Making College “Worth It” – Season 1, Episode 8

In this episode, we visit with Susan Hrach, director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and professor of English at Columbus State University, and Ashley Holmes, interim director of Teaching Effectiveness in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education, and associate professor of English at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. Both have written about the spaces that learners embody and interact with during their college studies.

View a transcript of this episode.

Meet our Guests

Ashley J. Holmes is Interim Director of Teaching Effectiveness in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education (CETLOE) and Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition theory and pedagogy, research methods, public and visual rhetoric, writing program administration, and digital writing and production. Holmes served as Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at GSU from 2018-2023. Her recent research explores student writing beyond the university, best practices for curriculum development and program design, and experiential and place-based pedagogies. Holmes’s first book Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies (2016) was published through the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series, and her work has also appeared in College English, Composition Forum, English Journal, Community Literacy Journal, Reflections, Kairos, and Ubiquity, as well as several edited collections. Holmes is the author of Learning on Location: Place-Based Approaches for Diverse Learners in Higher Ed (Routledge, 2023), and she has a forthcoming collection co-edited with Elise Verzosa Hurley called Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (WAC Clearinghouse).

Susan Hrach is Director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. In 2022-23, she served as Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (West Virginia UP, 2021), which was recognized with the 2022 Silver Nautilus Book Award for Social Sciences and Education. She is a member of the International Coaching Federation and provides executive coaching as an Associate Certified Coach within and outside of higher education, incorporating embodied strategies to support mental and physical wellbeing.

Episode Credits

This episode is co-hosted by Jessie L. Moore, Director of Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning, and Nolan Schultheis, a first-year student at Elon University, studying Psychology with an interest in law. Nolan Schultheis edited the episode. Making College “Worth It” is produced by Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning.

Episode art was created by Nolan Schultheis and Jennie Goforth, managing editor for the Center for Engaged Learning.

Funky Percussions is by Denys Kyshchuk (@audiocoffeemusic) – https://www.audiocoffee.net/. Soft Beat is by ComaStudio.

Learn More about Research Featured in this Episode

Learning on Location

Receive a 20% discount on Learning on Location at the Routledge site, using the discount code AFL04.

Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning | West Virginia University Press (wvupressonline.com)

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