Office and People Directory

Sarah Andriano

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Tara Arneson

What are your hobbies?

Snowboarding, mountain biking, knitting

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Michael Atwood

Biography

Atwood serves as an educational leader and consultant to students, families, teachers, administrators, and other staff to develop and broaden skills, knowledge, and experience in the area of information technology.

Distinctions & Awards

Certified Google Educator – Level one. Certified Vermont Agency of Education Technology Integration Specialist since 2020.

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Erika Austin

Biography

Erika Austin is a Digital Marketing Consultant specializing in SEO, Advertising and Analytics with 15 years of developing data-driven digital marketing strategies and campaigns. Erika has been working with agencies and other marketers to improve their skills and offer a new data-driven perspective on their marketing efforts.

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Leslie Averill

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Kel Bachus

Biography

Kel is an author and veteran of the video game industry; they’ve worked on everything from titles like Elder Scrolls Online, to mobile games to the last game ever made for the Atari Jaguar. Working in game development as both a designer and writer while publishing in genre fiction led to teaching with a very story-forward focus. In 2022, Kel created Champlain’s Interactive Narrative major to meet the increasing need for narrative specialists in the current market.

Champlain provided the perfect opportunity to create not only cutting edge curriculum for story creators, but to work on issues of equity and justice in this sometimes problematic field. Kel’s interest is in radically inclusive spaces and decolonized processes; they work with students on a range of projects in their own studios, often with a justice focus.

Kel founded Rad Magpie, a Vermont nonprofit supporting underrepresented developers, and runs a summer studio for students working on independent projects and starting their own companies.

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Phillip Bailey

Biography

Courses Taught: Interpersonal Communication

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

The Daily Stoic: Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Favorite Quote

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

—Peter Drucker

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Wendy Bailey

Biography

Teaching for over 20 years in the Information Technology field. Degrees include BA, MA, Graduate Certificate.

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Gary Baker

Biography

Dr. Gary A. Baker has a passion for teaching. For over 30 years, he’s been working to guide students toward successful career choices and successful lives. His own scholarly expertise lies in experimental social psychology. He enjoys interacting with students inside and outside the classroom. He likes introducing students to the study of psychology because students gain a practical knowledge of themselves and others that serve them well throughout their lives. He feels that the students who are most successful in college are those who seek an “education”, not just a degree. In addition to teaching psychology, Dr. Baker worked for nine years at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Medical College of Georgia conducting research on addictions and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Professional & Scholastic Affiliation

• American Psychology—Law Society
• Association for Psychological Science
• The Society for Personality & Social Psychology

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Kari Banas

Biography

Kari Banas grew up in Massachusetts and then lived in Rhode Island with her husband and three boys until her whole family made the wonderful move to Vermont in 2012. They had been camping in VT for many years and once they moved never looked back. She has a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts from Adelphi University in New York and loves to dance. She joined Champlain College in 2018 as a Compass Student Services Representative and has been with Student Accounts and Billing for over a year now. You will find her most days rain/snow or shine, walking all over campus during her lunch as she loves to see and engage with our students.

What are your hobbies?

Dancing, walking all over campus

Favorite local eateries and things to do in Vermont:

Any coffee shop that can make a coconut decaf latte

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Jonathan Banfill

Biography

Dr. Jonathan Banfill is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where he also directs the Global Studies Minor and the Freeman Foundation Asia Grant. Jonathan’s academic background is in Comparative and International Education, where he holds a PhD from UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. He also holds an MA in Comparative International Politics from American University in Washington, D.C. and a BA in Comparative History from University of Washington, Seattle.

Jonathan’s research and pedagogical practice is engaged in creating interdisciplinary interconnections between new trends in the humanities, social research on global and urban issues, and creative practices from art and design, via place-based and experiential education. He has a long-term interest in thinking about these issues specifically within the context of a transnational Asia-Pacific, but is expanding in more directions since relocating to Vermont. At Champlain, this means creating courses and pedagogical spaces that can combine students’ professional knowledge with a humanistic perspective that can address future changes and global challenges. Jonathan has lived, worked, and taught in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Beijing, Belfast, Pyongyang, Mexico City, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Tokyo.

Jonathan is a graduate of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and training program funded by the Mellon Foundation that brings together humanities scholars, architects, and urban planners to study 21st century issues in cities in the Asia Pacific. He also served as a research and teaching fellow for the program and at cityLAB, an urban research think tank in the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design. More recently Jonathan is a co-founder of the Urban Humanities Network, which is supporting a new generation of Urban Humanities scholars and practitioners around the world.

At Champlain, Jonathan is Primary Investigator for a Champlain College subward grant that is part of a larger Vermont EPSCoR proposal organized by The Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont. This project, called The Study of Online, Collective Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), examines social narratives using Big Data and computational tools. Champlain College’s project focuses on the way that the soundscape has changed in Vermont and how Vermonters have talked about those changes over the last 150 years. Jonathan is a contributing faculty member for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement (DHAG) grant that will be used to build infrastructure and contribute to faculty’s professional development for Digital Humanities tools. Finally he is a contributing faculty member to an ongoing multi-media research project funded by the Council of Independent Colleges Humanities Research for the Public Good grant that is investigating the history of Urban Renewal in the city of Burlington.

Jonathan is presently helping develop the new major in Digital Humanities at Champain that will start in fall 2024.

Publications & Abstracts

Urban Humanities Pedagogy (2016) 

Favorite Quote

“If a scholar stays only in one place, then he or she will know no more than one song, their mind poor and pathetic. He ought to travel widely, observe how people live and how things work, understand customs and cultures across regions, learn of mountains, waters, and meteorology (cosmology), in order to extend their knowhow. This is how scholars are benefited from their experiences.”

—Hu Yuan (993-1059), Northern Song Dynasty Educator speaking about what we would now call interdisciplinary education. I am a descendent of Hu and try to put his ideas into practice in my teaching. Original Chinese quote translated by Dr. Weiling Deng.

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Phylise Banner

Biography

Phylise Banner is a learning experience designer with more than 25 years of vision, action, and leadership experience in transformational learning and development approaches.

A pioneer in online learning, Phylise focuses her explorations and research on the synergy between the evolution of educational theories and technologies. The gemstones she treasures most in her career portfolio are the relationships she has built with the global network of talented colleagues she interacts with throughout industry and academia.

Phylise holds a BA in Information Visualization from New York University and an MSEd from Nova Southeastern University. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), certified Learning Environment Architect (CLEA), Adobe Education Leader (ALE), and Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. Her most recent book, “The Language of Learning,” is available from XML Press.

Her hobbies include general aviation (she co-pilots a 1968 Piper Cherokee), fire-torch enameling, performance storytelling, playing the theremin, and learning to play the accordion. She’s also the proud owner of a 1967 Amphicar.

What are your hobbies?

General aviation, fire-torch enameling, performance storytelling, music, baking

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Steven Barefoot

Biography

In his current role as the associate director for value-based care programs, Dr. Barefoot (Steve) is responsible for the clinical integrity of value-based care programs and ensuring the validity of clinical performance measures used in those programs. In addition, he has primary responsibility for data analysis that supports the design and implementation of these programs across the United States. This involves managing, merging, and interpreting data from wide-ranging information platforms. The platforms range from data-rich legacy systems to the most current social collaboration platforms.

In the early part of his career, Steve developed his clinical experience delivering patient care in his private practice, as part of an HMO dental clinic, and via a mobile dentistry program serving mostly Medicaid schoolchildren. He also has worked with other volunteers to deliver dental care in rural communities in Honduras.

His interest in technology and analytics lead him along a separate career path where he was a consultant and certified instructor in IBM-Domino technologies. In that role he developed collaborative, company-wide applications to manage workflow processes for a range of Fortune 500 companies and taught advanced courses in systems administration and application development. During this time, he was a National Solutions Director for an international, Chicago-based information technology consulting company with over 2,000 employees. In terms of analytics, Steve has experience modeling market penetration for new communication products in the wireless industry and has utilized unsupervised machine learning to perform cluster analyses to risk stratify patients.

His clinical background combined with has experience in analysis and developing sophisticated business applications provides a broad platform for teaching classes at Champlain College Online.

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Anjali Barnick

Biography

Dr. Barnick has worked in a variety of educational areas and her main focus is that each student have a successful experience. Learning is about exploring different perspectives and growing as an individual and she hopes to be a part of that process.

Distinctions & Awards

Faculty award from Michael Zemany

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Scott Barrett

Biography

Scott Barrett is an alumnus of Champlain College who is delighted to be pursuing his passion of teaching. He worked at Ubisoft Montréal for 5 years in a variety of roles, including as a network programmer, as a gameplay programmer, and as a tools programmer. He has worked on teams as small as under a dozen people to as large as several hundred people. He has experience with both Unity and with proprietary game engines.

Scott’s teaching philosophy centers around helping students achieve their goals by working with them collaboratively and with honesty. He teaches physics, networking, and game engine courses, and he has a particular interest in low-level and systems programming. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Science in Computer Science at the University of Vermont part-time while teaching at Champlain College full-time.

Distinctions & Awards

Awarded a gift grant by Activision for educational work at Champlain

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

Practical Creativity by Raph Koster

An excellent talk for game developers of any kind, and for anyone working in any creative field. Includes practical advice on how to be creative, and also includes a different way of looking at what it means for different works to share a genre.

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