(Photo by: Vaughn Wheat)

Welcome to Faculty Friday, our new weekly way to involve faculty and you, the students. Every week, we will be featuring a new faculty member, nominated by you. To kick off the series, let’s introduce Professor Beth Gulley, an English Professor here at JCCC.

Professor Gulley has been teaching at JCCC for over 25 years. In college, Professor Gulley decided to study what she liked, which ended up being English, art and theater classes. When she made it to graduation, she ended up with a degree in English.

“I was thinking, well, I really enjoyed being in class and I really liked my professors at my college. So I thought, well, I want to be like them. That seems like a great life to get to discuss literature with people all the time,” Professor Gulley said.

After applying to be a teaching assistant at UMKC multiple times, she finally got the call that they had a slot for her. That was surprisingly the one year she did not apply for the position.

“My very first class was the best, and I just fell in love with teaching and decided that’s what I wanted to do. The next year, I got hired as an Adjunct Professor at JCCC,” Professor Gulley said.

Professor Gulley said her favorite classes to teach are Creative Writing and COMP II. In COMP II, the class works to read and figure out what short but important texts mean in our world today.

“I think I was blessed to have a lot of great teachers, but I did have an English class when I was a junior. I don’t know how they got their curriculum, but it was called Tragedy, so the whole semester we just read tragedies,” Professor Gulley said. “But every day, at the end of it, like the last five to ten minutes of class, he would read us “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” so we didn’t leave in a really bad mood. It was really memorable and fun,” Professor Gulley said.

Professor Gulley likes to play around with the writing process and breakdown skills while focusing on small pieces. Active learning and group work are heavily practiced in her classroom. Professor Gulley’s spring semester classes are filling up fast. For a fun and active classroom environment, make sure to enroll before all seats are taken.