UW Faculty, Students Get Exhibition in Ft. Collins

A collaborative photo project that comes from UW faculty, students and from the Poudre Valley School District will get an exhibition in Ft. Collins through this month.

The University of Wyoming announced the exhibition on Tuesday.  Photovoice: Learning the Immigrant Story is on display at Everyday Joe's Coffee Shop, 144 South Mason Street, in Ft. Collins, Colorado.  A reception is scheduled from 5:30-7:30 PM on May 15th.  Some of the contributors for the project are expected to attend.

The exhibition is a collaboration among University of Wyoming College of Education faculty members Kevin Roxas and Kent Becker, doctoral student in counseling Nicole Needs, and the English Language Acquisition Department in the Poudre Valley School District in Fort Collins.

“During this project, we provided workshops to immigrant students and their parents asking them to share their hopes and dreams for school; what they hoped their teachers and their peer group could help them with so they could be successful in school; their personal stories of who they were; and what was special about their home lives and cultures,” Roxas said in an official press release. “We also gave cameras to each participant so they could create visual images to accompany the text they wrote.”

In all, the team provided five different sets of workshops to different participant groups, with each set of workshops lasting five to six weeks. More than 60 individuals participated in the project, with more than 100 of their posters (each 2 feet by 3 feet) hung on the walls of Everyday Joe’s, an old warehouse turned coffee shop.

“Being a part of this project, with so many amazing and inspirational immigrant students, parents, teachers, paraprofessional and district-level staff, has been quite an honor and an important educational experience for us,” Roxas says.