Q&A: Bill ‘Dr. Skateboard’ Robertson, dean, UTEP College of Health Sciences

The dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso spends a lot of time in his office, and plenty of time on his skateboard.

In some places, he’s better known as Dr. Skateboard. He has used his love of skateboarding to teach and create educational material for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, or STEAM, programs across the country.

“The idea was to reach out to students that were marginalized or not interested in school – to try to do something that envelops youth culture but that’s also interesting, motivating and engaging for young people,” Robertson said.

Robertson, 60, came to UTEP from Santa Fe, N.M., in 2004 with his wife. In March, he was named dean of the College of Health Sciences, which has more than 2,200 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students.

Before that, he worked in administrative roles at the College of Education, including as interim dean and associate dean.

He has a doctorate in multicultural teacher and childhood education from the University of New Mexico and received the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and the 2016 UTEP President’s Meritorious Service Award.

In his office at UTEP’s Health Science and Nursing Center, Robertson has at least a couple of boards in sight and ready to go.

He’s seen the inner parts of campus change from car-covered to what it is today, and occasionally skates around UTEP.

In 2020, Robertson was appointed as a distinguished research fellow at the Lemelson Center of the Smithsonian Institution, where he works with the center’s Innoskate program.

Robertson sat down with El Paso Inc. to discuss learning and teaching, skateboarding and his five university degrees.

Q: How’d you get to UTEP?

I came to UTEP in 2004. I came here after about 10 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I had gotten my degree from the University of New Mexico and was looking for a faculty position. I knew somebody here in the College of Education who sent out a message that they were looking for a new professor.

He sent me a job ad, I got it and read it and I said, it doesn’t look like me. He wrote me back and said take a closer look because it is you. I looked a lot closer, applied, and the best decision that ever happened to me was that I came here.

I was in the College of Education and have moved over here to the College of Health Sciences.

Q: Where does Dr. Skateboard fit into this?

I’m a skateboarder. I started when I was in middle school. I continued to skate, and at one point, I became a middle school teacher. One of the things I had to teach was physical science. Students were not interested in doing the kinds of experiments I was wanting to do and weren’t really that jazzed.

One day I brought my skateboard to show things like motion and forces, and everyone was just riveted. It was a big revelation for a young teacher at the time. Then I started to think, how can I integrate this more into education?

I was trying to appeal to the student who wasn’t that into school, who was probably really bright but wasn’t really challenged in the right way. I was also trying to appeal to educators and adults to not marginalize young students for being creative and enjoying their passions.

For educators, I made videos and books. I’ve developed a series of graphic novels in English and Spanish for young people to set goals in their education.

Q: What has been the response from educators and students?

I’ve got a nice history with it now. I did a lot of live demonstrations and a lot of video and am now doing things like the comic book or a small video game. It’s a nice progression to just offer different ways to connect with people.

The response has been good. It’s certainly something that has resonated with a lot of people locally. I was able to do this in conjunction with EPISD, Socorro and Ysleta ISD, which use many of the materials.

In my work at the College of Education and here at the College of Health Sciences, it sort of broadens the opportunities for people, not just locally.

It’s had a nice audience. The main thing is that it focuses primarily on skateboarding and BMX. Those two sports are everywhere. It’s its own culture in many ways. I can go anywhere if I have my board and make friends. That’s a very welcoming culture and is very strong here in El Paso and Juárez.

Q: What’s your work like here at UTEP? What do you do?

In spring of 2021, I moved over here to become the interim dean in the College of Health Sciences.

In many ways, the college had a tremendous integration into the community. They were doing things related to vaccines and contact-tracing and COVID testing.

I had some friends here. I had been at UTEP long enough to develop relationships with people in the College of Health Sciences. They knew me and could bridge the gap and probably calm the fears of others. Whenever a new administrator comes in, you’re not always sure what’s going to happen.

I had a bit of street cred. They may not have known me as Bill Robertson, an educator, but they knew me as Dr. Skateboard. People knew I was a community-facing educator.

The College of Health Sciences is a very community-facing college. We had something foundational and that was a big part of it.

I think it was the right time for a person like me. I guess sometimes your style matches to what people are looking for. I started as the interim and was chosen as the dean a little over six months ago.

It’s probably the most relevant work I could be doing myself because of the commitment of the people and type of work they do as it relates to health issues around the border.

Q: What’s the state of STEAM education in El Paso, at UTEP and local schools?

What we learned early on is that we needed to be integrative. My work in the College of Education and here in Health Sciences is inherently interdisciplinary.

There’s all sorts of crossover you can do. When you think about where subject matters are in STEAM, they’re all over the place.

It’s something that has foundations in real world applications. That’s always been the key for education that really sticks.

A criticism for many years about university education is that it’s disconnected from the realities of what people live and do. I learned early on that you need to be connected to what people can do. That’s the approach we’ve always taken here at UTEP, or at least for as long as I’ve been here.

As you look out into the community, you have civic organizations, Workforce Solutions, all the school districts, who have STEAM efforts, academies.

It’s not just limited to the content itself; it’s actually putting it in these ways that solve big problems. People are taking on local issues, whether it be water quality, aerospace or health disparities and looking at them from ways that are integrative. The STEAM aspect is very useful and alive and well here.

Q: How’s your fellowship with the Smithsonian going?

It’s been interesting. It’s literally a place where my background as a skateboarder and educator fit really well with what they’re doing. The Lemelson Center has a program called Innoskate, which emphasizes innovation, invention and creativity through skateboarding.

They’ve done it for 14 years and have done it all over the world in these different festivals. It became the educational arm of USA Skateboarding.

Since they’re connected to the Smithsonian, they’re emphasizing, kind of, maker mentalities or things people can do and a way people can create things, and then you can find their application.

Over the past three years, I’ve worked with them on developing curriculum that could be used in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., but also all these sites that are connected to them all across the country.

Q: What’s been the biggest change of how science and STEAM has been taught since you were in school and teaching?

I would say the biggest thing was that it was built on this delivery model where teachers held all the knowledge and students took their learning directly from the teacher. That led to a lot of lower order thinking, where you’d memorize things and give them back to the teacher on an exam.

Whichever side you were on, you probably forgot about it when you walked out the door. You may have learned a lot of content, but I don’t know if you learned how to make connections.

Now in education, people understand that you need to help students make content connections with a context and have conceptual understandings that are deeper and broader.

People learn in different ways, and it’s important to also accept their demonstration of their learning in many different ways. That wasn’t true when I was a kid; there was just one way. It’s one of the things we do a lot better now.

Q: What got you into skateboarding?

I was into sports. I played football, was a wrestler, played baseball, neighborhood basketball. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. When skateboarding showed up, I was a reluctant skater. I remember a friend of mine saying we were going to the store to buy skateboards.

It was something me and my friends in the neighborhood started doing. I had surfed and water skied, so when I started skateboarding, it was fun.

Competitions in skateboarding became really big. I lived about two hours from Virginia Beach, so right away I got involved in skate contests and did well. I had opportunities that a lot of people didn’t.

It was something I was somehow really good at. I just enjoyed it, had fun and had all these great experiences. And then I just kept doing it. I was a professional. I’ve done tours with Got Milk, NBA halftimes. I’ve had quite a disparate career.

UTEP has completely embraced the idea of Dr. Skateboard. This has always been something that has impressed and astonished me. Institutes of higher education are not necessarily always flexible like that with their professors.

Q: What’s the skating culture like in El Paso?

We have a great skateboarding scene that overlaps into Juárez and flows up to Las Cruces. There are lots of great skateboarders in town.

We have the nonprofit, the El Paso Skatepark Association, which has been around since about 2007.

We have a ton of parks, concrete parks, ramp-style parks – 12 to 15 all around the city. Our weather, 300 days of sunshine a year, is a perfect place for skateboarding.

Skateboarding is a relatively less expensive option for athletics. If you have a park and a board, you can go.

There’s always someone I can learn from at the park.

Q: How do you maintain your skateboarding abilities?

Skateboarding has a couple of things that are guaranteed to happen and one of them is that you’re going to fall down. I didn’t have too many injuries that were bad early on. I broke my wrist once and hurt my knee.

I lift weights, swim, do yoga, my diet. I’ve had to change as I’ve gotten older. I’ve also changed my approach to skateboarding as well. There are things you can do as a younger person.

Q: Is UTEP a good campus to skate through?

Before the transformation project with Centennial Plaza, you could drive right through campus. It wasn’t really a pedestrian friendly campus. You were managing yourself with cars, and it wasn’t always in a cooperative way.

Over the years the campus has transformed. People have started to see that skateboarding can be used as a way of transportation around campus. In a pedestrian campus, moving on your bike, skateboard, scooter, walking, however, was a much gentler way.

Q: What’s your unique education history?

My background in college is a little eclectic. I have five degrees. I have a history degree from Duke University. I have a zoology degree from Northern Arizona University. I got a master’s degree from UC Boulder in science education. I got my Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in multicultural teacher and childhood education.

When I got here, I started taking classes in Spanish. I just wanted to take classes, but they told me I had to enroll and become a student, so I did. In 2009 I graduated with a degree in Spanish. Tengo un título en Español, and I became a Miner for life.

Email El Paso Inc. reporter Sara Sanchez at sesanchez@elpasoinc.com or call 915-534-4422.