Dr. Justus Ortega, Kinesiology Department

We have a Biomechanics research lab skills course and in that course, students come into the lab. They learn the skills in a little bit more of a formal setting. But then what we do is we take the skills, like fall risk assessments, where they're learning about balance, motor control, proprioception — the feelings and their hands and in their feets — the use of vision for balance. They're even learning the exercises that you would prescribe, which is a big part of our program, what you would do if you have deficiencies in those areas. And then, as we learn those, train, and work together, and we go out into the community to the Health, to the Senior Centers, working with the Humboldt Senior Resource Center, Redwood, the Area 1 Agency on Aging, we'll pretty much go just about anywhere. And the students set it up and they administer all of those assessments to these older adults. And when they do that, they then prescribe those exercises. So it's sort of like that full circle: they learned about proprioception in the classroom, when they took Anatomy or Structural Kinesiology or Exercise Physiology, they learned about all these different pieces n a very formal setting. And then we say this is how you apply it in a way to test and then we go out in the community and they do it.

And then we often go back and we retest the same people, after they've been had a chance to do this. And many times you get the individual who comes and says, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get my testing done. You all helped me so much!" We get the most beautiful letters and when the students start to see that, that's that deep feeling inside. And just the kind of family connectedness. When you go out and work together with, you know, students and faculty and all the different sort of tiers: graduate students, working with undergraduates, and those senior undergraduates/more upperclassmen working with the new undergraduates, you start to create not only sort of a mentorship sort of process, but what you do is you really create a sense of family.

And I don't, I mean, I think anybody in this room could tell you that the Biomechanics Lab and what we do in this particular space is very much like the family who work together. We're a team. We're always, you know, willing to give each other positive as well as constructive or even sometimes we have to give them feedback that sometimes hurts but it's all with the idea that we're growing better as a team. And then we go out we do it and you get all that wonderful feedback it just makes us feel more connected.

You know, often sometimes in the classroom even though we're trying to develop critical thinking skills, until it's really applied like with an actual individual — there's sort of analogy that we use a lot in this lab and you'll see them physically around here — as we/I love puzzles. So for me, like the human body and what we learn and as we go out and observe — it's like it's a puzzle. And the students start to have to really think about: it's not just, oh how do I critically think about this piece of paper that I'm reading, you know, a journal article. It's more like how do I critically think about this actual human that the consequences of my thinking will have an impact? And that provides almost a deeper level of critical thinking than you would get just critically thinking about what someone wrote in a research article. Because there's there's real consequences on the other side of that critical thinking. And when you start to do that, what I noticed with these students, when they start really developing that, then they feel empowered. Because they've not sometimes thought like that before, like "Wow! Me really thinking carefully about what I'm doing with this individual, this older adult, who's maybe 85 years old, it's gonna not only the impact their life." But they go "Wow! I can really have an effect." So they know "This is really powerful experience for me to be able to think like this and have that kind of effect on another person." And then all of a sudden they're like in to it.