Saturday U comes to Jackson March 8

Area residents have the opportunity to go back to college for a day, with three professors from the University of Wyoming lecturing Saturday, March 8, in Jackson for the spring term of Saturday University -- UW’s free one-day college education program.

Obamacare, contemporary artist prints in the American West and solar homes are topics that will be discussed at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson. The program is free and open to the public.

The half-day of college classes and discussion begins with refreshments at 8:30 a.m., followed by a welcoming address at 8:45 a.m. The guest lectures begin at 9 a.m.

In its sixth year, Saturday U is a collaborative program that connects popular UW professors with lifelong learners. Offered six times a year -- twice each in Jackson, Gillette and Sheridan -- Saturday U is sponsored by the university, the UW Foundation and Wyoming Humanities Council, and is presented locally by Central Wyoming College, National Museum of Wildlife Art and Teton County Library Foundation.

Participants may attend one, two or all three lectures in Jackson, plus the final luncheon and roundtable discussion at 12:30 p.m. The program is free and open to the public.

Listed below are program topic descriptions from UW’s representatives:

9-10 a.m. -- “Obamacare: Where Do We Go From Here?” Mary Burman, UW Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing dean. Now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is law, how are matters shaping up, and are more people getting access to medical attention?

Burman has, by necessity, been involved in the ACA’s rollout at several levels. She provides up-to-the-moment insights to the current -- and future -- state of health care reform and ongoing concerns about access to health care, quality and cost.

10:15-11:15 a.m. -- “Make 100 of Them? The Contemporary Artist Print in the American West,” Mark Ritchie, UW Department of Art professor. Ritchie notes that the paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt of the Tetons and other Western landscapes reached the larger American populace through inexpensive works on paper prints.

Those images helped Americans see these places as valuable and helped create the desire and political will to protect “wilderness” as parks. Ritchie, an artist and printmaker, will discuss his own work and how he sees himself as an artist living in the rural West and building on those traditions.

11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. -- “The Solar House, Then and Now,” Anthony Denzer, UW Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering associate professor. Denzer says the term “solar house” usually calls to mind the eccentric, big-windowed architecture of the 1970s. But the solar house was a widely publicized and popular phenomenon in the 1940s and ’50s, when architects and engineers discovered the modern science of solar heating.

“Architects and engineers have successfully used solar energy to reduce utility bills since the 1930s,” Denzer says. “The lessons learned since then have improved and shaped our approach to building even today.”

The spring Saturday U term continues with the next program in Gillette March 29.

For more information, visit the Saturday U website at www.uwyo.edu/saturdayu/[BROKEN LINK].