Coworkers
One of the reasons I love working at ACU is the rich community that surrounds me from faculty to support staff. It is truly the people at ACU that are the aspect of this job that I value the most.

Art + Design Faculty
Outside of teaching, it is an amazing pleasure to serve in the department of Art + Design.  Through my roles as Assistant Chair and Interim Department Chair, I have had amazing opportunities to connect with each member of the department and build many lifetime friendships.  Despite my other appointments, Art + Design will alway be my “home” at the university.  It is my primary community at ACU, the crux of my professional identity as a faculty member, and my safe space. This is because of the people I work with, who have been incredibly supportive and encouraging during my toughest moments at ACU.

Co-Teaching
One of the most meaningful teaching experiences for me has come through the opportunity to co-teach over a dozen classes during my time here at ACU.  I cannot think of a better experience for young faculty members than having the opportunity to be paired in the classroom with other teachers.  Through my co-teaching experiences, I have learned classroom management skills, better teaching and planning strategies, information from fields far outside my own discipline, grading techniques, instructional technologies and so much more.  But the most important thing that I have gleaned from this experience is great friendships with people that I might not otherwise have had the opportunity to work with so closely.

Cornerstone Direction
Taking on the mantle of Director of Cornerstone has probably required the most collaboration of anything with which I have been associated during my time at ACU.  Through this role, I regularly work with a dozen spotlight speakers, more than thirty instructors, designers in the Learning Studio, workers in facilities, those within the First Year Program and Admissions, advisors, and administrators in the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and many more programs. I value these partnerships and have been richly blessed personally and professionally through regular meetings with those extended members of the Cornerstone team.

Cornerstone Advisory Council
Another experience that has been invaluable to me has been participation in the community of Cornerstone teachers, which I now have the blessing of directing.  When I started at ACU, the idea of teaching Cornerstone was thrilling, yet also frightening.  It had content that I was relatively comfortable with, yet the translation of that content into the classroom setting posed innumerable challenges. In my first year, I was able to pull together a group of other new Cornerstone teachers who met weekly to share lesson plans, review Spotlight presentations, and strategize on assignments.  However, we soon realized that the situation largely felt like the blind leading the blind.  To remedy this, we brought in a troop of more seasoned Cornerstone faculty who freely shared ideas and resources, and most importantly gave us moral support.  From that point forward, I felt empowered and energized in a way that I had not experienced before.  Today, I continue to meet with these other teachers on a weekly basis and they have created the bedrock of my professional and academic support.

Academic and Scholarly Collaboration
Collaboration at ACU is amazingly easy. Faculty share very diverse interests and are anxious to include others in their passions.  The faculty member that I have worked the most closely with in pursuing academic and scholarly projects is Nil Santana.  Dr. Santana and I first began working together in 2014, after recognizing a shared passion for Design Thinking.  Over the next two years, we worked with many others at the university to try to create a broader context for discussions about Design Thinking take place, including: Stephen Johnson, John Weaver, Jason Morris, Kyle Dickson, Hope Martin, Darren Wilson, and many others.  Through our collaborations, we developed an Honors Colloquium, entitled “Think Wrong,” which we co-taught together in the spring of 2016, and a large-scale design challenge that we led for Cornerstone in the fall of 2016.  Out of those projects, I developed my own research project,  “Integrating Art Educator Identities as Artist, Researcher, and Teacher through Design Thinking at the Christian University” and together we are still working on plans for a Center for Creative Inquiry at the university.

Conferences have been another place where I have had many opportunities to collaborate with faculty, not only from ACU, but from other institutions as well.  For the past three years, I have participated in the Christian Scholars Conference and have presented on joint panels with scholars from Lubbock Christian University, Lipscomb University, Harding University, and Pepperdine University.