Starting this Saturday, KRCU will air three new education specials for fall 2020 from American Public Media's award-winning documentary team, APM Reports. Here's a rundown of each episode, and when you can hear them:
Covid On Campus
The Coronavirus pandemic represents the greatest challenge to American higher education in decades. Some small regional colleges that were already struggling won’t survive. Other schools, large and small, are rethinking how to offer an education while keeping people safe. This program explores how institutions are handling the crisis, and how students are trying to navigate a major disruption in their college years.
Airtime / Saturday, Aug. 29 from 3-4 PM
What The Words Say: Why So Many Kids Don't Understand What They Read
Everyone agrees the goal of reading instruction is for children to understand what they read. The question is: how does a little kid get there? APM Reports continues its series of groundbreaking, award-winning documentaries about reading with a new program about comprehension. Senior correspondent Emily Hanford explores what reading scientists have figured out about how reading comprehension works and why poverty and race can affect a child's reading development. We meet parents who are desperately searching for schools where their children will be taught how to read, and teachers who are learning things they were never taught about how reading comprehension develops.
Airtime / Saturday, Sept. 5 from 3-4 PM
Black At Mizzou: Confronting Race On Campus
In 2015, Lauren Brown left her mostly black neighborhood in Chicago for the University of Missouri. Moving to a predominantly white college was a huge shock, made even more difficult by the racial harassment she faced that fall. That same semester, the campus erupted in protests that made international news after several instances of racial harassment set off a movement led by black students to change the school.
Those protests inspired movements on college campuses across the country, but few of them got as much media coverage as the University of Missouri. News reports seemed to treat the racism that black students endured at Mizzou as an aberration, but Lauren and other black students knew that it wasn't just a recent spate of racist incidents that lead to the student uprisings — it was years and years of them. In this documentary, we learn about the long history of student activism and demands for change that set the stage for the protests at Missouri. The only way to really understand what has changed, and what bound black students together in the fight for change, is to understand what students call "Black Mizzou." Lauren is our guide to this campus within a campus that was fundamental to the 2015 movement at the University of Missouri, to Lauren's decision to ultimately stay and graduate from the school and to holding administrators accountable for change today.
Airtime / Saturday, Sept. 12 from 3-4 PM