Associate Dean for Liberal Education Advancement and Development (LEAD)
Arun John is a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Humanities at Austin Community College (ACC). He has taught for more than two decades, joining the ACC Composition and Literary Studies Department in 2007. Arun is now ACC’s Associate Dean for Liberal Education Advancement and Development (LEAD), a program that helps students find deeper meaning in general education courses through High Impact Practices (HIPs) such as undergraduate research, service-learning, and collaborative projects. His current work centers on the Character Education Initiative (CEI), a multi-year project supported by Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character.
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.”