Author: Stephanie Guzman

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Music, The Garifuna Collective, Weyu Larigi Weyu

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We don’t have exhibition openings anymore. We have an open house. And so changing your language makes a difference as well because you’re helping to give a sense of what’s really happening and going to an open house. It can be more inviting than going to it and opening, whatever that means.

About our Guest

Juliette Bianco

Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Endowed Director, Weatherspoon Art Museum UNCG

Juliette joined the Weatherspoon staff in September 2020. As museum director, Juliette sets the strategic, collaborative, and academic leadership and vision for the museum as a core learning resource for UNCG and the community. Her scholarly interests focus on transformational leadership in higher education, and on university museums as hubs of innovative teaching and learning; creative partnerships; and the benefits of a diverse and inclusive museum community. Juliette’s work at the Weatherspoon focuses on how museum staff invites diverse stakeholders to reassess both the artworks in the collection and the ways in which they are shared, so that community dialogue can better promote access, collaboration, and transformation and inspire investment in our shared future. Juliette is a graduate of Dartmouth and holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and an EdD from Northeastern University. She received a 2019 New England Museum Association (NEMA) Excellence Award and is a member of the Board of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) and a member of the City of Greensboro’s Cultural Affairs Commission.

Weatherspoon Art Museum

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro enriches the lives of diverse individuals and connects multiple communities, both on and off campus, by presenting, interpreting, and collecting modern and contemporary art. In recognizing its paramount role of public service, the Weatherspoon fosters an appreciation of the ability of art to positively impact lives.
Visit the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

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Music, The Garifuna Collective, Weyu Larigi Weyu

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Maybe students never had someone who took the time to model the way that you express yourself. Is there anything really wrong in how they express themselves to begin with?

About our Guest

Dr. Gabriela Livas Stein

Dr. Gabriela Livas Stein is Professor and Head of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on cultural resilience in communities of color – especially Latinx youth and their families. She credits her incredible mentors for helping her see what was possible, what she was capable of, and making room for her to grow!

About the CAMINOS Lab

The CAMINOS Lab attempts to identify individual, familial, and cultural processes that place minoritized youth at risk for maladaptive psychological and educational outcomes, with a focus on immigrant and Latinx populations. We also seek to understand the individual, familial, and cultural processes that serve to promote positive development and mitigate risk. The lab’s research questions are grounded in cultural models of child development (e.g., Integrative Model; García Coll et al., 1996) and tenets of developmental psychopathology (Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). The integration of these perspectives can deepen our understanding of risk and resilience processes in Latinx and other families of color to inform how best to deliver community-based prevention and intervention programs that address the mental health and cultural needs of these communities. Our work broadly focuses on cultural values, discrimination, ethnic-racial socialization, and interventions in Latinx and other minoritized communities. Learn more about the CAMINOS Lab, please visit their website.

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Music, The Garifuna Collective, Weyu Larigi Weyu

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Africana feminist epistemology is a way of knowing and understanding that we can create self-determining spaces, knowledges for ourselves. We do not have to lean on what the corporatized university system or organization that holds on to an EDI value set in name but does not do so in practice. We can live beyond the limitations of those words and inactions and do for ourselves and create for ourselves.

About our Guest

Jasmine Getrouw-Moore

Jasmine Getrouw-Moore is a professional equity leader, consultant, and academic scholar, pursuing a Ph.D. in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jasmine’s professional background examines the implications of structural inequity on minoritized people. She holds a master’s degree in Public Administration and a bachelor of science in Public Health with a concentration in community health education. Jasmine leverages structural racism as an analytic method for interpreting systemic inequities within the social determinants of health model. The social determinants of health (SDOH)  “are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work and play, worship and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes (CDC, 2021). Furthermore, Jasmine is the co-founder and Executive Director for RJ Squared, LLC- a reproductive justice technical assistance consulting firm that centers on the Reproductive Justice (RJ) Framework outlined by Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. RJ is the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. There, she applies an aptly situated intersectional,  root-cause analysis of structural inequities manifest in macro and micro-level institutions. Jasmine’s academic research focuses on two critical sites of shaping within the sociopolitical context: health and education. She is concerned with the long-term implications of structural oppression (inequities) on Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color life course (birth to death). Jasmine brings herself, her ancestors, and her community into her scholar-activism. As such, she employs a critical reflexivity practice, acting as both subject and object while sharpening her scholar-activist lens.

References from the Episode

• Alexander, M. J. (2005). Pedagogies of crossing : meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory, and the sacred (Ser. Perverse modernities). Duke University Press.
• Bilge, S. (2013). Intersectionality Undone: Saving intersectionality from Feminist 
• Intersectionality Studies. Du Bois Review, 10:2 (2013) 405–424. 
• Busey, C. L., & Dowie-Chin, T. (2021). The making of global black anti-citizen/citizenship: situating blackcrit in global citizenship research and theory. Theory and Research in Social Education, 49(2), 153–175.
• Butler, T. T. (2018). Black girl cartography: black girlhood and place-making in education research. Review of Research in Education, 42(1), 28–45.
• Collins, P. (2009). Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment ([2nd edition], Ser. Routledge classics). Routledge.
• Evans-Winters, V., & Esposito, J. (2010). Other People’s Daughters: Critical Race Feminism and Black Girls’s Education. The Journal of Educational Foundations,24(1),11-24.
• Figueroa-Vásquez Yomaira C, & Project Muse. (2020). Decolonizing diasporas : radical mappings of afro-atlantic literature (Ser. Book collections on project muse). Northwestern University Press.
• hooks, b., & Mesa-Bains, A. (2017). Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (1st ed.). Routledge.
• Love, B. L., & Evans-Winters, V. E. (2015). Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak
• Back, Up, and Out (Black Studies and Critical Thinking) (New ed.). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.
• Landreman, L. M. (Ed.). (2013). The art of effective facilitation : reflections from social justice educators (First, Ser. An acpa publication). Stylus Publishing, LLC.
• Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Jct (Online), 29(1), 72–89.
• Morris, S. M. (2012). Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(3–4), 146–166.
• Myers, J (Guest). (2020). Cedric Robinson, the Black Radical Tradition and Racial Regimes with
• Joshua Myers. [Audio podcast episode]. In Millennials are Killing Capitalism.
• Singh, N. P. (2014). The whiteness of police. American Quarterly, 66(4), 1091–1099.
• Smith, L. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies research and indigenous peoples. Bloomsbury.
• Wynter S. and McKittrick K (Ed.). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future:conversations. (2015). Sylvia wynter on being human as praxis.Duke.

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Music, The Garifuna Collective, Weyu Larigi Weyu

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1 out of every 25 families in the U.S. includes an adopted child. Despite the fact that we do have a prevalence of children being adopted and families formed through adoption, stories about adoption and adopted children are not regularly a part of our classroom discussions or included in the curriculum.

About our Guest

Melody Zoch

Melody Zoch (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of Literacy and TESOL Education in the Teacher Education and Higher Education department at UNCG. She joined the UNCG faculty in 2012 after completing her PhD in Language and Literacy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, she worked for six years as a bilingual Spanish/English elementary school teacher and literacy coach in Texas. She is the lead PI for a multimillion-dollar grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Project Ignite, which supports ESL licensure for pre-service and in-service teachers. Her research interests include supporting teachers to develop practices that are inclusive of culturally and linguistically diverse students and communities. This includes families that are formed through adoption and families who have been forced to resettle due to war and other catastrophes in their home countries.

References from the Episode

• Bishop, R.S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 6(3), ix–xi.
• Dei, G. J. S. (1996). Anti-racism education: Theory and practice. Fernwood Publishing.
• Dei, G.J.S. (2014). Personal reflections on anti-racism education for a global context. Encounters/Encuentros/Rencontres on Education, 15, 239-249.
• Guida-Richards, M. (2021). What white parents should know about transracial adoption: An adoptee’s perspective on its history, nuances, and practices. North Atlantic Books.
• Kendi, I.X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World.
• Lee, E. (2012). Antiracist teaching. In James. A. Banks (Ed.), Encyclopedia of diversity in education, Volume 1 (pp. 114-117). Sage Publications.
• Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational researcher, 41(3), 93-97.
• Paris, D., &; Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
• Polacco, P. (2009). In our mothers’ house. Philomel Books.
• Ruskai Molina, L. (1998). Raising adopted children: Practical, reassuring advice for every adoptive parent. HarperCollins.
• Troyna, B. (1987). Beyond multiculturalism: Towards the enactment of anti-racist education in policy, provision and pedagogy. Oxford Review of Education, 13(3), 307-320.

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Music, The Garifuna Collective, Weyu Larigi Weyu

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If you’re a community member and also in higher ed and want to do the work of diversity, equity and inclusion, don’t come in as a savior. We don’t need saviors.

About our Guest

Josette Ferguson

Josette Ferguson (who uses they/them pronouns) is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where they are earning their degree in Educational Studies with a concentration in Cultural Foundation. While earning their doctorate, Josette works full-time as narrative coordinator for a progressive organization in North Carolina. They partner with community organizations to identify storytellers to share their stories with news outlets. In addition, they collaborate with politically progressive organizations to create a cohesive and authentic statewide narrative, in which all North Carolinians can believe in. Powered by their love of education and community, Josette believes that the most powerful tool in making change is being a bridge builder and a convener of stories. They believe that through storytelling, trust is cultivated, and communal power is built.

As a Queer, non-binary, gender nonconforming, Guyanese African American womxn, Josette uses their identities to connect with Black community members in North Carolina to expand the potential of Black political capital in the state. As they work with Black community members, Josette grounds themselves in the mantra “we have to be the change we want to see in this world”. They use this mantra to push Black community members to actively participate in the United States democratic system to create change. Moreover, Josette uses the words of Bettina Love (2019) who states, “we cannot pursue educational freedom or any type of justice without a model of democracy that empowers all” (p. 68). Josette believes in the power of representation and is motivated to increase the representation of Black and Brown people in positions of power that will create justice. Through this expansion of representation, they believe that the United States democratic system can empower all.

Resources from the Episode

All links go to the UNCG library. You must use your UNCG credentials to access.

• Love trilogy: All About Love: New Visions, Communion: the Female Search for Love,
• Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks
• Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks
• Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger by Lama Rod Owens
• We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational
• Freedom by Bettina Love
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
• Community Building in Social Justice Work: A Critical Approach by Silvia Bettez & Kathy Hytten

Bills to Pay Attention to in the North Carolina General Assembly

• House Bill 187: if passed, this will prevent educators from promoting Critical Race Theory.
• Senate Bill 49: if passed, this will require teachers to tell a student’s parents if they begin to question their gender. This would make it ok for a student to be outed by their teacher.
• House Bill 43: if passed, it would make it illegal for anyone under 18 to receive gender-affirming care and treatment.

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Music, A Short Walk, from Zapsplat.com

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We love for employers to talk about workplace culture. It’s becoming more and more common for employers to have employee resource groups on site. Those employee resource groups frequently reflect racial identity, social identity, gender identity.

The practical application of this is to have conversations in your classrooms, faculty about salary negotiation. Partner with career development centers and have a salary negotiation workshop.

About our Guest

Megan Walters

Dr. Megan Walters serves as Associate Director for Career Development at UNC Greensboro. In this role, she leads the student-facing team of professional career coaches and works alongside them to design and facilitate campus wide career readiness programs. Megan also sits on the Board of Directors for the Southern Association of Colleges and Employers (SoACE) as the Conference Committee Chair. She completed degrees in communication, college student development, higher education administration, and educational leadership all at Appalachian State University. When she’s not at work, Megan is an avid jigsaw puzzler and a mega-fan of singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile. Megan and her partner live in Whitsett, NC with their 3 dogs.

Resources from the Episode

During the podcast episode, Megan discusses the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Career Readiness Competencies employers are looking for in our graduates.

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Music, A Short Walk, from Zapsplat.com

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About our Guest

Nodia Mena

Nodia C. Mena (she, her, hers), is a Ph.D. student in the Education Leadership and Cultural Foundations program at UNC-Greensboro. Her area of research is centered around racial and gender equity as well as educational justice. Nodia teaches Cultural Foundations of Education in the School of Education building. She is Garifuna, Black-Indigenous born in Honduras, Central America. Nodia served as the Lead Coordinator for the Afro-Latinx Consortium from August 2018 – June 2021. Nodia currently serves as Racial Equity Associate in collaboration with the Chancellor Fellow for Campus Climate at UNC-Greensboro. To learn more about Nodia, watch her TEDx Greensboro talk.

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Music, A Short Walk, from Zapsplat.com

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According to the iBelong Survey results, 81% of students felt that diversity is a major priority at UNCG.

About our Guest

Jamie Stephens

Jamie is a lifelong North Carolinian, originally from Raleigh and growing up in Lake Toxaway.  She is a proud first-generation graduate and a two-time alum of UNCG.  Jamie has a BA in History, a Master of Public Health degree, and 10 years experience in college mental health. 

Jamie joined UNCG in 2012 and served the campus as the Coordinator for Outreach and Peer Education and has recently transitioned to a Well-Being Specialist position in the newly established Spartan Well-Being program area in Student Health Services.  Her areas of focus include mental health awareness, stigma reduction, suicide prevention, and peer health education.

Prior to higher education, Jamie worked in community mental health leadership where she conducted suicide prevention training programs for community groups and local non-profit organizations.

Resources from the Episode

• iBelong Campus Climate survey
• DiversityEdu self-paced training
• Viewpoints of Inclusive Student Experiences (VOISES) Panels 
• Safe Zone / Trans Zone Training
• Green Zone Training
• UNCG Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) “Thrive at the G:  Holistic Health and Wellness” – additional details forthcoming
• 2018 ACHA data report

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Music, A Short Walk, from Zapsplat.com

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Major Takeaways

There is a significant difference between official and unofficial student withdrawals that faculty need to understand. See below John’s distinction between the two.

About our Guest

John Lucas

John Lucas is the Director for the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships at UNC Greensboro.  He has worked in Financial Aid and at UNCG since 2000. He has held many different positions in Financial Aid including leading the scholarship department, supervising front-line staff, and overseeing the verification process. Before becoming the Director, John served as the Associate Director for Students Services in Financial aid, and prior to working in Enrollment Management, he worked in Student Affairs by way of Housing and Residence Life at the University of Connecticut, Lehigh University, and the University of Arizona.

John has a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Connecticut (Go Huskies!) and a M.A. in Higher Education from the University of Arizona.

Resources from the Episode

• Financial Aid Basics
• Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) Policy
• Student Loan Debt Forgiveness on Spartan Central
• Student Accounts Policy 4 -Student Refunds

The difference between Official vs. Unofficial Withdrawals

When a student executes a total withdrawal (i.e., drops all courses) from UNCG, federal regulations require the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships to do a calculation to determine if any financial aid funds need to be returned to the Department of Education.  At the same time, the Cashiers and Student Accounts Office will use the published refund calendar to determine the appropriate adjustment to the student’s tuition and fees.  Both of these processes are predicated on the student’s withdrawal date.  Because UNCG’s refund policy mirrors the Department of Education’s Return of Title IV (R2T4)  policy, the amount of the tuition and fees refund will be roughly the amount that needs to be returned to the federal government.  The end result may leave the student with a small balance owed to UNCG or a small refund from UNCG.

When a student just stops attending classes, without executing a total withdrawal, they are considered an Unofficial Withdrawal.  This type of withdrawal can result in massive financial ramifications for the student.  For students who fail to earn any academic credit, the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships is still responsible for completing the R2T4 calculation based on the documented Last Date of Academic Activity (LDAA). The earlier a student stops participating in their courses, the larger the required amount of aid to be returned will be. However, because the student did not execute a total withdrawal, there is no tuition and fees adjustment.  In these cases the student may be left with a large student account balance as well as F grades that damage their GPA rather than a negligible balance and W grades that will not impact their GPA.

It is critical to engage with students who stop attending class and cease to participate in academic activities.  If withdrawing from the university is in the student’s best interest, they should officially withdraw to avoid the negative consequences of simply walking away from the semester. The financial and academic impact will be felt most keenly when the student tries to re-enroll at a future date. The lack of academic progress and the prior account balance will be significant roadblocks for the student to overcome.

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Music, A Short Walk, from Zapsplat.com

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White men have been flat in their enrollment rate probably from the 1970s.

About our Guests

Dr. Dan Tillapaugh

​Dan Tillapaugh is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Counselor Education at California Lutheran University. At Cal Lutheran, he primarily teaches in the Counseling and College Student Personnel master’s program. He obtained his Ph.D. in Leadership Studies with a specialization in Higher Education Leadership from the University of San Diego in May 2012 and has an M.Ed. from the Counseling & Personnel Services program (now the Student Affairs concentration) at the University of Maryland. His research interests are connected to social contexts of higher education, particularly college men and masculinities, LGBT issues in higher education, intersectionality, sexual violence in higher education, as well as leadership development and education. He is a frequent speaker, presenter, and consultant on these topics.  

Resources from the Episode

Resources (articles/websites/etc.)

• Men & Masculinities: Theoretical Considerations & Promising Practices for Supporting College Men’s Development
• American Men’s Studies Association: https://www.mensstudies.org/
• NASPA Men & Masculinities Knowledge Community 
• ACPA Coalition on Men & Masculinities
• Guyland – Michael Kimmel Link to book in UNCG library
• Masculinities in Higher Education – Jason Laker & Tracy Davis Link to book in UNCG library
• College Men & Masculinities – Shaun Harper & Frank Harris III Link to book in UNCG library
• J. Luke Wood & Frank Harris’ texts on teaching boys and men of color
  • Supporting Men of Color in the Community College
  • Teaching Men of Color in the Community College
  • Teaching Boys and Men of Color