students were moving out of the WNMU residence halls this spring, they may have observed something unfamiliar: donation boxes set up by the Choose to Reuse program. Choose to Reuse is the brainchild of Kinesiology major Itzela Darkenwald, who explained what motivated her to create the program: “When I was a freshman here and . . . everyone was moving out, I noticed that a lot of people were throwing away good, reusable stuff because they couldn’t take it back home—it wouldn’t fit in their car, or they didn’t need twin sheets or a mini-fridge once they had graduated—so a bunch of stuff was going to waste.” She wondered why there was no system for preventing this. “We really needed to do something about it.” She was also concerned that the move-out process was encouraging dumpster divers on campus. A conversation with a person taking material from the dumpsters, however, revealed that some of those collecting the students’ cast-offs were from the local...

The undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs at WNMU have been recognized by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) as among the best in the nation in preparing future elementary teachers to teach children to read, earning an A+ distinction. The programs are among just 48 nationwide and are the only programs in New Mexico highlighted by NCTQ for going above and beyond the standards set by literacy experts for coverage of the most effective methods of reading instruction—often called the “science of reading.” National data shows that more than one-third of fourth grade students—over 1.3 million children—cannot read at a basic level. In New Mexico, the situation is even more dire, with over half of fourth grade students unskilled at basic reading. By preparing teachers in the methods that research has shown to work best, WNMU College of Education is doing its part to change these devastating results. To evaluate the quality of preparation being...

WNMU held an open house and ribbon cutting for the WNMU Gallup Learning Center on May 20. While WNMU has had a Gallup campus in the past, with the new center, WNMU renews its commitment to offering its education programs to students from McKinley County and surrounding areas. Located at 425 N. 7th Street, the center will offer bachelor’s level programs in elementary education, secondary education, special education and early childhood.  The university plans to start offering courses at the location in the fall. WNMU had a campus in Gallup that closed ten years ago. With its return to the area, the university is starting small, with plans to grow the program in the future. In addition to offering courses for new students, WNMU also welcomes students who are returning to school, current teachers who are seeking certification in a new field, and those with degrees in other fields who wish to change their career path. The main campus also has a graduate program in education that...