Rebecca Shipman Hurst, Seminar Participant

Rebecca Shipman Hurst (rshipman@massasoit.mass.edu) has taught at Massasoit Community College since 1974. She taught a year prior to that in a four-year liberal arts college in Arkansas. She has been the department chair of the Human Services Department since 1976 and has thus always combined teaching with departmental administrative work. In her early years of teaching she was greatly influenced by Carl Rogers and tried to follow his view that the teaching/learning process was relational and individual. She has taught a wide variety of courses, including information-intensive courses and courses that are more process-oriented and promote student skill development. In the early to mid-1990’s she was involved as a Faculty Coordinator in a Title III grant designed to improve teaching and learning at Massasoit. This activity allowed her to work with dozens of faculty members and become familiar with outcomes-based learning and some other valuable educational trends. Several campus-wide initiatives resulted from the Title III grant, such as the Faculty Forum, Classroom Assessment Project, and an outcomes-based learning initiative. Rebecca credits a number of life experiences as helping her to appreciate inclusion/exclusion and diversity on a personal level: her experience growing up in West Virginia, being a step-mother, being an adoptive parent of a Native American daughter, being an individualist feminist, and beginning to slide down the slippery slope toward decrepitude and senility.

Reflections: Spring 2005 | Class Evaluation Form

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