Heidi Toth

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Story by Heidi Toth 
NAU Communications

Video reported by Corderro McMurry and produced by Erik Sather
NAU-TV

There are no spectators at a Mountain Tremors choir practice. There are only singers—loud singers who will call out the insecurely tone-deaf visitor who comes expecting to just sit and observe.

Of course, the purpose of this choir is to sit up straight, control breathing, follow the director’s instructions and sing with as much volume as the diaphragm will allow; singing on key is optional. Singing with gusto, you see, is literally keeping at bay the deleterious effects of Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurological disease that, over time, erodes a person’s ability to move, speak, think and emote.

The disease is what ties together this little choir, comprised half of Flagstaff residents with the disease and half faculty and students from Northern Arizona University’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) and School of Music. Well, that and a love of singing.

“Since all skeletal muscles are affected, singing is a recommended exercise for people with Parkinson’s,” said Gordon Holt, who’s been a member of the choir since it began two years ago. “The other reason I’m involved is because I love music. This choir is so much fun. Every time it’s always fun.”

Fe Murray, a professor of speech-language pathology, started the choir two years ago, when now-choir regular Linda Webb, a member of the Parkinson Support Group at The Peaks Senior Living Community, asked CSD clinic director Kim Farinella about creating a Parkinson’s choirs in Flagstaff. Farinella asked Murray if she was interested in facilitating it.

Murray, a bilingual speech-language pathologist who has spent years working with people to overcome speech and communication disorders and help people reduce their accents while speaking English, said yes. She has witnessed over and over how isolating not being able to communicate can be, and while Parkinson’s isn’t a communication disorder per se, sufferers are held back in their communication because participating in their community is a struggle.

“The goals of the choir are to develop a community of people with neurological impairments, their families, caregivers and friends, around music,” she said. “For those with Parkinson’s in particular, I have seen an improvement in social engagement, as well as a maintenance of vocal ability. We have a small core group of loyal members who may not have much in common outside of their diagnosis, yet music provides a common ground, something they can all relate to, a shared joyful experience.”

Plus, who doesn’t want to rock along to classic Eagles, groove to Elvis Presley and dance to Diana Ross?

 

The therapeutic case for singing loud

Valerie Carter, a professor of physical therapy at NAU, said Parkinson’s is a disease of the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that affects movement, cognition, motivation, emotions and speech. In Parkinson’s, the basal ganglia isn’t getting enough dopamine to function at the normal level, essentially acting as a dimmer switch to the person’s mental and physical activity.

The result is the known Parkinson’s symptoms: slow, quiet, often monotonal speech, little facial movement, slow and small steps, stooped posture and slower brain activity. Although research shows that exercising these muscle groups can slow and possibly reverse symptoms, the lack of motivation the dimmer switch causes means many people on Parkinson’s simply don’t have the motivation to take action themselves.

That means singing in the shower or the car may not help that much, but a choir that includes weekly practice, learning words and patterns, pausing when the music does, harmonizing with other members and then performing instead of others can hit all of the notes to hold off Parkinson’s symptoms.

“Your muscles are working, your brain is working with learning new things and your voice is getting louder because you have to practice it,” Carter said. “That’s why choir is so great. You need to sing loud. You need to sing on pitch, hopefully. You need to listen, you need to pause. Those are all things people with Parkinson’s struggle with, but if they practice they can actually outperform healthy control individuals.”

Parkinson’s researchers throughout the world are studying how certain activities can slow the disease and provide a better quality of life, but Carter found in her work much of the research focused on one aspect—voice training or physical exercise or mental cognition—while she has worked to combine treatments to address multiple symptoms. Choir is great for that, as is boxing, which requires quick, powerful movements side to side and backwards and forwards, along with an awareness and responsiveness to surroundings, and the tango, which requires dancers to move in rhythm with a partner and take large steps backwards.

“When you add the beat of the tango music, or music in general, there’s just an ease of movement,” she said. “Tango itself calls for stepping forward and backward.”

Carter has been to a number of practices and performances for the Mountain Tremors to buoy up her research and because of an especial love for people with Parkinson’s. Part of it is because “they’re so darn fun to work with”—a statement with which anyone who’s experienced the Mountain Tremors would agree. But she’s been motivated in other ways; her mother, Charlotte Hull, died recently, 30 years after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Her mother was a member of the Mountain Tremors, Carter’s poster child for her research and the reason her research goal is nothing short of stamping out the late stages of Parkinson’s disease.

Carter quote

The choir fulfills a different need for its members as well. Parkinson’s can be a lonely disease, said Emily Sakievich, a CSD master’s student who joined the choir in its third semester. Voice and touch are two main ways humans use to communicate, and Parkinson’s “literally freezes your body and voice.”

“I can’t begin to imagine what that feels like,” she said. “Although I do think about singing as a form of therapy, I don’t necessarily look at the members of the choir clinically; they’re my friends and it’s so uplifting for me to be around their fun positivity.

Holt feels the same way. As a doctor, he knows the importance of activity to slow the disease’s progression, but he just loves being in the choir and loves singing. He was in his church choir for decades when living in Phoenix and has a list of favorite songs ranging from musicals to opera to folk. He has a log dating back to the start of the choir, with lists of all the songs they’ve performed, what CSD students were part of the choir and who directed them.

But don’t ask him his favorite song.

“Oh gosh, there’s been so many fun ones,” he said. “I can’t say my favorite song. I just like so many of them.”

University involvement

Sakievich was one of the first students to join. Her clinical interest was secondary to her human interest in the choir.

“I have always known I want to find ways to make music part of my clinical practice, so it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss,” she said. “I was also very curious; my grandfather sang in choirs and small groups his whole life and the last few years of life he stopping singing. He said it was because his voice wasn’t the same as it was before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.”

About a dozen other CSD students have participated in the choir. They help choir members focus on posture, breath control, vocal quality, loudness and articulation, which provides experience for the students with a population they may not normally see.

Mountain Tremors
NAU students Lorenzo Slavin, accompanist, and Leon Lucero, director, perform with the Mountain Tremors.

“This experience will prepare our students for possible future practice with adults and helps them to see them as people first, which will help the students be more empathetic and effective clinicians in the future,” Murray said.

She also reached out to Edith Copley, NAU’s director of choral studies, who in turn reached out to music students and have sent a number of directors and accompanists. Both Leon Lucero, this year’s director, and Lorenzo Slavin, the accompanist, are finishing their time with the choir after the summer. The upcoming concert will be their fourth.

For Lucero, a music education major, it’s been a great learning experience but also a great experience overall.

“The best part of the experience is working with people who just love to sing,” Lucero said. “They come into rehearsals eager to be there, and they leave the same way, always super excited for next week.”

While music education is generally considered more at the K-12 level, the general process he goes through with the Mountain Tremors—picking songs the choir will enjoy singing and be able to learn, teaching non-musicians about following a director and learning by rote instead of reading music, catching tricky areas quickly and walking the singers through it—will be useful in his future classrooms.

“I plan to teach choir for the rest of my life, and I’ll encounter many levels of singers along the way,” he said. “Being able Leon Lucero quoteto work with a group of individuals who aren’t ‘musicians’ prepares me for the day I walk into a rehearsal and nobody can read music.”

What’s next

 

The Mountain Tremors will reconvene in the fall. Anyone with Parkinson’s or other neurological conditions is welcome to join, as are family, friends and caregivers. Contact Fe Murray for more information.

Valerie Carter’s physical therapy students run a tango class for people with Parkinson’s disease. Contact Valerie Carter for additional information.

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Three Northern Arizona University professors are among the leaders of an international team to assemble and make available the most complete dataset looking at how temperatures on Earth have changed from 1 AD to the present.

This collection is significant because it allows climate scientists to study the patterns and causes of surface temperature more accurately than was previously possible, said Darrell Kaufman, Regents’ Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability and third author on the paper, which was published July 11 in Nature Scientific Data.

“Our dataset is the most comprehensive collection of information on global temperature change over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years,” Kaufman said.

The international project was coordinated through Past Global Changes project (PAGES), a core project within Future Earth, a research initiative on global environmental change and global sustainability. Participants assembled proxy data from biological and geological sources that provide indirect information on past temperatures, such as tree rings, which can grow more during warmer years. This dataset includes proxy data from other sources like corals, glacier ice and marine and lake sediments. The database, called PAGES2k, gathers 692 records from 648 locations, with data sources covering all continents and oceans.

PAGES2k data gathering
Sediment coring of the deep, artic lake Kongressvatnet in Svalbard, Western Spitsbergen, Norway. Credit: Anne Hormes.

Assistant professor Nick McKay and assistant research professor Cody Routson, both in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, also are authors on the project, along with 95 other researchers from throughout the world, including Germany, China, Italy, Australia, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others. The group of scientists realized the existing datasets were incomplete, including missing metadata that would allow scientists to reuse the data, which led to the worldwide project.

“The expanded database now includes records from the oceans for more complete global coverage as compared to previous work,” said McKay, who was the second author. “It also includes extensive documentation to facilitate the accurate reuse of the data. Furthermore, the selection criteria for the records included in this version were applied more uniformly and systematically across regions, resulting in a more cohesive global data product.”
The database will be available as open data, which allows anyone to download and use the information. Kaufman also wrote a blog for Nature further discussing the need for community-endorsed data products for climate research.

 

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By Heidi Toth
NAU Communications

Not enough people going into teaching plus half of teachers leaving the field in their first three to five years equals America’s sizable and still growing teacher shortage.

A program at Northern Arizona University, set up to provide support from when math and science education majors set foot on campus to years after they graduate, is out to combat that imbalance.

The National Science Foundation gave NAU a second grant of $1.45 million to continue a program started seven years ago that aims to recruit, train and retain well-qualified math and science teachers.

Shannon Guerrero, a professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and principal investigator of the grant, said they created the Noyce Scholars program in 2010 with three separate forms of outreach and support: $15,000 scholarships for students in their final year of school; an induction program that provides continuing education and community during teachers’ first two years in the classroom; and through a sub-award, paid internships for math and science students at Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) to encourage them to become teachers and continue their education at NAU.

To qualify for the scholarships, teachers must spend their first two years teaching in a high-needs school district, meaning the district has a high rate of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, a high rate of turnover in math and science teachers or a large number of math and science educators teaching out of their content area.

For this new award, the goals stay the same, but some of the details will change. Students will get $18,000 in their final year, and the induction program will be more flexible in terms of scheduling and course requirements. Teachers won’t have to pay for those credit hours—they’ll be treated as continuing education credits—but if having more education will bump up a teacher’s salary, they can earn those credits as graduate hours.

Basically, whatever Guerrero’s team can do to help teachers succeed in the classroom in those difficult early years, they’re going to do it.

“One of our main goals is to take them beyond survival mode and to keep pushing them to grow as teachers and not get caught up in the daily grind and by teaching how to continue growing as professionals and remain energized,” she said. “This program is about recruiting teachers, retaining them and serving those under-represented populations and high-needs school districts.”

The major change is in recruitment. Guerrero said the reasoning for the partnership with MCCCD was to encourage students to get interested in teaching math or science, then matriculating into NAU’s program. That didn’t happen at the levels they hoped. This time, they’ll reach out to Coconino Community College, perhaps using Noyce Scholars as ambassadors, offering tutoring, collaborating with faculty and otherwise raising awareness of teaching as a profession.

“Our sense is a lot of students who might be going through these classes have never even considered teaching as a profession,” Guerrero said. “One of the Noyce goals is to grab students early in their career and suggest they give teaching math and science a shot.”

Gauging the effectiveness of the Noyce program is difficult since graduates from the first round of scholarships have only been in the field for three to four years. In addition, the same year the Noyce Scholars program began, the Center for Science Teaching and Learning and Department of Mathematics & Statistics implemented NAUTeach for future math and science teachers, which puts the onus of educating students on how to teach on the content departments instead of the College of Education. Separating the impact of either program on the success of mathematics and science education graduates is difficult since they began at the same time and serve the same population.

Screen Shot 2017-07-03 at 10.40.38 AMAnecdotally, the Noyce Scholars have benefitted, particularly from the induction program. The first class has been teaching for four years now, two years without the induction program, and many have said they didn’t realize at the time how much it helped, but they see it now. This means they’re staying not just in the industry but in the high-needs schools they started in, providing much-needed stability and quality teaching to what Guerrero hopes are upcoming math and science teachers.

“To be a math education major at NAU, you essentially get the equivalent of a full math degree. It’s intimidating,” Guerrero said. “The areas of physics, chemistry and math are intimidating for a lot of students, and schools are losing highly qualified math and science teachers, so instruction is not as good as it could be to get students interested and comfortable with math and science. Then they come to college and don’t have the skill set, interest or desire to pursue math and science.

“We’re trying to break that cycle by putting really good math and science teachers out there.”

About NAU Teach

In 2010, NAU introduced NAUTeach, a program that allows math and science education majors to do not only their content but also their education work through their departments, allowing classes to focus specifically on teaching math and science instead of general teaching. Students take courses through the College of Education as electives.

The program begins with Step 1 and Step 2 classes, a one-hour course for which students can sign up their first or second semester. These classes are open to any major and offer an opportunity for students to discover whether they like teaching. They learn about education and the theories behind teaching, then go out and teach in a local elementary or middle school. Students earn $100 upon completion of this course.

“Give this class a shot,” Guerrero advised. “Give this profession a shot.”

 

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By Kerry Bennett
Office of the Vice President for Research

As part of the first comparison study of central pit impact craters throughout the solar system, professor Nadine Barlow of NAU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy recently published findings revealing insights into the environmental conditions governing the formation of these craters.

Central pit craters are impact craters caused by the collision of asteroids, comets or meteorites that feature a central depression. These pits, located either on the crater’s floor or on top of the crater’s central peak, are between 100 meters and 190 kilometers in diameter and are found in craters that range in size from five kilometers to 450 kilometers in diameter. Central pit craters exist on a variety of bodies with different target properties, gravities, geologic histories and surface temperatures.

Barlow, a planetary scientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on Martian impact craters, is the lead author of the paper, which was published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science. The paper presents the results of research conducted by a team of scientists on central pit craters on Mars, Mercury, Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, and Saturn’s moons Tethys, Dione and Rhea.

“In this study we compared the characteristics and distributions of central pit craters on Ganymede, which is a large, volatile-rich body; on Tethys, Dione and Rhea, which are smaller, volatile-rich bodies; on Mars, a body with an intermediate amount of crustal volatiles; and on Mercury, a body with a low-volatile crust, to determine similarities and differences between central pits on different bodies,” Barlow said.

Volatiles are chemical elements and compounds with low boiling points that are associated with a planet’s or moon’s crust or atmosphere, including nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane.

Although scientists conducted research on these craters in the 1970s, when many of them were detected, Barlow decided to take another look.

“We have all sorts of new data sets available now for these planets and moons, including higher-resolution image data as well as information about their dust content and topography—so we wanted to look at them again using the newer data sets,” she said.

Based on earlier research, scientists believed the smaller moons were not large enough for central pit craters, but the team identified 10 more central pit craters on Rhea, Dione and Tethys using the new data.

“Until recently we thought pit craters only occurred on bodies with water or ice on their near-surface regions,” Barlow said. “The majority of the models for how these pit craters formed, in fact, were based on the theory that ice or water on the surface vaporized or drained upon impact. But central pit craters also appear on Mercury and on the moon, which do not have ice or water on their near-surface regions.”

The investigation found that pits on the floors of craters are more common on icy bodies and are larger relative to their crater than pits on central peaks. While the central peak analysis found no difference between pitted and unpitted peaks, it did indicate Mercury’s crust is twice as strong as Mars’ crust. The study also found central pit formation involves initial uplift followed by collapse.

This study is part of a larger ongoing investigation comparing central pit craters across all solar system bodies, the results of which will provide comprehensive new insights into whether a single formation mechanism can explain central pit formation on both volatile-rich and volatile-poor bodies. Barlow’s analysis eliminated some models previously proposed by scientists explaining central pit formation. Her findings suggest the actual formation process is a complicated interplay of crustal strength, surface gravity and energy of the impacting meteorite.

Barlow focuses her research on impact craters and what their presence reveals about the distribution of sub-surface reservoirs of water and ice. Other research topics she is pursuing include analyzing crater relationships to thrust faults on Mercury to determine whether the planet is still shrinking, identifying features indicative of the freshest impact craters on Mars and investigating how climate change on Mars has influenced crater formation and erosion.

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Hospital-associated_Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus_(MRSA)_Bacteria
Courtesy: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

By Heidi Toth
NAU Communications

Ecologists frequently tag animals in the wild, monitoring their movements and activities to gain a greater understanding of the species’ behaviors and lifestyle.

Benjamin Koch is one of the first ecologists to propose doing the same with bacteria.

Koch, an assistant research professor in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) and the Department of Biological Sciences, led a team of biologists and ecologists to study antibiotic-resistant bacteria through an ecological lens. They outlined new ways to use genomic “tags” to track the bacteria. More and more scientists are paying attention to these bacteria, which are increasing in prevalence as antibiotic use in humans and food animals, or animals intended for food consumption, spikes throughout the world.

It’s a complicated situation, which is why Koch and his colleagues, including Ecoss director Bruce Hungate, wanted a different take on it.

“We clearly need to use antibiotics more responsibly,” Koch said. “However, limiting the spread of antibiotic resistance also requires knowing the extent to which antibiotic-resistant microbes move among farms, the environment and people.”

Koch’s study, which will be published in the August issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, applied ecological principles to newly acquired genomic data on antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He and his colleagues looked at existing data from scientific literature as well as data on antibiotic use and resistance collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Armed with these data, they applied concepts usually reserved for more traditional ecological issues, such as how non-native species invade an ecosystem, to identify the conditions that enable antibiotic-resistant bacteria to successfully colonize in humans.

The data they gathered highlight the pathways antibiotic-resistant bacteria use to move between food animals and humans. By applying basic ecological principles—essentially looking at the data with the perspective of how species move, reproduce, survive and interact—Koch and his colleagues can help organize what scientists know to better monitor, understand and manage the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“This highly detailed view into the transmission patterns and lifestyles of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is revealing new insights for controlling their spread,” Koch said. “The approach of combining ecological theory with genomic data could lead to new strategies for controlling antibiotic resistance.”

The next step of this research will be to get a “microbe’s eye view” of the environmental factors and biological interactions of the bacteria, which will include studying samples of resistant bacteria throughout the food-production chain. They also plan to look at person-to-person transmission of other types of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

This study and the studies that follow are aimed to help scientists find new ways of combating antibiotic resistance beyond just developing more and stronger antibiotics. Those alternative approaches could include implementing more efficient hygienic measures that target specific antibiotic-resistant strains or strengthening the human microbiome so it is better able to keep the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in check.

“Melding ecological theory with increasingly prevalent genomic data on antibiotic resistance has the potential to revolutionize how we monitor and manage antibiotic resistance,” Koch said. “It may also give us powerful new tools for slowing the spread of antibiotic resistance.”

Koch and Hungate also collaborated with Lance Price, director of the Center for Microbiomics and Human Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff and a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University.

Read the article in FEE.

Antibiotic-resistance pathways
Pathways of potential contamination into animals and humans. Illustration by Victor Leshyk

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Marielle de la Fuente was tired.

She’d spent hours the previous day dancing—line dancing, square dancing, two-stepping—any kind of dance in which a shout of “yeehaw!” was appropriate when the music ended. And that was only Tuesday. On Thursday she was interviewing folk singer and storyteller Tony Norris and Friday she’d learn the ins and outs of a local country radio station.

Oh, and she did all of it on camera in a language that’s not her first.

De la Fuente is one of almost 40 college students from the Netherlands who came to Northern Arizona University for an intensive video workshop. For 14 years a cohort of Dutch media students have come for what they now officially call The Flagstaff Experience—three weeks of brainstorming ideas, setting up interviews, shooting and editing video and doing live shots, all of which culminate in an hourlong video magazine show that is broadcast live.

“I feel at home here after just one week,” said de la Fuente, whose on-air segment was about cowboy entertainment. “Everyone is so welcoming. It makes it easy and exciting as we’re doing all the work.”

Coming to America

Paul Helford, a lecturer in the School of Communication and director of the NHTV Netherlands Video Workshop, gave one reason NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences in Breda, the Netherlands, embraced the partnership with a university 5,000 miles away—NAU’s three-camera high-definition television studio.

There are other good reasons—proximity to the Grand Canyon, southern California, Las Vegas and other places allow the students to experience different aspects of American culture; already-established relationships between the universities, expertise in the material. But the studio is a big deal, Helford said. Few universities have a professional-quality TV studio that’s available during the summer months. Thanks to an agreement between NAU-TV and the School of Communication, NAU has that.

Breda students in studio
Students from NHTV work on producing their “From Coward to Cowboy” show.

The program has stayed about the same since its first year, Helford said, with NAU professors teaching classes on the technical skills and helping them hone ideas and set up their interviews. The students live on campus and go to classes; Bob Reynolds teaches them how to use NAU’s equipment, Dale Hoskins and now Brian Rackham teach writing and announcing for TV, and Todd Birch is the studio teacher.

In addition, 10 students worked the workshop, providing writing and editing help, going along for the ride (and to provide on-site help) when the students do their field pieces and providing the college social experience that often doesn’t differ from continent to continent. Students from Breda University do similar workshops in Bournemouth, England, and Hilversum, the Netherlands.

Those are the official reasons. The students’ reasons are a bit more fun.

“Going to America has been a dream of mine ever since I was a child,” Dylan Ijsselstein said. “It was such a good opportunity I felt like I had to take it.”

Neill Baas and Marieke Peters echoed Ijsselstein; for all their lives they’ve dreamed of coming to the United States. Peters chose the NHTV program in large part because of the Flagstaff workshop. She’s also sticking around for a couple of weeks to explore the California coast, Yosemite National Park and Las Vegas.

“I really love the American people,” she said. “They’re all so nice.”

Discovering the ins and outs of Northern Arizona

The students divided into teams of three, with each student picking a primary task—on-air talent, producer and editor/shooter—though all the students did a little bit of everything throughout the workshop. Each team did a segment that fits into one of three chunks of the show: Artizona, From Coward to Cowboy and Arizona from Above.

Faculty members were there to teach, guide, direct and answer questions, but the work of conceiving and producing the hourlong show falls squarely on the students’ shoulders. They spent much of the first week learning the equipment, practicing using a teleprompter and planning their field shoots. A few teams actually went out and shot during the first week, including going to the First Friday Art Walk.

The second week they all split up, heading to artists’ homes and studios, music venues, the Lowell Observatory, the Snowbowl and other known and lesser known northern Arizona landmarks.

Baas’ team not only shot their story in the field, they camped one night at Babbitt Ranch. He didn’t love the camping part, but he called it part of the

Breda student parkour
NHTV Timo Appels tries his hand at parkour during a segment on “Artizona.”

American experience.

“It’s a real ranch with real cowboys,” he said. “We’re talking to them about what you need to do or be to be a cowboy, hoping to gain insight into what cowboys do for a living.”

Baas was the editor and cameraman for his team, learning much of that here in Flagstaff. At NHTV the students study in the international media and entertainment management program. Although many of the students have some video shooting and editing experience, the program in Breda does not focus on production. Here at NAU they have three weeks of video production immersion. By day two the students are in the field, doing stories about the NAU campus that serve as templates for their video story packages.

The camera work was much easier for Peters, who owns a production company. She has not, however, filmed the creation of cowboy boots before. Her team did a segment on how cowboys dress, so they talked to artisans who made boots, hats and even saddles.

“At first I was not so interested in the subject, but now I’m really into it,” she said a week and a half into the workshop. “It’s something different, something we don’t have in the Netherlands.”

They also explored other aspects of northern Arizona. The group went on field trips during the weekend, going to Slide Rock, Sedona, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, in addition to hanging out with the student workers and experiencing Flagstaff nightlife.

“I think the weekends are the most fun,” Baas said.

Marieke Peters-Breda workshop
NHTV Breda student Marieke Peters practices on camera during production of “From Coward to Cowboy.”

Finishing touches

The final week of the workshop was an entirely different experience. The students edited stories, filled in information gaps, put their segments together and practiced. Student workers were on call for shifts in the wee hours of the morning, as Helford knew the Dutch students would be up until 3 or 4 a.m. putting pieces together. On Tuesday, 48 hours before the big day, they started run-throughs and story reviews, then went back to editing and revising as they realized what worked and what didn’t.

Wednesday was much the same, though with less editing and more practicing. On Thursday, each program got a run-through an hour before its scheduled time, and then each group put on its 20-minute live show, broadcast to anyone interested in watching, including an excited group of family and friends in the Netherlands.

That was a long day.

On Friday the group watched the full show together. There were critiques, but not then; Helford said the group viewing is a chance to appreciate how hard the students worked for the past three weeks. The hourlong program included stories an entertainment venues in Flagstaff, the small but enthusiastic parkour community, local restaurants, hiking trails and sunsets. One crew even flew in a small plane to get the true Arizona from above experience.

The 38 students ribbed the students on-screen, laughed at the Arizonaisms that didn’t quite translate into Dutch and cheered and clapped as each segment came to an end.

It was a satisfying close to an exhausting and exhilarating three weeks, which translated into 11 credit hours. De la Fuente said her parents and boyfriend tuned in back home and gave her rave reviews.

“We all didn’t have much experience at all, and we all came out of here and are skilled,” said de la Fuente, who in addition to her cowboy entertainment segment co-anchored the “From Coward to Cowboy” show with Peters. “We all changed from doing this.”

Watch Artizona, From Coward to Cowboy and Arizona from Above.