Professor of General Studies, Student Development
Dra. Laura Cortes Franco is an Associate Professor in the Student Development Department at Austin Community College (ACC), where she teaches Learning Frameworks. With a background in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and counseling, her work centers on understanding and supporting human development in educational and organizational settings. She is passionate about helping students recognize how their choices, habits, and character influence not only their academic success, but also the people they are becoming. Through her work in character education, she hopes to help students translate an understanding of character into intentional action.
How has your community college teaching experience shaped your character over your career?
Other than a few years spent teaching and working in university systems, my entire teaching career has been centered at the community college — a most rewarding and enriching experience for me, both as an instructor and as a human being. The experiences my students bring into my classroom, and my interactions with them, have shaped the way I think about what getting an education means. For me, being in the classroom is about constant growth; I would not want to teach if I had to do the same thing over and over from semester to semester. To combat the inertia that accompanies a job such as ours, the character virtue that has most shaped me as an educator is wonder. I have learned that evoking wonder in the classroom is the primary vehicle through which our students can attempt to comprehend the world and the meaning of the education they are pursuing. Wonder does not happen often, but that does not mean we should stop trying to evoke it. My students, in fact, seem more open to experiencing wonder than people my own age. I, therefore, owe a great debt to the students who have passed in and out of my classroom over the years: they have made me want to try harder, to center their experiences, and, in the words of Walt Whitman, to sometimes “look up in perfect silence at the stars.”