Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Brian Hooper. I serve as the Dean of Social Sciences at Tallahassee Community College. So I came to FAMU. I was actually a member of the Marching 100. So I did my undergraduate degree there. My major was psychology. Then I went on to Florida State to do a matches in rehabilitation therapy and counseling. And then I went back to FAMU to do a doctorate in a public health. TCC stands for Tallahassee Community College. And I speak to my faculty often in the opening of the semester where I say, we can't take the community part likely because that's where our students come from, whether they're coming for certification, or they're going to be here for two years or less before they transfer to a larger institution, they come from the community. So I think we have to be, as a large stakeholder, of the community, a part of the community invested in the community and concerned for the community. My area is social science and I kind of joke often. I say, well, this is where students come to become citizens. Because the course is that they're taking political science, history, anthropology, you know, it kind of, they're away from the communications and humanities and it's not necessarily the hard sciences that you see in math and science. But this is where you go to become a critical thinker. And I think that's very important. So I try to make that a big part of our missions, particularly in my division, because we have to make students critical thinkers. College, like anything else, is a system. If you don't have any background knowledge in that there's going to be some barriers. And those barriers don't mean that you aren't meant to be there or you don't have the skills or the smarts to be there. That just means you don't know the system. I think the bread and butter of what we do is provide students a place where they can be nurtured and they can grow. If they don't know, they can figure out what they want their next steps to be. And if they do know what they want their next steps to be, well, we can remove some of the barriers and help them get toward that goal. My name is Brian Hooper. I serve as the Dean of Social Sciences at Tyler Has Community College. You're listening to voices that inspire.