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(Bluefield)—When Dr. Tamara Meade tells her Bluefield State College students to persevere and use their time wisely, she speaks from experience. Meade, Assistant Professor of English & Speech at BSC, is only weeks away from earning the required 18 hrs in Communication from Radford University, maintaining a 4.0 GPA while handling the responsibilities of a full-time faculty member, adjunct faculty member, parent, and graduate student along the way.
“After earning my doctorate, I thought briefly about the possibility of taking a break before returning to grad. school,” she said. “However, a need existed for additional faculty certified to teach speech at Bluefield State, and Dr. (James) Voelker (Dean/School of Arts & Sciences) was so supportive, I enrolled in the master’s/communications program at Radford.” She expressed special appreciation for BSC’s and Voelker’s willingness to arrange her fulltime teaching load to permit her to teach here and take grad. classes at Radford concurrently. The Professional Development program at BSC has helped Meade underwrite the costs associated with her participation in the master’s program at Radford.
“The entire experience has been energizing,” she continued. Meade has already designed a professional communications course for BSC students. “Our students have such devotion to acquiring practical communication skills,” she explained. “Many students here face the same challenges of juggling multiple family, life, and academic responsibilities that I face. The support I’ve received from the College has been invaluable, and I try to provide the same type of encouragement and support for the students in my classes here.”
Meade also conducted in-service sessions and worked as a consultant for Paul D. Camp Community College (Franklin, VA) earlier this semester. “Several studies have identified a tendency in some colleges to produce doctorate-holding faculty who excelled in research, but were not prepared to teach,” she explained. The participants in her sessions completed a questionnaire based on the Faculty Inventory: Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education—a tool developed with support from the American Association for Higher Education, the Education Commission of the States, and the Johnson Foundation, Inc.
April 27, 2005
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