Charles Park

Community college is all in the family for Charles Park, an English professor at BCC whose wife is a librarian at Greenfield Community College. Originally from Irvine in southern California, Charles graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a bachelor's degree in speech communications and a master's degree in English. After meeting his wife at church and eventually getting married, they moved to Indiana so that Charles could earn his PhD in American Studies from Purdue University.

"From there, I just kind of went to different places," Charles explains. They first moved to eastern Pennsylvania, where he taught at East Stroudsburg University for a few years. It was a great place to advance his career, Charles says, but he wanted a more permanent, tenure-track position.

"I applied to a lot of different positions throughout the country, but BCC made me a very attractive offer," Charles recalls. "My wife and I drove up here and decided this was a good place for us. We enjoyed the ruralness of it. We fell in love with the area."

That was 10 years ago. Now, Charles and his wife have moved on to Springfield, which helps balance out his and his wife's commutes. But the attraction of the Berkshires that led him here wasn't just the beauty of the physical environment — it was the people.

"BCC was so welcoming and friendly. I clicked right away with a lot of people here," Charles says. "They seemed to have the same ideas, the same goals about education as I did."

Those goals are more than just academic mileposts. They are life skills.

"What we are trying to get students to understand is to think about not only how to write critically and analyze one's own ideas and thoughts, but also how to read critically — to take apart information, see how it works, see what it's trying to do and whether it's doing it well, and assess it," Charles says. "That means thinking about the audience, thinking about who the document is intended for, thinking about how well the author is able to present their case — and what kind of support is needed to make that case. These are soft skills, but they really are critical skills."

Teaching with an eye toward critical thinking skills is a logical progression for Charles, whose background in communications evolved with his education.

"The more I studied communications, the more I enjoyed the rhetorical analysis aspect," he says. "I've always enjoyed reading, I've always enjoyed literature, so that love of rhetorical analysis, coupled with my enjoyment of reading broadly and writing — it just made sense for me to go into English."

Charles credits a creative writing professor at Cal State with helping him get into the master's program there.

"He basically said, 'You need to be an English major.' He guided me along the way," says Charles, who says he learned while working on his master's thesis that he "wasn't truly an English person." That's what led him to the American Studies program at Purdue, which he describes as "very interdisciplinary."

"It allowed me to explore things broadly and take my interests wherever they wanted to go, which is really in cultural studies — studying culture through literature, history and sociology," Charles says.

In the BCC English department, teachers focus on three main components, Charles explains.

"The first and the most visible thing we teach is composition: how to write a college-level essay, which we do in our Comp I and Comp II classes," he says. "The second thing is literary analysis. We expose students to literature that they might have otherwise not been exposed to. We expose them to the process of reading and analyzing and talking and thinking about literature, and what it means to us in our society."

The third thing, Charles continues, is creative writing. "We help students take the stories they have and express them in a way that is not only engaging and entertaining, but also meaningful, for both the writer and the readers."

While many of his students take English to complete their core requirements, others choose English as a major. Though people often associate English majors with teaching, most actually go on to do other things, pursuing careers like law, politics, public policy and business, Charles says. "The skills you need in order to be a good entrepreneur are the same skills you need to be a good English person. To be honest, you can be an English major and go in any direction you want."

When discussing the quality of education at BCC and at community colleges in general, it is evident that Charles is passionate about the subject.

"The quality of education we provide is as good, if not better than, a four-year institution. This idea that we are somehow 'less than' comes from a notion that somehow four-year schools are more selective," he says. "We are an open-access campus, which is part of our mission. Since we don't offer a bachelor's degree, we are often seen as a stepping stone to something better."

But the idea that community colleges are simply junior colleges for people who can't get into or can't afford a four-year school is a misconception, according to Charles, and he is determined to help change it.

People are starting to see us more as a first option, not as a second option, because of the care we put into each student, because of our faculty-to-student ratio, because of our smaller class size. What students get out of BCC might be a lot more than what they get out of a four-year school. And it's not just the cost. It's the attention and the support we provide. Each student matters to us. It's our mandate.

But Charles is careful to note that higher education and community colleges "are at a pivotal moment."

"People are concerned with changing demographics, especially schools like BCC that are located in a rural area declining in population," he says. "One of the things I'm personally interested in is the role a community college can play in revitalizing a community, both economically and in terms of its vitality. I'm researching it on my own and slowly writing about it."

Part of being a community partner is offering equal access to higher education, a topic about which Charles is also passionate.

"Equal access is not just academic. We should make higher education more affordable, if not free," he says. The MassReconnect program, which can help students ages 25 and over earn a degree or certificate for free, "is a good first step towards that goal."

"My role is to make sure that every student who takes my class, whether online or in person, understands that they belong here, that they should be a college student, regardless of the past education they have received or how long it's been since they've been in school," Charles says. He strives to provide students with the confidence they need to be successful, including helping them resolve "whatever anxieties, insecurities or imposter syndromes they may have."

"Once they get a sense that yes, they do belong here, they tend to succeed. They impress themselves at how well they can actually do in college," he says. In his composition classes, for example, he often encounters students who find they not only can do the work, but they enjoy it.

We help them to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of accomplishment that they can do what is being asked of them as a college student.

Nurturing that sense of accomplishment is what Charles calls his favorite part about teaching.

"It's a great feeling when my students have a moment of recognition of themselves as an academic or a scholar — when they realize yes, I can do this."

Sometimes, Charles says, it isn't until years later that he hears these kinds of stories from his students.

"Someone will say, 'I really enjoyed your class — I'm still using what I learned.' Or it might be a book we read that really impacted them in some way," he says.

One of his favorite books to teach is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, which he calls "a very heavy, dense book" that students can relate to and get something new or different out of it. In the end, he says, if he is keeping his students engaged and helping them grow, he is doing his job.

"I love the students here, and I love the mission of the college. I love the community we are serving," he says. "I really enjoy my colleagues and being a part of my division. We have some very dedicated, talented people here who make BCC great — and hopefully I'm being a positive contributor to that."