NMSU first-year students benefit from Every Learner Everywhere

Each fall about 600 NMSU freshmen learn communication skills in an introductory course. Two professors are fundamentally changing the ways of delivering that course, thanks to a program called Every Learner Everywhere.

Gabriela Morales, an assistant professor, and Dae Romero ’17 ’19, a college instructor, both teach communication studies. They both have taught Introduction to Communication in three back-to-back sessions of 200 students once a week in the fall and spring semesters. Teaching assistants meet with smaller groups of these students separately. It takes a team effort to provide so many students with needed communication skills in such a short time.

A grant from Every Learner Everywhere has allowed Morales and Romero to re-envision this foundational communication course that impacts virtually every student who attends NMSU. Romero is going solo in fall 2023 as Morales teaches other courses, but the two worked closely together to develop a new way of delivering the course to hundreds of students by using resources from Every Learner Everywhere. 

“It’s not your traditional way of providing a lecture,” Morales says. “We’re so used to doing things a specific way and we’re so focused on getting all the material that we need out to our students that we often don’t realize that a lot of these strategies are no longer working. Every semester we get a new batch of students with different ideologies, with different knowledge, with different backgrounds and as faculty, I think it’s our responsibility to keep up with that and to be able to modify our pedagogy, our way of teaching, our way of putting together assignments and materials. We need to change the way we provide that information to our students.” 

Every Learner Everywhere offers a broad range of content and communication tools, curricular models, design strategies and services to support institutions in developing a tailored engagement approach that aims to create better learning experiences and more equitable outcomes for minority students and those from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“We wanted to implement inclusivity, equity and understandability when it comes down to the content,” Romero says. “I am a huge advocate for intersectionality. I’m an identity scholar, so what really interests me is how we communicate our identities to other folks and how other folks communicate with our identities and through our identities to us.”