FAYETTEVILLE – Heather Griffiths almost missed out on becoming a professor.
“I worked two or three jobs at a time to pay for college,” she recalled in an interview this year. “I didn’t think I could afford grad school.”
Luckily, the sociology major found her way into a stipend-supported graduate program and kept on studying.
“I knew that it would not be easy to make it through graduate school, and there were no guarantees, but I was willing to take a gamble because I had come to love higher education and I placed a high value on the freedom to pursue what interested me,” Griffiths recalled. “By the time I had finished my first year, teaching at a university was my number-one career goal.”
She has reached that calling at Fayetteville State University, where she teaches everyone from early-college high schoolers to graduate students. Griffiths’ classes are known for connecting sociology to contemporary issues, with classroom debates that are grounded in scholarly work but centered on real-time events.
With research interests that range from social movements to pop culture to systems of control, she has plenty of ripped-from-the-headlines material to choose from.
“I bring in the real world as much as possible,” she said. “That means, for example, following the conflict in Syria throughout a semester, bringing in Fulbright students for guest lectures, and encouraging students to become familiar with global social issues through research and debate.”
Griffiths has also been a leader on FSU’s faculty in exploring the potential of hybrid courses, where students review course material online and spend class time on deeper engagement with the professor.
Her redesign of a Sociology 210 course a few years ago led to better student performance; it also offered a more flexible style of teaching to accommodate students from very different circumstances.
“The hybrid format makes it easier to attend class for students trying to work around a work or childcare schedule,” she wrote in a reflection on the experience. “Students in my classes can review lecture content multiple times.”
That’s especially valuable at a campus like Fayetteville State, where many students are adult and part-time learners, or active-duty military trying to work a bachelor’s degree into an already busy life.
Serving those nontraditional students more effectively is a key part of the University system’s strategy for expanding access, and teachers like Griffiths are leading the way.
“Took her class online,” one student wrote. “It is a little tough, but she is SOOO helpful. If you need anything she is very readily available and is very nice. I would recommend her class to anyone.”1
Even with all of her teaching duties, Griffiths found time to work on a novel experiment in open-source class materials, contributing to multiple editions of a sociology textbook that’s available free to students across the country.
That kind of practical innovation is a hallmark of Dr. Griffiths’ approach. It’s one reason she is so popular Fayetteville State – and also received an Excellence in Teaching Award this year from the Board of Governors that oversees the University of North Carolina system.2
1http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1003821.
2https://www.northcarolina.edu/content/Heather-M-Griffiths-0.
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