Interim Director of the Crown Center for Teaching; Associate Professor & Chair, Music; ACM Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow, Office of the Dean of the Faculty

Phone: (719) 389-6558 
Email: rbanagale@coloradocollege.edu

Ryan Raul Bañagale is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Colorado College. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University and his research explores the realm of Arrangement Studies, having applied such approaches to a variety of American music subjects and genres. He is on the editorial board of the Gershwin Critical Edition, "Open Access Musicology," and serves as Digital and Multimedia Editor for the "Journal of the American Musicological Society." Ryan is the former Director of Performing Arts at CC. In this faculty administrator role he amplified the role of the arts in the academic mission of the college, supporting the collaborative and creative impulses of the campus and community. Between the endeavors of the academic arts departments, the innovative co-curricular student groups, and the expansive programming of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, he facilitated the cross-disciplinary connections that remain an essential component of the liberal arts experience.

Director of Mentoring Alliance Program; Associate Professor & Chair, Film & Media Studies

Phone: (719) 389-6890
Email: skrzych@coloradocollege.edu

Scott’s areas of teaching and research concern psychoanalytic theory, film theory, popular culture, and political media. His first book, Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria, offers the first book-length study of contemporary right-wing documentaries, identifying in the films an acute strand of hysterical posturing endemic to U.S. conservativism more broadly. In its hysterical mode, conservative media emphasizes form over content, relies on the spectacle of debate to avoid substantive dialogue, mimics the aesthetic devices of its opponents, reduces complex political issues to moral dichotomies, and relies on excessive displays of opinion to produce so much mediated "noise" as to drown out alternative perspectives or viewpoints. Though often derided for its reliance on nonsense or hyperbole, Scott argues, conservative media marshals incoherence as an aesthetic and rhetorical weapon meant to bolster the political status quo by confusing those audiences who come into its orbit.

His next book project examines issues of racial capitalism, financial speculation, realism, and psychoanalytic theory, and is tentatively titled, Derivative Desires: Cinema and Psychoanalysis in the Financial Era. Along with Todd McGowan, Scott co-organized and hosted the first two meetings of the LACK conference.

Crown Lead Instructional Coach; Associate Professor & Chair, Education Department; Ray O. Professor of Exemplary Teaching in the Liberal Arts

Phone: (719) 389-7146
Email: kvaltierra@coloradocollege.edu

Tina Valtierra is an Associate Professor and Chair of Education at Colorado College and Crown faculty center's inaugural master teacher. Dr. Valtierra spent over 15 years as a K-12 classroom teacher, instructional coach, and educational consultant. Her expertise is in literacy, curriculum, and instruction, emphasizing anti-racist, diversity, equity, and inclusive (ADEI) studies. Her research examines urban teacher preparation, focusing on promoting teacher reflection, identity, and thrival. She is the author of  Teach and Thrive: Wisdom from an Urban Teachers Career Narrative, co-author of Schooling Multicultural Teachers: A Guide to Program Assessment and Professional Development, and a two-time recipient of the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) distinguished article award for her scholarship on teacher identity formation. Her upcoming book, Tools to Thrive: Priming Early Career Teachers to Flourish in an Era of Attrition, will be published in 2024 by Teachers College Press. Her courses, such as Youth Organizing for Social Change, Critical Multicultural Education, Culturally Sustaining Teaching, and Inclusive Pedagogies in Literacy, Curriculum & Instruction, inform her research and course syllabuses.

Crown Lead Instructional Coach; W.M. Keck Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, A.E. and Ethel Irene Carlton Professor in the Social Sciences, Associate Professor of Southwest Studies 

Phone: (719) 389-6647
Email: sguerra@coloradocollege.edu

Crown Student Assistant

Lia grew up in Evanston, Illinois where she loved to run, train in her local circus troop and eat the local ice cream shop. After high school she took a gap year and worked in Seattle then traveled to New Zealand. At Colorado College she studies sociology with a passion for education. During her free time she likes to ski and run. She is eager to work for the Crown Center to connect with new people across the CC community and spread her passion for education. 

Crown Student Assistant

Aidan (he/him, ’24) is an Economics major and Education minor at CC. In Fall 2022, he attended CC’s TREE (Teaching and Research in Environmental Education) Semester, which sparked a passion for the theory and practice of education. Aidan is enthusiastic about teaching, learning, research, the block plan, and experiential education. In his free time, Aidan loves getting outdoors to go hiking, skiing, and camping.