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A Few Minutes With … adjusting to online instruction during COVID-19

April 14, 2020 | Vince Lara

Handling the transition to online instruction

Vince Lara of the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois speaks with Keiko Ishikawa of the Speech and Hearing Science Department and Neha Gothe of the department of Kinesiology and Community Health about the transition to online instruction at Illinois.

Watch the interview

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of “A Few Minutes With,” the podcast that showcases Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara, and today I’m speaking with Keiko Ishikawa of Speech and Hearing Science and Neha Gothe of Kinesiology and Community Health about the transition to online instruction during the coronavirus crisis.

So just a simple question, where are you setting up in your house as you transition into this world of online instruction?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Well, I actually set up a home office at my house. I didn’t have a really official space from home before. But we actually created a room for me to work in next eight weeks.

VINCE LARA: That’s great. How about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think a similar situation for me as well. We have an office space in our house. And so I have a standing desk. I was able to connect with the AHS IT team and get all the more access softwares that I need on my laptop so I am able to access– and also remotely access my office computer if I need some documents or some softwares.

VINCE LARA: Have either of you had online instruction prior to this, whether it’s with Illinois or any other university?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: I will start. So yes, I actually tried to make a hybrid course last semester for AHS 300, which is the undergraduate level anatomy and physiology course. So in that class– in half of the class, which is almost all the lectures, were done online. And then class met for laboratory activities. So I was not new to this type of online instruction. But full online instruction is a first for me.

VINCE LARA: How about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, this is completely new for me. I have never taught online classes before in any small or big capacity. So this was a first transition for me to use an online software, such as Zoom which has worked really well for us thus far, and connecting with students. And also trying to then adjust your syllabus coursework, grading rubric accordingly so things move on to a smoother transition.

I think in this situation what certainly did help was I was able to see and connect with my students for the first half of our semester. And so the students know me. I can put a name and a face together when I’m on Zoom with more than 100 students in one of my classes. And so it does certainly help to have had that in-person interaction prior to just switching to online.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, I’ve heard that anecdotally as well that that helped having that first part of the semester interaction. Do either of you think that this kind of experience would make it more likely that you’d be involved in online instruction in the future? Why don’t you start, Neha.

NEHA GOTHE: For me, certainly. I think I have already been thinking and brainstorming about ideas in which I could either transition my course to an online course or perhaps think of a hybrid format. So perhaps meeting in person for once a week and then doing some other activities for the course remotely. And I think to some extent it does work to my advantage being in the field of kinesiology and community health.

All our coursework is very applied, at least the coursework that I teach in the context of health and behavior, health promotion, exercise and health, psychology. These are all the things that are very practically, very applicable to students. A lot of my assignments involve students to try something with their family or friends. And so I can really see this connection where I could do certainly the theory and instruction in person once a week and perhaps connect with my students remotely in a hybrid format.

VINCE LARA: And Keiko, what do you think?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes, it really, in a good way, forced me to be creative and think what else I can do for the class that I haven’t been preparing for online courses. And like Neha said, my classes typically are also very applied, so there’s some concrete knowledge that our students need to develop. And then those things are easily communicated via online courses or prerecorded lectures. So it’s really reasonable to do a hybrid format.

VINCE LARA: There are advantages to working from home, no commute, no dressing up. But are you– let’s start with you, Keiko. Are you enjoying working from home?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes and no, I would say.

VINCE LARA: Yes.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yes because no commute. And it’s nice to have two minutes to my lunch break.

However, there are challenges. And also I’m missing my colleagues. It’s not the same. I’m all by myself in the house. So that is a disadvantage, I think.

VINCE LARA: And Neha, what do you think?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think even for me, I think the biggest change was not seeing any of my colleagues and students. So I think I had to get adjusted to that or trying to see them through Zoom meetings and online meetings that we set up. But in terms of working from home itself, I feel like sometimes it has been a struggle to draw boundaries just because you are at home.

You wake up. You get on with your work. And you’re just working all day. And so I feel like when I used to come into work at the university, I had kind of fixed hours. And I know that once I left my office, it was time to do other things. But that boundary has been shifted a little bit.

It’s a little more loose when I’m working from home. So there has definitely been some adjustments that I have made, and a schedule that I have created. And just some logistical edits that I have made my calendar, so that way, I can stay on task and still have kind of a work hour routine through the week.

VINCE LARA: Keiko, you mentioned technological challenges. Talk about some of those. Is it Zoom itself? Is it something else that’s been a challenge particularly?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK, technological challenges. Well, I’m not sure at this point technological challenge-wise. So I haven’t tried the Zoom instruction– synchronous instruction this week.

VINCE LARA: OK.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: That was just because we were not sure about the bandwidth, whether that was standard for all the classes to meet. So we’ll figure it out. We’ll test it out and see how that goes little by little. So I guess unknowns, what is that technology capable of and how much is what it can take is a challenge at this point.

VINCE LARA: Neha, what about you?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, I think since we’ve been transitioning to working from home and also having lectures online, I think without an IT department, you are really your own person to solve your tech problems. And so I think some of the most common issues I’ve had this first week after spring break is usually to do with low internet or poor internet connections, either on my end or on the other person’s end– either the student or a colleague.

Occasionally, some low quality video calls similar to the bandwidth situation that Keiko mentioned, and maybe sometimes some softwares or program which I wish I had access to and which are loaded on my work computer. But I don’t necessarily have an easy connection unless I do a remote access and jump through a few other hoops.

VINCE LARA: Right. Keiko, you mentioned you haven’t had synchronous classes yet, but I’m just wondering, maybe you can answer this anyway. What’s student participation been like?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: So what I have done is– so I have asynchronous part, which I prerecord lectures, as I told you earlier. And so they’re supposed to watch this and work on the assignments. So it is, in a way, the classroom arrangement.So I have office hours that I established. And they are supposed to– I mean, they’re not supposed to, they are welcome to join me anytime, ask questions. This week in particular, I think they’re still adjusting. So only a few students have participated in the office hours. I’m hoping to see more faces virtually.

VINCE LARA: And how about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, the same for me. We’ve tried both with asynchronous and then, like Keiko does, recording my lectures and then posting a video. I’m really learning a lot about all of the features you can have, even built in Microsoft PowerPoint, when you can do your narration. And then you can also have your audio and screen slideshow recorded.So that as well as complementing it with the Zoom and being able to record your video in Zoom and screenshares. I think those two have been my go-to this first week, and both of them have worked really well for us. Also, one of the classes I teach is a lecture and discussion class. So it’s KINES 201, that’s Physical Activity Research Methods.

It’s a large class. It’s over 100 students. And I lecture for the class twice a week. And the students break out into smaller discussion groups with their teaching assistants for more in-depth knowledge and practice. And so those lab sections, my teaching assistants have been absolutely enjoying the synchronous through Zoom. I think they enjoy seeing the students.

Because it’s a small group, there is more of the possibility of having some more conversations and Q&As. And my TAs tell me that they absolutely love it. So I think there are definitely pros to both, and both have worked really well for me thus far.

VINCE LARA: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because I was going to ask next about lab work or similar in-person instruction. And have either of you thought about or even started working on workarounds to lab work? Or even now that we can’t do in-person data collection any longer or in-person instruction, how do you work around those limitations? Keiko, you can answer first.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: Yeah, I can start. So we actually were very timely in this matter that the US publishing online service study, which was just approved by IRB. So we were just in time to do this, and we are launching actually a survey risk of vocal injury in university faculty. And we included some of the questions regarding how this transition to online teaching have affected your voice use and whether you are feeling like your voice is getting tired more and what not. So that’s one of– actually just coincidentally is something that worked for us.

But at the same time, we are also looking into doing some experiments online. For example, we do speech perception studies, which listeners listen to some stimuli and then give us responses. So we are working very quickly to transition to online format for this kind of experiment.

VINCE LARA: Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, so for us, it was a little bit different. We were amidst one of our research studies where it was a site-based exercise trial. So we invited participants to come to campus and exercise with us for a period of 12 weeks. And we were right smack in the middle. We were at week 6.

And so now, with no face-to-face in-person interaction, we have had to transition our exercise sessions remote or online. And then it’s been working well so far. We were a little bit hesitant since our population is older adults. And so we weren’t sure about how technology would be embraced by them.

But we’ve had Zoom meetings, again, synchronous Zoom exercise classes with our participants. And things have worked out really well so far. This has been the first week. But thus far, we’ve had less technical issues than I had anticipated.

For our study measurements, we have been trying to explore other opportunities and services, either through the university IT department or some other commercially available softwares. Qualtrics is a great resource that is available through the university. So for any questionnaire data that researchers might want to collect, Qualtrics would be a great place to launch your surveys online. And I’m connecting with some other colleagues in professional organizations to get some sense of how some of those other unique measurements could be collected online, which are not necessarily as simple as questionnaires.

VINCE LARA: I’m wondering what you both think of take-home exams. Why don’t you start, Keiko.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK. Yes, exam is- how to administer exam online is something that I have to think about and I’m still making my plans for the final exam. Obviously, you cannot do a simple multiple choice questions–

VINCE LARA: Right.

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: –as you may do in the classrooms. So we need to alter the format of the questions and the type of questions you ask. So that is a challenge for sure. It will be much more time intensive on the side of graders. So yes, I’m finding that is a challenge.

VINCE LARA: And how about you, Neha?

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, so I’ve been trying to go back and look through my rubric and grading rubrics. Thankfully, a variety of my assignments were online for students to do because they were take-home assignments. They had to try different kinds of exercise routines, and do a self-reflection about it. Or they were experiential activities. So those are largely unaffected by this transition.

But the exams, for sure, I’m connecting with my teaching assistants. And we are trying to make some judgment about what did we want students to know and learn for the course, and is there a way to evaluate that learning without having to do an exam necessarily. So we are also exploring other opportunities for grading, maybe adding in an assignment or two, or doing an in-person Q&A, or using some based polling during a class to make sure that the students have understood the content.

So I think my focus has—it was always to make sure that the exams are meant to evaluate the learning for the student in the course. But given this transition to an online format, I’m trying to explore ways in which I could test that learning in other settings.

VINCE LARA: Do either of you have students who are on internships that have gotten interrupted? And what do you do about that? Neha, if you want to handle that first.

NEHA GOTHE: Yeah, we have every semester between, I would say, 5 through 20 undergraduate research assistants. Since a lot of my research is campus-based, we have participants—research participants will come to our labs and participate in a variety of exercise, and fitness, and cognitive activities. We have had an army of undergraduate students who help us with all that in-person assessment and training.

So for them, I have had to creatively think of ways in which they could do other things remotely and still get somewhat of a research experience. So we have been doing and brainstorming ideas, such as doing an online journal club. So that would involve me giving an overview of the research process more towards the end of publications, manuscripts. How do we find the correct evidence? How do you read a journal article?

So for a lot of our undergraduate research students, these are new experiences, and they’re a little bit different from their day-to-day collection that they are used to. So I’m just exploring other ways in which I could give them glimpses of the research spectrum and the research experience without necessarily for them having to come into a lab and collect data.

VINCE LARA: Right. And Keiko, how about you?

KEIKO ISHIKAWA: OK, so for research experience in my lab, they are able to do a lot at home online. So we are not severely affected by it. Except that we were collecting data from audio screening clinic where we had a face-to-face interaction with the participants. So that had to stop.

And then that was—that is affecting a bit of the graduate students who are getting clinical practicum hours through the clinic. But that is only tip of an iceberg. We, as a clinical training program, our graduate students are severely affected by losing training sites, like schools and hospitals. They are unable to do their training at this point for indefinite time. We are very concerned about this.

And telehealth seems to be a really good solution to this problem. However, right now, we have a regulation where the telesupervision is not allowed. So we are quickly working to see how we can petition for changing this regulation, at least for the moment.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Keiko and Neha. For more podcasts on Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences, search “A Few Minutes With” on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Radio.com, and other places you get your podcast fix. Thanks for listening, and see next time.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Department of Health and Kinesiology, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Keiko Ishikawa, Neha Gothe, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Toni Liechty

March 06, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Toni Liechty (Photo by Brian Stauffer)*

Vince Lara speaks with Toni Liechty, an associate professor in the department of Recreation Sport and Tourism to talk about her research on why people get involved in fitness programs, what keeps them involved, and how life stage and body image impact that involvement.

Listen to the podcast

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of A Few Minutes With, the podcast that showcases Illinois’s College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara and today I’m speaking with Toni Liechty, an associate professor in the Department of Recreation Sport and Tourism, to talk about her research on why people get involved in fitness programs, what keeps them involved, and how life stage and body image impact that involvement.

All right. Sitting with Toni Liechty. Toni, thank you for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it. You know, commonly, when I meet with faculty, I ask them about their inspirations for their research. Because usually, there’s something that inspired you to look at what you study. And so for you, how did you get interested in your line of study?

TONI LIECHTY: So, I think maybe I might be a little different than some folks. I never had any interest in doing research or becoming a professor at all. In my field, in recreation sport and tourism, a lot of people go into the profession. And it’s not as common to go into research. And I thought that’s what I was going to do.

I used to work at a summer camp that was a sport and fitness camp. Which means that a lot of parents sent their kids there because they wanted them to lose weight. And while I was there, I in some ways saw that it was an amazing place for kids to come. I heard some kids say things like, I feel really comfortable at camp because I don’t feel like I’m going to get bullied because of my weight and things like that.

At the same time, I saw some things that were really problematic. You know, kids would share stories of how they would lose five pounds over the weekend and these sort of unhealthy weight loss issues. Another thing that I heard that kind of broke my heart was, I still remember a camper telling me that she said, I love swimming. It’s one of my favorite things to do. But I only swim at camp because at home, I don’t want to be the fat kid in the pool. And it kind of broke my heart that she would have something that she loved to do that would be good for her, but her body image made it so that she felt that she couldn’t do that.

And then I started to hear it more often, people saying, well, I like to play tennis. But I won’t play tennis because people will be looking at me if I were a little short skirt. Or even in other sports like soccer or basketball, I don’t want to run up and down the field and have people looking at my body.

And I thought initially, this was a thing that made sense at this weight loss camp. But when I came home and I decided to do a master’s degree, I started to notice it very commonly. Other people who I wouldn’t think of as having a weight issue still felt uncomfortable about their body.

And I think part of the reason that I really wanted to do a master’s degree was because, as a professional, I looked for information about how to improve our camp, how to make it better, how to address these body image issues in the setting. And I couldn’t find the information that I wanted. I didn’t feel like there was enough in terms of understanding of management of camps and sport facilities and so on. I didn’t feel like there was enough information about addressing body image issues specifically.

So that’s why I decided I was going to go back to school and study this. And I thought I was going to go back to school and study it so that I could come back to the camp and do a better job. But I kind of got hooked on the whole research thing and it went from there.

VINCE LARA: So you never really wanted to teach or anything. But the research part of it kind of sucked you in, I guess.

TONI LIECHTY: Especially in terms of how I viewed that it could make a difference in the professional world and how it could help to sort of make people’s lives better in a very noticeable way or direct way.

VINCE LARA: You know, some of your research looks at why people get into fitness programs and what keeps them there. And I’m interested, what led to that line of research?

TONI LIECHTY: Well, so when I started looking at body image, there’s a lot of research that says that people start out– that having a poor body image might encourage someone to start a fitness program. But it generally doesn’t lead to long term participation. Because if your motivation is just to look good and you start doing something physically active, it’s very unlikely you’re going to see results immediately. And if your only motivation was to see a physical result in terms of your appearance, then that result doesn’t happen so you stop doing the activity.

So I wanted to start to understand what else encourages people to be active, how can we get away from just the appearance factor, help to address different types of motivations that will keep people participating longer.

There’s also a lot of research saying that body image doesn’t lead to the most healthy behaviors. So if I’m trying to lose weight because of the way I look, I’m more likely to do sort of unhealthy dieting, excessive exercise, things that are going to just be focused on the way that I look.

Whereas if I’m motivated by my general health, I want to feel good, I want to interact with my friends, I want to get outdoors, things like that, I’m more likely to engage in healthy behaviors. So the idea is trying to shift people’s motivation and their reasons for physical activity away from the appearance focus and toward other types of things.

VINCE LARA: I’m curious if you ever are asked to consult with, let’s say, Planet Fitness or any of these other sorts of chains that pop up.

TONI LIECHTY: There’s a tension there.

VINCE LARA: OK.

TONI LIECHTY: Because I think there’s sort of an old fashioned thinking that if we can make people feel bad about the way they look, it will motivate them to be active.

VINCE LARA: Interesting.

TONI LIECHTY: And that’s the old school marketing approach, right? If you tell people, oh, you gained weight over the holidays. Don’t you want to lose that weight so that you can look good in a bikini in the summer, that it will encourage people to join your gym. But what we know from the research is that if people join the gym or whatever because of body shaming, then they do not continue to participate. So the difficulty in getting people to accept what the research says as opposed to what may seem a little bit more logical to them.

VINCE LARA: You know, one of your studies looks at barriers to physical activity. And what are some of those barriers and how do you go about trying to combat them?

TONI LIECHTY: I mean, the first barrier I was interested in was just the body image in general, being sort of self-conscious about the way you look. I think for a lot of people– So one of the things that people will report most commonly is that their barrier is time. They’ll say, well, I don’t have time to do it. Yet we know from research that people have time to do a whole lot of other things, right? They have time. Everybody has 24 hours in a day.

So it’s not necessarily how much time you have, but how you choose to allocate your time and what things you prioritize. A lot of people don’t prioritize physical activity because it’s not as easy or enjoyable as pulling out your phone and surfing on social media or doing something that’s more fun.

So one of the barriers, and is going to sound silly, but is just the fact that exercise is not fun for a lot of people. And I am not– I think a lot of people get into studying physical activity because they’re fitness gurus. But I am not a fitness guru. I don’t like going to the gym. I don’t like running. I don’t like working out in the traditional sense.

VINCE LARA: Sure.

TONI LIECHTY: But I like playing tennis. I like hiking. I like doing a lot of things that are active if they have something else that makes them enjoyable. And so for me, well, we also know in terms of research that there is a certain percentage of the population that would probably be active no matter what. They enjoy being active. But that’s a relatively small proportion. And most people, the majority of us don’t particularly like being physically active.

So I’m trying to help figure out how we can make physical activity more fun, more enjoyable, and more of a priority for people. If they have a barrier of just the inertia of getting started, if they view physical activity as a chore, if they think of it as something negative, if they don’t have anyone to participate with, that’s going to be more boring than if they want to do something that’s social.

And then there are a lot of barriers that people face just in their community. They face just the cost. We even hear people say that they don’t go to an activity that’s relatively low cost even if it’s only a couple of dollars. If their income is very low, that couple of dollars on a regular basis is not something they can afford.

Being in their local neighborhood, a lot of people are not willing or able to travel a long distance to work out at a gym or to hike in a park or something like that. So it needs to be relatively accessible to help people overcome that inertia of getting out and doing something active.

VINCE LARA: So what do you try to do to combat those things? Is there a movement that you– do reach out to, let’s say, a local park or community or something like that?

TONI LIECHTY: One of the things that we’ve been doing– So, I’m particularly interested in different life stages. And one group of people that are particularly inactive are older adults. And so, we’ve been working a little bit with Aurora Park District to find out what they do to help get people more active and what they do that is successful and is less successful.

And some of the things that they’ve been doing, one thing that they do is they have a punch card system so that people can buy a punch card. And every time they go to a class, they just take one punch. And that makes it so that they’re not paying for a whole class if they know that they’re not going be able to come every time. It makes it more cost effective. It also makes it feel less overwhelming to pay, say, a large amount of money for a session if they can’t afford it all at once.

And they make the classes fun. They make sure that there’s variety from class to class. They have fun music. They do fun moves during the act during the process. They encourage social interaction so that you come out come out and you hang out with your friends and you all laugh together and have a good time together. And it may sound silly, but fun is a pretty enticing element of any kind of leisure activity. So specifically for physical activity, which is not viewed as being very fun, if you can make it fun, that’s going to get people coming back.

VINCE LARA: You talked about looking at specific segments of people. So one specific segment you look at is women who play tackle football, really interesting. How did you get involved with that?

TONI LIECHTY: So I actually knew someone. She was a mature student who had come back to school. And she took a class from me and I was talking a little bit about body image. And she came up to me after class and said, this really resonated with me because I’ve always had a poor body image because I’ve always been really big. And I wanted to do things like figure skating. This was when I lived in Canada and figure skating’s very popular.

She said, but I never felt that I could do figure skating because I don’t have a body for it. And as an adult, I started playing tackle football and I realized that suddenly, instead of being a negative thing, my size was a positive thing. People appreciated, they wanted me on their team because I was big. So I thought, that’s such a unique setting. That’s such a unique sport that celebrates a bigger body, which is very uncommon for women.

You know, I used to do gymnastics or I played basketball or softball or tennis, different sports that have a sort of body that’s an ideal. And when I started talking to these women on the team, they said, what’s awesome about football for women specifically is that we can be any size that we are, whatever our body is now, and there will be a position that suits us. So instead of me trying to make my body be the way that the sport requires, I have the body that I have and I just find a position on the team that suits the way that my body is. And that makes a big difference in terms of the way I view my body and appreciate what my body can do instead of how my body looks.

VINCE LARA: Interesting. That’s a league in Canada for women who play tackle football?

TONI LIECHTY: Yeah. And there are leagues in the US, too. They’re just not as well-known.

VINCE LARA: Really interesting. You know, Illinois is an R1 university. So research projects are your bailiwick, right. And typically, there’s always a lot in your pipeline. So what have you got going on that you’re really excited about that you’re ready to talk about? It’s at that stage that you’re ready to talk about?

TONI LIECHTY: I think the thing that I’m kind of focusing on right now is a study I’m doing on roller derby. A colleague of mine out of Eastern Illinois University had kind of an in with some local roller derby leagues. And we did, actually, a photo voice approach where we asked the participants to take photographs of what roller derby means to them.

And they took photos of themselves doing derby. They took photos of their outfits. They took photos of their team, their family, and so on. And we interviewed them asking, why did you take these photos? Tell us about your experiences with roller derby.

And in some ways, there were some similarities to the football study in that they said, it’s a really cool sort of empowering sport that celebrates your body instead of telling you to fight your body and make it a certain way. That sense of celebrating your body as it is also encourages you to keep participating because there’s not a constant frustration that my body’s not correct, quote unquote, for this sport.

They also talked a lot about the social aspect and how they felt a lot of social support with the team, which kept them coming back. And a lot of people talked about how participating in that sport in that moment served a really valuable need for them. Like maybe they were going through a divorce or dealing with a health issue or something like that. They found this team and this sport and they were able to enjoy doing something physically active. They felt strong and empowered. They had this social network. So it really filled a lot of needs in their life.

And again, I think that’s one thing that we sometimes miss out on about physical activity. A lot of times, if you’re thinking, OK, I have 30 minutes in the day or a couple of hours in the day. If I can just only get physical activity out of it, that might not be a good enough use of my time. But if I can get physical activity. I can also get fun. I can also develop friendships. I can also develop connections in the community and all these different things, then that’s much a better use of my time, more efficient use of my time.

I don’t know that they all said it in those exact words. But a lot of them just talk about getting multiple benefits from participating in a given sport. And that’s another way that I think we can help promote ongoing activity and physical activity, or ongoing participation in physical activity.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Dr. Liechty. For more podcasts on Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences, search A Few Minutes With on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Radio.com, and other places you get your podcast fix. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Podcast, Toni Liechty

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … David Strauser

March 03, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Vince Lara, media relations specialist at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois, speaks with David Strauser, professor of Kinesiology and Community Health at Illinois, about Dr. Strauser’s research on work personality and vocational behavior with a focus on people with chronic health conditions and disabilities.

Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hi, and welcome to another edition of A Few Minutes With, the podcast that showcases Illinois College of Applied Health Sciences. I’m Vince Lara, and today I’ll speak to Dr. David Strauser of our Kinesiology and Community Health Department about his research on work personality and vocational behavior with a focus on people with chronic health conditions and disability.

All right. Speaking with Dr. David Strauser. Dr. Strauser, I appreciate you taking the time to come on with our podcast. The first question I ask when I meet with faculty is I’m interested– I do my prep as any journalist would, and I try to find out– hmm, I wonder what led this person to our fine institution? Your background is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is where you got your degrees. So I wonder what led you to Illinois.

DAVID STRAUSER: That’s a good question. There’s probably a variety of things that led me to the University of Illinois. I came to the University of Illinois from the University of Memphis where I spent 10 years. And that was the first job that I got after completing my PhD at the University Wisconsin-Madison. Down there, I started a research center, had about 30 people working for me. We were doing a lot of work across the state of Tennessee in the southeast.

And then this opportunity came available at the University of Illinois. And I think for a combination of probably family reasons, being a native Midwesterner, and also an opportunity to be at a school like Illinois, it just seemed like a nice opportune time to make that switch from the University of Memphis to the University of Illinois. And a chance to be in a Big Ten school, at a big research school just seemed like a hard opportunity to turn down.

Also, I think Illinois is a little bit unusual compared to other programs in the Big Ten that have my area of study that it focused a little bit more on health and health behavior. And so that was something that maybe initially didn’t come into the mix but became a point of what I really appreciated over the course of my time here.

VINCE LARA: Are you from the Midwest originally?

DAVID STRAUSER: I’m from Madison, Wisconsin originally.

VINCE LARA: That makes sense. I know research is a big part of this job, obviously. But did you always want to teach? Was that something that was top of mind, or was it the research first for you?

DAVID STRAUSER:: That’s a really good question. And I would say it’s probably teaching first, research second. I started out as an undergraduate thinking that I would go on and do– as an athlete, I was going to go on and do coaching of some kind. So I think that was always kind of my focus as an undergraduate.

And I had some very influential faculty people who pulled me aside and said, hey, what about me be doing this? What about looking at this opportunity? And that started to peak my interest enough to go look into it a little bit deeper. After completing my undergraduate, I was out in the private sector for about a year or so and decided, you know, this is good, but really being affiliated with the university and pursuing that academic work would really be something that I’d want to do as a career.

With that then became the teaching, and then the research developed through my work as a doctoral student to really look at their research. But I was very much trained from faculty at UW Madison who trained me as a professor. So when we talk about a professor, in my opinion, it’s the research, teaching, and service together. It’s not just one aspect of it. So that relates to your first question about being in Illinois. I think Illinois gives me an opportunity to do all three of those core components of being a professor, and that’s teaching, research, and service.

VINCE LARA: Focusing on that research part, now, your research, to an extent, focuses on work, health, and well-being. And I’m wondering, commonly with researchers, there’s something that inspired them to look at that. And I was wondering if there’s anything that inspired you to look at those research lines.

DAVID STRAUSER:: Yeah, that’s an interesting story probably as a reflecting back on it. Again, as I was an athlete in college and struggled with injuries in college, it became losing the opportunity to compete in college because of injuries. I guess that was happening at the same time that I had some of these influential faculty in my year talking about, hey, what about pursuing rehabilitation psychology as a career? What about some of those things? So I guess serendipity of those things coming together.

That extended then to probably my first job, as I mentioned, before I went back to graduate school, and that was working with injured workers in Southern California. And through that and my own experience of injury and then working with industrial injured workers solidified my interest into working with people with disabilities as a whole and working with people who are having problems working– pursuing their careers because they have an injury or illness.

VINCE LARA: Yeah. You get some of your research was in marginalized workers. Could you talk a bit about that?

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty big term, marginalized workers, in that it’s a good word. It’s an encompassing word. I look at– especially right now, for probably about the last 15 years, I’ve really looked at young adults who are having a hard time entering the labor market for some reason related to a chronic health condition, whether that’s cancer– I do a large group of that. Could be some mental health issues, autism.

So they’ve been marginalized because they have a chronic health condition. We have a project right now where we’re looking at foster care youth, formerly incarcerated or justice involved youth. So you’re correct to save my work has always looked at people who’ve been marginalized from entry or participation in the labor market, usually because of some chronic health condition or combination thereof.

So my research has focused a lot on undergraduate– or I mean younger adults in terms of their entrance in the labor market. Probably an advocacy side of me has continued to deal with industrial injured workers– I’ll use that term– people who’ve been injured on the job and advocating for their overall well-being and helping them manage and deal with their loss. So that’s probably more of an outreach service component of it than it is a research part, where my research is primarily focusing on these young adults’ entrance into the labor market.

VINCE LARA: So what particularly do you deal with? Is it trying to overcome the stigma of what these workers have dealt with?

DAVID STRAUSER: Most people who have chronic health conditions are likely to experience difficulty in meeting the demands of working how it’s typically performed. So they’re having some issue with meeting the job requirements or figuring out how they identify with the labor market. They may– for example, somebody might have an interest in doing something as a career, but because they have a limitation or a functional impairment, can’t pursue that, so that causes a lot of stress. So I deal with that.

There also is just a lot of people right now and a lot that we more to learn about mental health that they’re having a lot of mental health issues that are impacting their ability to function on the job and meet the demands on the job. So they might get a job but they can’t keep a job. And so after a period of time, they start to develop that resume that looks very scattered, very thin in terms of duration on the job. And that becomes then stigmatizing and marginalized.

So stigma is an issue, obviously, that everybody deals with with chronic health conditions. That is something I deal with, but I’m more interested in how they fit to the environment, how do they see themselves fitting as a worker, and how did they develop their identity as a worker.

VINCE LARA: Has your research ever led to you being a consultant for either a company or perhaps an industry looking to help these marginalized workers get back in?

DAVID STRAUSER: I do a lot of work with a group called Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, where I work a lot with them to help young adult cancer survivors and businesses help understand issues related to cancer survivors, try to help that fit. So yes, I’ve worked with some non-profits and some NGOs to work with them to understand, develop plans, develop programs to help them address these issues.

VINCE LARA: You developed what’s called the Illinois Work and Well-being Model. I’m interested about that. Tell me a little bit what that is.

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah, the Illinois Work and Well-Being Model is kind of a byproduct of my 30 years of in this field of how I was thinking about career stuff and finally came together for me as a model, where in our field, in the health field, we use a lot of the International Classification of Functioning or the ICF. So I use components of the ICF and then Common Career Development domains and mesh those two together.

And the model really tries to explain about how people’s functioning and how their personal environmental factors impact how they function and how their functioning impacts the career domains of how people become aware of what they are in terms of what they want to do, their vocational identity, how they go about acquiring jobs, and how they go about maintaining jobs.

And so that model helps provide a framework for research, and it’s guided a lot of my research over my whole career. Probably the last four or five years it’s been formalized as a model that we’re using to guide our research, to help us identify factors and variables. But also, we’ve been using it quite a bit with practitioners to help them guide their services to identify where interventions might need to be placed, where are points of intervention.

So as an example, if we’re having a person, a young adult cancer survivor who has a brain tumor, they’re trying to figure out, where do I fit into the world of work? What am I going to do? How am I going to do it? We might want to look at their functioning. What are the residual factors of their brain tumor? How do they function in terms of physically, cognitively, emotionally? And how do they communicate? And look at that.

However, even though as we look at those factors or those components, we also understand that personal factors, psychological factors such as resilience, hope, self-efficacy, impact how they perceive their functioning. In addition, environmental factors– ethnicity, social class. I say ethnicity. Ethnicity is a personal factor, but their cultural background. Their social factors, their schooling, their family also impact how they perceive their functioning.

So we want to make sure that we’re looking at all those factors and then how do they relate over to the career domain and those three factors I talked about in terms of awareness. We call it awareness. Basically, vocational identity. Acquisition and maintenance.

VINCE LARA: You always have research going on, several projects in the pipeline. That’s one of the things you have to do.

DAVID STRAUSER: Right.

VINCE LARA: What are some of the ones that you have that you’re excited about, that can talk about, say?

DAVID STRAUSER: Yeah. We actually have a lot of good stuff going on right now, and I’m very excited about it. We’re at a good time. We’re having a lot of data and a lot of projects. So we are right now– a couple things. In terms of the cancer group, we have several data sets right now, one with Dana Farber, one with Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, where we’re looking at these psychological career factors that impact employment and employment outcomes with a group of brain tumor survivors.

What’s really exciting about that, and this might– compared to people in other areas like epidemiology or even breast cancer, our data set combined right now is we have about 300 brain tumor survivors. That’s quite a good number for brain tumor survivors. So it’s a hard group to get. So we have some data there that we’re starting to analyze and look at working with these Dana Farber and Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation that look at what are these factors that impact employment outcomes.

And we’re very excited about that. We have several papers submitted right now. They’re under review. A couple of papers that have been accepted that are looking at using the Illinois Model, as we talked about, looking at how functioning and perception of functioning impacts the different domains of career. Highlight to that would be we’re starting to get good evidence to suggest that how people’s emotional function, the perceptions of their emotional functioning, really impact a lot of their identity development, contributes some to the acquisition phase.

Conversely, we know that people now who start to– how they perceive themselves physically really has a lot to do with how they perceive their ability to maintain a job. So what we can start to do there is start to parse out of, where people are in their career development, what our interventions need to target and what areas of functioning do we need to maybe support or address to maximize outcomes? So that’s very exciting with that.

Another population that we’re starting to look at or another group that we’re working with is, as I mentioned, a broader group of people with disabilities looking at developing some instruments related to the Illinois Work and Well-Being Model. We have a couple of instruments being developed right now to measure some of those constructs within the model, so we’re very excited about that. That’s not as maybe exciting, but for us, that’s a very practical piece.

Another area that we’re really starting to get into because we have seen it quite a bit with the young adults in foster care and the formerly incarcerated young adults is the issue of trauma and how trauma is impacting them, but how trauma is impacting their perceptions of their career development and their career development opportunities. And not surprisingly, we’re finding again there’s quite a bit of an impact there in terms of how much trauma, how they’re experiencing that trauma, how they feel about that trauma, how close to the surface, so to speak, that trauma is is going to be impacting a lot of how they see themselves as a worker, their identity, and their motivation to pursue those things.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to David Strauser. For more podcasts on Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences, search A Few Minutes With on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Stitcher, and other places you get your podcasts fix. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

Tags: David Strauser, Podcast

A Few Minutes With … Pasquale Bottalico

Dec. 17, 2018 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Pasquale Bottalico’s research looks at noisy environments, such as restaurants. (Google Images)*

In this edition of “Five Minutes With …,” AHS media relations specialist Vince Lara-Cinisomo interviews Dr. Pasquale Bottalico in the department of Speech and Hearing Science about his study of the effects of ambient noise in restaurants.

Bottalico, in his study, “Lombard effect, ambient noise and willingness to spend time and money in a restaurant,” published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, found that subjects reported a disturbance of their speech when noise reached 52.2 A-weighted decibels (dBA) and that vocal effort began to increase at 57.3 dBA. The sound level of speech increased as ambient noise increased. As background noise increased, it triggered a decrease in the willingness to spend time and money in that establishment. You can read more about Dr. Bottalico’s research here.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: Hello, this is Vince Lara, Media Relations Specialist at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today I spend five minutes with Dr. Pasquale Bottalico, of the Department of Speech And Hearing Science, to talk about his recent study on ambient noise in restaurants and its effect on the bottom line.

PASQUALE BOTTALICO: So the goal of the restaurant, the idea of the restaurant, is what we can do to improve the situation in restaurant. So my study was actually started because there was a lack in the literature. And I’m always being interested, it’s not the first paper that I worked about Lombard effect. I’m very interested in Lombard effect.

And I started to be interested in Lombard effect, again, starting from classroom acoustics, because the Lombard effect is basically characterized by a rate of voice increase per dB increasing noise in the environment. And the value is 72 for teachers, which is the highest. Generally, in the literature, it’s reported between 0.3 and 0.6. But teacher, 0.72., so they’re increasing their voice even higher.

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: Every day?

PASQUALE BOTTALICO: Every day, for every dB of noise increasing in the classroom. So this means that restaurant noise– everyone went to a restaurant in his life, and it can happen that after dinner with some people, at a restaurant, you go out and your throat’s sore. And you don’t really understand why. And because the Lombard effect is an unconscious effect, so you are not conscious of the fact that you are actually screaming.

But your voice, your body, and your physiology knows that. And so you will have the effect that your throat is burning. And I found particular the fact that this effect was never studied in a restaurant. And there were not studies correlating it with the willingness to spend money. So I thought it was a good idea to do the study. And I already did similar study for understanding other aspects of the Lombard effect. I was quizzing in the past about at which level of noise it starts, these effects, in other papers.

So I use a similar protocol, but I changed the setting, and it changed the noise. So I tried to recreate a restaurant in one of our sound booths. I had my students, my undergraduate students, that were the partner in the dinner. And we used typical restaurant noise, and we changed the level in a random way, covering a very large interval of noise, so from a medium level to a very loud level. Again, using the range of noise level reported by the literature, in restaurant noise.

And what it came out, that a level between 50 and 55 dB is starting this willingness to leave that place, and also to spend less money to eat in that place, and is starting the disturbance in the communication. And because of that, there is the objective evaluation of the voice, that is starting to increase at about 60 dB of noise. And all of these effects were quite strong.

We are starting to work again on the project. After the forum actually, because I kind of figured out that in this case, we used college students for this study, and I’m considering it like a pilot. But I want to move forward with the elder population.

And so, we know also that we have child in our college that’s interested in new research on aging people. And we have a movement, that is the age friendly in Urbana-Champaign, to make the city more friendly for aging people. And I think that this project will fit perfectly.

So I have a doctoral student in audiology. She’s going to start to collect data next semester. And the goal will be to create a different group in the elder population, normal hearing, and people with a moderate hearing loss, and people with a severe hearing loss. And try to understand better how these vulnerable populations are affected by the problem.

VINCE LARA-CINISOMO: My thanks again to Dr. Bottalico. This has been Five Minutes With.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Pasquale Bottalico, Podcast

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … Brandon Peters

Jan. 06, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

*Brandon Peters (Photo courtesy of Division of Intercollegiate Athletics)*

Vince Lara of the College of Applied Health Sciences speaks with Illinois starting quarterback Brandon Peters, a graduate student in the Recreation, Sport and Tourism department of AHS.

Peters, who got his undergraduate degree at Michigan before transferring to Illinois, talks about why he picked RST and what he enjoys about the classes.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA: This is Vince Lara at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today, I speak with Brandon Peters, starting quarterback for the Illinois football team, and RST grad student.

I’m talking with Brandon Peters, who’s the starting quarterback for the Illinois football team. So Brandon, how much did graduate programs– in terms of deciding where you wanted to continue playing– how much did the academics part of it, and how much, honestly, did the football playing part it have a play in your decision?

BRANDON PETERS: I would say football was the main focus for me. But, you know, when I came on my official visit, they kind of laid out the academic plan for me. And, you know, kind of weighing my options. Illinois being the university that it is, they offered the RST program for me to be in, and sport management was always something I was interested in at Michigan. And I just thought it was a great opportunity to come to Illinois, also at the academic level.

VINCE LARA: Now, you’re taking some online courses, what I had read. But you’re on campus obviously a lot. Have you run into any of your professors? Or have you had a chance to interact with any of them?BRANDON PETERS: Not yet, but I’m going to set up a meeting with the RST– I forget. Tiger?

VINCE LARA: Mm-hmm.

BRANDON PETERS: (Prof.) Tiger. Yeah. I’m going to set up a meeting with him, and just get to know him a little bit, and talk to him.

VINCE LARA: Now obviously, football’s the goal. Right? Ultimately, whether it’s the NFL, CFL, XFL, or whatever it is. But if that doesn’t happen, or even thinking post-football, do you have any ideas? Like, maybe RST hopes? You know, like you can work as a GM, or you can work in– you’re doing sport management as your focus, right? So what have you thought about post-football?

BRANDON PETERS: I really haven’t thought much into it yet. I still have another year to play. When it gets to that time, I think I’m going to think at it in more depth. But like you said, I’ve always thought about staying in the sport world, since I’ve always been so close to it my whole life. I think this will definitely help me propel myself into the future when I get to that point.

VINCE LARA: You’re from Avon, Indiana.

BRANDON PETERS: Yeah.

VINCE LARA: So did the proximity of Illinois play a big factor in deciding to come here?

BRANDON PETERS: Yeah. I mean, the other school that I had a lot of interest in too was Miami, Ohio, which is even closer than Illinois. Being able to stay at home was a great opportunity for me. And then just to be even closer to my family, and they could come to even more games. You know, my elders, my grandma and grandpa can travel well to games. So you know, it’s nice to have that.

VINCE LARA: Definitely. One last question I have for you. What classes are you taking right now?

BRANDON PETERS: RST 515 and 512.

VINCE LARA: 512? What are those courses like?

BRANDON PETERS: Organization and marketing.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Brandon Peters. This has been A Few Minutes With.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Podcast

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … Daniel Romanchuk

Jan. 06, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Vince Lara, media relations specialist at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois, spends a few minutes with Daniel Romanchuk, 2016 Paralympian who’s training at Illinois for a spot in the 2020 games in Tokyo.

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Transcript

VINCE LARA: Hello. This has Vince Lara and the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today, I spent a few minutes with Daniel Romanchuk, 2016 Paralympian who’s training at Illinois for a spot in the 2020 games in Tokyo. All right. I’m speaking with Daniel Romanchuk who is a 2020 Paralympic trainee hoping to make the team for the Tokyo games. So, Daniel, you started with the Bennett Blazers. But I want to go back a little bit before that. When did you know that sports was something you wanted to do?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: Ooh. So I started with the Bennett Blazers when I was two years old. Sports has always just been a part of my life. So I’m not sure if there was ever really a moment where I was like, oh, I want to play sports. I got started in wheelchair racing with the Bennett Blazers when I was, I believe, around four years old.

VINCE LARA: Wow.

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: And, so yeah. With that program, a lot of kids just tried everything. You didn’t have to really stay in anything, but you’d try it to see if you’d like it and kind of just go from there. If you liked it, of course you can stay in it. Also I think a little bit with your question, their motto is actually, tell kids they can before they’re told they can’t.

VINCE LARA: Wow, that’s great.

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: We’re athletes. And so there’s never really been, to me, oh, well I can’t play basketball. I can’t do this. There’s really never been any of that really in my life.

VINCE LARA: Which is great. You’re from Maryland, which is where the Bennett Blazers are located. But how did you end up training here at Illinois? And is it a testament to Coach Bleakney that you ended up here? Had you known about Coach Bleakney before getting here?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: So I grew up in the Mount Airy, Maryland, about a half hour outside of Baltimore where the sports program was located. And then it was just over four years ago that I was training all on my own. We’d eventually gotten in contact.

We had asked the high performance director, at that time, are there any training facilities or anything that I maybe can go train at? Because I wanted to try and make the 2016 games. And so after them kind of looking around a bit, we got put in contact with Adam Bleakney. And so he had let me come out and train, at first kind of intermittently. And then we moved out here.

VINCE LARA: Wow. When you say you were training on your own, how did you even know how to train?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: I would say my mom did a lot of that. So we would just basically go out to there’s a cul-de-sac that I would just do repeats on. It was a slight hill. And so I would just go out and do repeats of about 200 meters long. And then, eventually, just going out on the road.

I would just kind of push. I especially did not know any training methods. I didn’t know anything about taper or any of the phases or anything of training. And so we would just kind of go out on rides at that point.

VINCE LARA: Had you watched the Paralympic Games, and is that what gave you the idea, oh, I need to do 200’s or whatever training you had done on your own?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: I would say really it was kind of my mom that, at that time, was sort of guiding training. But yeah, they are one of the very few sports that I actually watched– the Olympic and Paralympic Games. So yeah. I don’t remember when I first watched it, but I do remember Beijing, and Tatyana McFadden, Josh George, and a number of other Paralympic racers, and other sports, as well.

So a number of other athletes had come through the Bennett Blazers sports program. And they had come back. Even after they’re gone off to college or whatever, they would come back every once in a while to kind of just come back– of course, say hi, and then just help the next generation along. And so that’s something I like to do when I can, is to get back and help bring along the next generation.

So I wouldn’t necessarily say when I first saw the games that I wanted to go. I’d probably say I just kind of known about them through other older athletes. And I’ve always been one to just push myself to see how far can I go? How fast can I go? And I think a lot of this just happened at such a young age. I don’t really remember too much of it.

VINCE LARA: OK. Well, you spoke about Tatyana. And you spoke about giving back. So, at this point given your experience in the marathons that you’ve had and the 2016 games, do you feel yourself as a mentor to some of your younger teammates? Because some of them are as young as 19, let’s say Alexa Halko. So what kind of role do you see yourself in now, while you’re competing, but also as one of the more experienced members?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: I mean I think I’ve been very–

VINCE LARA: Fortunate?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: Yeah, to have older athletes and mentors that have helped me get to where I am. And so I certainly want to help any athlete and help them just reach their potential.

VINCE LARA: Mm-hmm. Now, you’ve competed in several world majors of the marathon circuit. And does that training help you with the Paralympic Games, or do you consider them really kind of separate?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: As far as the marathon at the games, that certainly does help. You’ll see a lot of the same racers. Courses of course vary, but I would say it does help with the marathon.

VINCE LARA: You’re also now training for Dubai. Is that a springboard also for 2020?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: Yep, the last world championships just leading into the games. And so that does have a lot of things to do with the games. Slots can be earned for the country at the World Championships. I believe if you end up in a medal spot, you earn a spot. So it certainly is a big event going into the 2020.

VINCE LARA: Mm-hmm. So now you’ve talked about potentially enrolling at Illinois, maybe 2020, 2021. What do you think comes after sport for you?

DANIEL ROMANCHUK: Certainly like to stay in the sport to whatever degree, as long as I can. One thing I’ve learned in racing and just otherwise is I don’t know what God has planned for me. And so I try not to make a plan too much and to hold too tightly to it. Because I can make a plan for a marathon, and chances are it’s going to fall apart somewhere along the way. So I’m not sure where I’ll end up, but I’d certainly like to stay in the sport.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Daniel Romanchuk. This has been A Few Minutes With.

Tags: Daniel Romanchuk, Podcast

Podcast: A Few Minutes With … Kevin Richards

Feb. 13, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Kinesiology and Community Health assistant professor Kevin Richards spends a Few Minutes With AHS media relations specialist Vince Lara and speaks about his pedagogy research and the socialization of teachers, primarily in physical education.

Transcript

VINCE LARA: This is Vince Lara in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois. Today it’s been a few minutes with Kevin Richards, Assistant Professor in the Kinesiology and Community Health Department of AHS, to talk about his pedagogy research and the socialization of teachers.

Kevin, what inspires your research? Let me ask it this way. What led you to do what you do?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s interesting because a big thrust of my research is socialization. So, basically, you’re asking me what socialized me into the research that I do. But so I did my undergraduate degree back in Massachusetts in physical education. And I had every intention to go out into schools and to become a K-12 physical education teacher.

But back east, you have to have a master’s degree within five years to keep teaching in schools. And so a lot of people did like the night– the night school thing, and that just wasn’t for me. So I decided that I was going to look at graduate programs so I could just knock out that master’s degree in one shot, and then focus on teaching after. And that led me out to Purdue University, where I did my master’s and built the relationship with my advisor, Tom Templin.

And Tom studied socialization. And he was one of kind of the forefathers of that area of research in physical education. And I just got really passionate about that area of research through talking with him. So, you know, the main thrust of my research through the work that I did on my PhD and then, you know, and the majority of my career since focuses on how we recruit, prepare– recruit and prepare teacher– individuals to go into the field of physical education.

And then once they’re out in the schools, what are their lives and careers like? Physical education tends to be a marginalized subject in a lot of schools. And so I do a lot of work looking at marginality and how that affects teachers’ understanding of themselves and their relationships with others.

VINCE LARA: So, basically, to streamline what you’re saying is, you’re trying to build the best teacher you can, is that fair to say?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yes, in a sense. You know, we look to recruit people into our programs who are diverse in terms of things like traditional markers like race and ethnicity. But then also in terms of their background experiences. Physical education’s been traditionally a discipline that potential recruits really see to align with coaching.

So those who want to coach extra curricular school sports sometimes come into physical education with these really solid, developed backgrounds in team sport. And they see physical education as kind of a conduit to continue that. But not every kid who is out taking physical education in schools loves sports. So we try to recruit more diverse students.

But then also looking at the methods that we use in our physical education programs to give those students the knowledge and skills that they’re going to need in order to become effective practitioners into the future. But, also, you know, we focus a lot on dispositions, because, you know, while they’re in our classes, we can hold them accountable. So we can grade them. If they don’t do what we tell them to do, you know, we can fail them even.

But the reality is that once our students transition out of our programs out into schools, we lose that control. And so at that point the true marker is, you know, have they internalized these beliefs to the extent that they’re going to use them even when we’re not watching. And so, we really try to work with students to help them develop ideologies that align with best practice, but are grounded in their own experience, and that they’ll follow through on.

VINCE LARA: What are some of the challenges, you know, physical education teachers– there’s some stigma around that, right? So what are some of the challenges of getting kids into the program? And what do you do to try to, you know, defeat some of those stigmas, if you will?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah. That’s– it’s a really good question. And it’s timely, because this has actually been one particular area that I’ve been focusing on quite a bit in my work right now. But, you know, there are a lot of those negative social stigmas. And some of them, you know, are grounded in fact. You know, unfortunately, there are some physical education teachers, especially at the secondary level, the middle school and high school, who teach using ineffective practices.

The colloquialism in our field is that they roll out the ball. So they just kind of throw a ball out and let the kids play. It’s not educational. It’s not purposeful. And I think that sometimes people think about physical education and they reflect upon their own past experiences or maybe what their kids are going through in school, and they use that as the marker to evaluate the whole discipline. But, you know, of course, physical education can and should do so much more than that.

And so we really try to work with, you know, on the pre-service teacher side of it, develop teachers that are ready to step out into the world of schools, and teach using effective practices. And then a lot of my work has then also looked at those teachers who are in-service, working out in the schools, and how can we help to improve their work conditions and reshape their ideologies so that they’re using best practice. And then you have kind of this streamlined approach in the ideal situation where pre-service teachers are stepping out into schools that are ready to embrace the practices that they’ve learned.

And then, you know, this is all kind of a cyclical process, because the next generation of teachers are going to come out of those schools, and they’re going to see physical education as it’s presented to them by their own teachers, and use that as the basis for evaluation to determine whether or not they think physical education is for them. And so if we can get better physical education in the schools, then we’ll have better recruits coming into our programs.

VINCE LARA: One segment of your research, I noticed, deals with helping teachers deal with stress.

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah.

VINCE LARA: So what methods do you use to research that?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah. So I was initially trained as a qualitative researcher. My advisor, Dr. Templin, was very qualitative. I joke, in that, I don’t think he’s ever, like, calculated a mean in his career, like it just wasn’t his bag. Now I’m exaggerating, he has. But he’s very qualitative. So that’s how I was originally trained.

But then I did a postdoc at Purdue with a woman named Chantal Levesque-Bristol. And she was a cognitive psychologist that used primarily quantitative methods. So I kind of got a mix of both, and have really come to appreciate mixed methods and multiple methods working together. A lot of my studies are designed using sequential approaches.

So we might do a large scale survey of teachers, you know, and get hundreds of responses, asking them questions about stress and burnout, and, you know, protective factors like resilience and perceived mattering. And then we’ll take a sub sample of people who complete that survey, and then do qualitative interviews with them.

But what I’m really excited about is we’re taking all of this information that we’ve learned over the last few years studying teacher stress, and we’re putting it into practice. We got some funding through a small seed grant to develop a professional development program for teachers in local Champaign-Urbana area.

We’re calling it the Dream Project. That’s developing resilience and enhancing appraisals of mattering. And it’s kind of the culmination of the last six years of my career learning about stress and burnout in the relationships among these variables, and how teachers experience their work life, and then putting that to practice to try to do something about it.

VINCE LARA: You also look at social and emotional learning in physical education. Would you elaborate a little bit on that?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of a sub area or a second, maybe not sub area, but it’s kind of like a second tree of my research. So I had a colleague when I was going through grad school together– grad school named Michael Hemphill. And Michael and I– or Michael was very interested in social and emotional learning using this one particular best practice model called teaching personal and social responsibility.

And so TPSR, as we call it, is a way to teach within a physical activity context that views physical activity as kind of a mediator or a vehicle to get kids talking about personal and social responsibility. So there you have that hook of physical activity that a lot of kids like. It draws them in. And then that opens the door to say, OK, well, yeah, we’re going to focus on skill development. We’re going to focus on activity. But we’re also going to help you learn to be better people.

And so we focus on goals like participation and showing good effort, respecting the rights and feelings of others, self direction, and some goal setting, leadership and helping other people. And then the ultimate goal of all of that is to take lessons learned in the gym and transfer that out into other aspects of your life. So you know, you learn about respect in a physical activity program where you can use that in school.

Before I came to the University of Alabama, I was at– or excuse me, before I came to the University of Illinois, I was at the University of Alabama. And while I was there, a doctoral student and I, Tori Ivey, we ran a after-school program that focused on social emotional learning through physical activity over the course of three years, and learned a ton about best practices and best ways to do that.

And so then moving up here to Illinois, myself, Naiman Kahn, who’s another faculty in KCH, and my wife, Felicia Richards, who’s an instructor in our department, have been collaborating to take a summer program that our department’s actually offered for like 60 years. It’s one of the longest running summer programs, physical activity summer programs in the country. It used to be called Sport Fitness.

And so we took that and made some modifications to the structure, and rolled out a revised version of the model that we’re now calling IPAL. So it’s Illinois Physical Activity and Life Skills is what we are calling the program now. And that– that’s kind of a framework that we’re going to use this summer to roll out a couple of different summer program offerings using physical activity as kind of the hook, but really trying to get at those social emotional learning goals.

VINCE LARA: Is that program one of the reasons why you chose Illinois?

KEVIN RICHARDS: You know, I chose Illinois for a lot of reasons. I really like the people I worked with at Alabama, had great relationships down there. But Kim Graber and Amy Woods who are in pedagogy area with me, they’re leading scholars in the field. And Kim was actually on my dissertation committee. So we have this relationship that goes back a ways. And then, you know, Amy and I have collaborated over the years, too.

So those pre-existing relationships are a big part of what drew me here. But then, you know, or at least piqued my interest. But then after having come onto campus and see everything that Illinois has to offer, I mean this is a magical place. I really love it here. And, you know, my wife and I couldn’t be happier with the decision we made.

VINCE LARA: Now research obviously is a big part of why you’re at Illinois and our institution, obviously. But you know you also have to teach.

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah.

VINCE LARA: So do you– is there a particular class that you enjoy more than others?

KEVIN RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah. And people who listen to this might find this a bit surprising. But I love teaching actually. You know, it’s a huge part of my identity. I look forward to it. It’s not a burden. I love interacting with students. And the way that my teaching appointment is split here is that I teach one physical education majors course, so I still have my connection with the PE majors.

I teach a rotating course for our doctoral students. And then actually my favorite course is– it’s KIN201, Physical Activity Research Methods. And when the course got turned over to me, Neha Gothe and I actually collaborate on it. I teach it fall, she teaches in the spring. And when the course got turned over to us, you know, I think that it was a good idea, but it needed some fleshing out and development. And it’s been really fun to do that over the last couple of years with Neha.

And, you know, we’ve got the course to a position now, where the feedback that we’re getting at least, is that the students really enjoy it. We use kind of a lecture lab format. So they– you know, a large group lecture, where we can kind of talk about these concepts. But then the students break out into lab groups, where they get more kind of intimate contact and attention.

And, you know, I love talking about research. And so sparking that interest in the minds of our undergraduates, I think is a really cool part of our job. And so, I just got an email the other day actually from a student who was able to take something that we talked about in class a few weeks ago, and apply it in her life, reading a research article, and she wrote to me to tell me about that, which I thought was really cool and that really speaks to what I hope students get out of this class.

VINCE LARA: My thanks to Kevin Richards. This has been A Few Minutes.

Tags: A Few Minutes With, Kevin Richards, Podcast

MPH alums are on the front line of the pandemic battle

April 08, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Master of Public Health students are better equipped for the COVID crisis

Graduates of the Master of Public Health degree program in the College of Applied Health Sciences are finding themselves on the front line in the battle against COVID-19. And thanks to their University of Illinois education, they are better-equipped to handle a pandemic for which few could have been prepared.

Ken Borkowski, a 2012 MPH graduate, is working for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, conducting contact tracing with known cases of COVID-19 within the Metro-Detroit area. He credits his ability to succeed in the job in part because of what he learned in the MPH program.

“Going back to the basics of EPI 101, it kind of goes back to how this disease moves, and collecting all the information that’s necessary to give us accurate models of how things are going to look and progress, and what do we need to do to inform the public-health work that we do here in Michigan.”

Borkowski’s job involves calling people dealing with COVID-19—or their family members if the patient is too ill—and collecting information.

“Some of the key things that we’re looking at now is onset date of symptoms, as well as have people been able to quarantine and then did they go to any sort of high-risk areas such as nursing homes, long-term-care facilities, childhood daycare centers, and so on.”

Teresa Castaneda, who graduated from the MPH program in 2019, has a similar job as a communicable disease investigator for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, and also gives credit to her Illinois experience.

“The (epidemiology) knowledge and biostatistics prepared us for how a pandemic is going to come in waves, how we can track cases. There’s really no way to prepare for this, but just knowing the science and the (epidemiology) behind it really helps,” she said.

Castaneda started at CUPHD as a case manager for HIV patients, and was working with a communicable diseases investigator for routine communicable disease cases.

“I assist her when we have someone who tests positive for e-coli or salmonella, or hepatitis B or C, so I’m used to doing that type of investigation.” But she wasn’t surprised when the pandemic hit, or by getting pulled into that type of investigation.

“I’ve been involved in these conversations since right around Christmastime,” she said. “We’ve been having ‘When-it-comes-to-Champaign-County conversations,’ not ‘If-it-comes-to-Champaign-County conversations.”’

Derrius Carter is also a 2019 MPH grad and working for CUPHD in contact tracing and as a public information officer. Part of his job is akin to what Borkowski and Castaneda are doing, but Carter also has a public-facing role.

“What we do is create and provide guidance,” Carter said. “How to grocery shop, how long people should stay home.” Like Castaneda, Carter’s background was more involved with HIV and other infectious disease.

“But we have to be mindful about how all the variables intersect, and create avenues in which we can educate people about both HIV and COVID-19.”

One of Carter’s task is engaging in community-based risk reduction.

“Like using dating apps,” he said. “Just because COVID-19 is around, it doesn’t mean people aren’t being sexually active; so talking about how to reduce their risk of contracting COVID-19, in addition to contracting HIV.”

Like Borkowski and Castaneda, Carter credits his MPH education for getting him ready as he could be.

“We had some classes that touched on emergency preparedness, but I don’t think anybody can prepare you for doing the work,” he said. “Moreso learning the different mechanisms to respond. But when you’re actually in it, it’s a little bit different.”

One thing the MPH alums agree on is that their knowledge and healthcare experience have caused them to approach their personal lives with a high degree of COVID-19-related care.

“Because I take this very seriously, I have not been in a grocery store in so long,” Carter said. “I just feel like it makes the most sense. Limiting my risk. I haven’t been to the gym in quite some time. I knew gyms weren’t practicing social distancing.”

Castaneda also tries to limit her time outside.

“Definitely going less frequently (to the grocery store),” she said. “My husband and I, one of us goes once a week. I pretty much go to work, and go to the store once a week.”

The MPH alums are heeding their own advice, but they are most concerned that some people are listening to advice from less-reputable sources.

“Misinformation is most alarming for me,” Carter said. “I’ve gotten calls from people asking, ‘Oh, I can hold my breath for a minute. Does that mean I don’t have COVID-19?’ And I’ve gotten calls asking if a specific demographic is immune.

“And that’s alarming to me because then it means people aren’t taking it as seriously. (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) Dr. (Anthony) Fauci has been continuously been on a media campaign to spread information about COVID-19, but it’s Facebook articles that people are adhering to, and not his guidance.”

Castaneda agreed.

“The public’s response … I didn’t expect the craziness.”

The Illinois graduates remain hopeful the crisis can end in the upcoming months, but are imploring people to follow state and federal guidelines.

“Pandemics come in waves, and we see that historically,” Castaneda said. “So I don’t think when we get to the end of the downturn of this one, that will be the end of COVID-19, but social distancing and washing your hands are the best things you can do for yourselves.

“Look at the amount of flu outbreaks we have every year, and think about what social distancing and hand-washing could do to those. I do hope in a couple of months we will return to some normalcy,” she said.

“My advice for anybody who wants good information is follow your local health department or the state, we always have the best stuff.”

Now engaged in the worst pandemic since the outbreak of H1N1 in 2009, Michigan-native Borkowski is grateful for what he learned at Illinois.

“There’s been times where people that ask me, ‘Do you regret going out of state for school and doing your degree elsewhere and so on? And given everything that my schooling has led me to and got me into the field that I’m in and working in the job that I’m currently working, it was all well worth it. I definitely appreciate knowing that I have such a profound impact on the community that I’m trying to help and serve.”

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.

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Tags: COVID-19, MPH

Alumni Spotlight—Ron Barger

April 10, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Alumni of the College of Applied Health Sciences have myriad career options thanks to the tremendous diversity of programs. We periodically will put the spotlight on an alum to find out what they’re doing now, what experiences they had and what AHS means to them. This week, we talk to Ron Barger, a 1977 graduate of what was then known as Applied Life Studies and who was most recently senior managing director, head of operations and general counsel at ORIX Corporation USA.

Q: Why did you choose the University of Illinois?

A: I grew up in a very small town in Southern Illinois. I was the first kid from either side of my family to go to college. I was lucky enough and did well enough to receive a scholarship and was entered into the University of Illinois. I originally went to Illinois because my mom wanted me to be a doctor. In fact, my first year at Illinois was in premed. At the end of that first year, when I finished my freshman year at Illinois, I didn’t like what I was studying, and I was looking for something else I had such an affinity for sport and athletics and the things that I had been raised with that I looked at what was then the Applied Life Sciences school and enrolled in that, transferred into ALS. From there, it was a magical time, because for me, it ignited the passions that I had, something I didn’t have my freshman year. When I was growing up, Illinois was this wonderful university. It still is. But it was almost something so much greater than what I could expect and so for me, going to Illinois was like a dream come true.

Q: What about AHS inspired things in you? What was it about that program or whatever you saw? Was it a brochure you saw? Was there something on campus that said, hey, transfer into ALS?

A: No, I think I sought it out. I think you have to remember back in the ancient days, when I was in school, and this was in the early to mid ’70s, we didn’t have the Internet in the sense we have now. You didn’t have digital marketing. You didn’t have those kinds of things. I knew some people that were in the college. A lot of the things that it was, what I saw in terms of kinesiology and coaching and the aspects around sport, fit with where I was in my life at that point in time. So it seemed like a natural place to transfer and to then pursue that area of my life.

Q: Were there professors that had a profound impact on you from ALS?

A: Yes, yes. I was blessed. There were several that I think—and I still think about them from time to time. Marianna Trekell was there. Jim Meisner, and, I think, Don Arnold were both involved in the summer program that the college put on for the community that I participated in and helped in. But Jim Meisner, Don Arnold—Helga Deutsch was a professor I thought a great deal of—and Susan Greendorfer. There was a class I had, and I couldn’t tell you the name of it today, but it was along the lines of sociology and sport. I can remember the paper that I wrote. It was about it was about Althea Gibson and Billie Jean King and the impact that their lives and what they were doing, specifically in tennis and their larger role that they had in society because of that, because of their tennis and their recognition. I remember writing a paper in that class as sort of the capstone of that class with Dr. Greendorfer. For me, doing the research and the writing, I still have a very vivid memory of that experience.

Q: You got your law degree from SMU, so maybe AHS didn’t lead to your current career path. But what did you learn here that’s been instrumental to your career?

A: Vince, thank you for the question. I think there is something that I took away from Illinois—in specific, ALS at the time—a couple things, one of which was being exposed to different thoughts, different ways of seeing concepts. All those kinds of things contributed to where I wanted to go. Originally, as I graduated from Illinois, I wanted to go into politics and ultimately return to Southern Illinois and get into politics and represent that region. I ended up going to SMU and then went into a legal career, and from there, being in a large Dallas-based firm. Then I left after, I think, 17 years in private practice, and I went to a company that was being formed by Goldman Sachs called Archon, which was a real estate subsidiary of the firm and being in that organization that we grew to be worldwide, and very large. Then ultimately, I left Archon and went to a company called ORIX. In those roles, what I found is that my talent or my passion is building. It’s building people. It’s building organizations. It’s leading. A lot of the things I took from my time at ALS and some of the classes as well as student teaching at Urbana high school was, how do you coach people? What I found is that in business, the way you move the business is through people. You help them become the best expression of themselves, the fullest expression of who they are. So the same way that you build teams in a sport environment and the same way that you educate people in a classroom is the same way you lead a business—by building people, by building processes, by building organizations and letting them flourish and letting them succeed and how you motivate and how you inspire and how you give them vision and how you build them up and how you coach them and how you mentor them. All those things go into making a successful organization and a successful business. So while there is not a direct correlation to a specific class that I took, being immersed in those kinds of activities and those experiences ultimately is what made—the success that I’ve had as a business leader came based upon those foundations.

Q: As you said, there’s not a direct correlation between the law and what you learned at ALS. But clearly, there was the foundation in place from here and from those classes that you enjoyed. You talked about the courses you enjoyed the most. Were there any others that you could say really stood out to you?

A: I remember the anatomy classes I had. I loved cutting on the cadavers. I loved the labs, the exercise physiology labs that I had. Student teaching at Urbana High School was a wonderful classroom experience and working for a gentleman by the name of John Stergulz over there. Those kinds of things are life experiences that helped form me. I look at this stage in my life and in my career and it’s one in which you’re formed along the way by all those little experiences and people that touch you. One of my favorite philosophers—and a business philosopher, strangely enough—is John Wooden. Coach Wooden, if you’ve ever read any of his quotes, he didn’t think of himself as a basketball coach. He thought of himself as an educator. Some of the things that he said, and I still follow those, I’m trying to think of the exact quote, but something like, “Five years from now, you’re going to be the product of those people you’ve met and those books you’ve read.” I frankly think that goes from the beginning of your life until any point in time that you look at it you are the result of those people that are around you and the intellectual curiosity and the continued learning that you have to make you who that person that you are at that particular moment. I think all of my experiences, and Illinois is certainly formational for me in terms of helping me move from a small town in Southern Illinois to widening my horizons, thinking about things more broadly than that I had until that point in time, and then launching me into, ultimately, a legal career, which then launched into a business career. I’ve been blessed. I’ve been blessed by being associated with some amazing institutions and some amazing people.

Q: What were some of your favorite on-campus and then off-campus experiences?

A: I’m glad you phrased it like that. I can tell you there are a couple of experiences specifically to AHS that I remember. There was one summer that I was working for the recreation department and was sort of the gym supervisor for Huff Gym. And I can remember being in there late at night, not another person in the gym, and looking around and feeling the people and the events that had taken place in that facility and in that gym. And just sitting there in the dark and feeling it around you and knowing that at so many different times, during the time that Huff was being used as the basketball arena and the state high school basketball championships were played there, that it touched me very deeply. I take that with me. Something that I’ve found as well is just the relationships I had with some of the professors. And that’s what surprised me. For example, Don Arnold wrote a book with regard to, I think it was about the legal aspects of the administration of physical athletics or physical education and athletics in public schools. I was in law school when he sent me a draft of it and said, will you look at this for me now that you’re in law school? Having that sort of relationship was something that impacted me. Having professors that were very engaged with you, were very willing to be a part of your journey, and that’s something—I don’t have a specific recollection of a class. I can just tell you the way I felt is that they were engaged and willing to be partner, mentor and coach, and teach me along my journey. So that’s a wonderful thing. You ask about things that happened that were off-campus. I happened to be on-campus my freshman year when all the streaking was going on. So I can still remember that part of the college experience. I have just the fondest of memories of the University of Illinois. Walking down the quad late at night, I remember walking on campus as a freshman, feeling like you didn’t know a soul and when you walked away as a senior, you couldn’t pass five minutes walking down the quad without running into somebody and seeing a friend. At that time, I think you’re very impressionable. I think you’re very open to what is available to you as you’re in that part of your life and for me, it was a very formative time.

Q: In closing, I’d like to ask you what you would say to someone, a prospective student, to recommend the College of Applied Sciences?

A: I’ve been fortunate to be on the Board of Visitors and so I’ve had an opportunity to be around the college. I am deeply impressed with Dean Hanley-Maxwell. I think she is doing a phenomenal job guiding the college, expanding its reach, enhancing its reputation, looking at ways to integrate what the college is doing, what AHS is doing, into other parts of the university, other parts of the community, and frankly, other parts of the world. I’m really impressed with that and the depth of the areas that the college now touches is amazing. A good friend of mine has recently rejoined as the head of development, Jean Driscoll. I think she will be a wonderful return addition and an Illini coming back home to lead development for the college. Every time I go to a board meeting, and I listen to what is being done, I am amazed. I’m gratified by what I hear and frankly; I am just so thankful that I was able to be a graduate of that college and this University. So if you have a passion in this area, you can take this college, the curriculums that it provides to you, and do amazing things. I think it also prepares you for, if that is not where you necessarily see your journey ultimately taking you, it gives you a great foundation for going and following that dream, if you have something outside of it. I look at my undergraduate degree as being something that has been foundational for both my legal career and my business career. And I think that is probably even more enhanced today with the current state of AHS.

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.

Tags: alumni, Alumni Spotlight, Ron Barger

Alumni Spotlight—Marty Morse

April 01, 2020 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Alumni of the College of Applied Health Sciences have myriad career options thanks to the tremendous diversity of programs. We periodically will put the spotlight on an alum to find out what they’re doing now, what experiences they had and what AHS means to them. This week, we talk to Marty Morse, who got his kinesiology degree in 1984 and master’s in exercise physiology in 1987 at Illinois, and who was the university’s first wheelchair track coach in 1984.

Q: Why did you pick AHS?

A: In 1980, my coach told me that the Department of Kinesiology at Illinois was the finest in the world. Also in 1980, the Director of Boston University’s Spinal Cord Injury Center, Dr. Murray Freed, recommended that I pursue my wheelchair athletics dreams at the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES). I visited in 1980 with both kinesiology and DRES faculty. I fell immediately in love with the campus.

Q: Which professors had the most impact on you?

A: In kinesiology, it was Dr. Helga Deutsch and Dr. Richard Boileau. At DRES, it was Dr. Bradley Hedrick and Dr. Stephen Figoni. In kinesiology, I was surrounded by professors who knew of my goals and they became involved in making sure I reached or surpassed my academic dreams. At DRES, Doctor Hedrick and Figoni set the bar high for me in athletics and academics. Each day was crammed full with learning at the feet of these two giants in the field of athletics and academics.

Q: What course did you most enjoy?

A: Everything I was required to take in kinesiology I enjoyed. The same can be said for DRES. Hedrick and Figoni kept the learning challenging, but fun.

Q: Did you enter AHS knowing your career path, or did AHS help you decide?

A: I had no idea where I was going when I entered AHS other than the fact I would be coaching. Dr. Hedrick made sure I received a graduate assistantship at DRES. That alone set my career path in coaching at DRES.

Q: Did your AHS experience lead to your current job?

A: Yes. I was (the first) wheelchair track and field coach at DRES from 1984-2005.

Q:What is your current job?

A: I retired from full-time coaching in 2009.

Q: What was your favorite on-campus experience?

A: Day-to-day contact coaching Illinois student-athletes. There is a vibe being around Illinois student-athletes that can’t be found anywhere else. I thrived in that environment. Each day I was surrounded by the best and the brightest wheelchair athletes that come to the Urbana-Champaign campus to realize their academic and athletic dreams.

Q: What would you say to recommend AHS to a prospective student?

A: Kinesiology and DRES remain where I found them in 1981, the best. If you want to help people live an active, vigorous, healthy lifestyles, the College of AHS is the place to be. You will be challenged outside your current comfort level to achieve your dreams.

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.

Tags: alumni, Alumni Spotlight, Marty Morse

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