Dr. Stephen Dunnivant is currently the Dean of Business, Industry, and Technology at Tallahassee Community College. He has been involved in business and higher education for over 30 years, served on economic development task forces and national organizations to further entrepreneurship, and is regularly invited to speak at national conferences on systemic change and organizational development. He taught middle school and then worked at Gulf Coast State College for over 17 years. He has also written several books such as Miracle of the White Leaves and his latest, The Herd: How to Leverage the Absolute Power of Organizational Culture.
He is an incredibly smart and multifaceted individual, with a fascinating history and richly varied accomplishments. But what drew me to interview him wasn’’d let you know, if it was close he would point out how it could have been polished, and if it wasn’t good he would tell you why it wasn’t and give advice on how you could do better in the future. This was in an eLearning class, and was one of the only times I felt connected to a professor I had never met. I later found out that this was during a very turbulent time in his life, but he still made sure his commitment to the students didn’t suffer.
The following consists of a few small samples of my interview with Dr. Dunnivant, which have been condensed and edited slightly to fit this post. The full interview can be watched in the video below. The interview was more rushed than my other interviews, and had to be pieced together from multiple sessions , but I urge anyone with the time to give it a listen.
What made Stephen Dunnivant want to teach?
So what made you want to become a teacher?
I always wanted to teach, but while I was working on my undergraduate degree I also worked in a men’s clothing store to pay for my education. I had this employee named Jenny who died of an overdose. This was one of those epiphany moments. I had talked to her for three hours in the stock room, and told her ‘these guys don’t care about you. To them you’re like a car or a suit, a possession.’ A week later she was dead. The drug dealers has gotten to her, she was too caught up in the drug culture. Her parents wanted me to be a pallbearer, and as I was looking down in her grave I thought ‘I always wanted to teach, and if I’m going to do something I need to do it now.’ So I became a middle school teacher. So I really got into education to help those students who were, like me, stuck in that cycle of poverty and violence.
Bringing technology to the middle school classroom.
I taught middle school for three years, and I loved my kid. I got involved in technology in the classroom, and got the students using digital multimedia for their reports.
What year was this?
1990. A colleague and I built something called ‘Book Builder’. We had IBMs. We had students using video clips, animations, and text, you know multimedia reports. He submitted them to the history fair and got disqualified because they weren’t on paper. So we wrote this book called mastering new media and portfolio development in the year 2000, published by McGraw Hill.
It’s fascinating to think that you were disqualified for something that a few years later you would have won an award for.
Yeah buddy we were so far ahead of our time. They were doing black and white stacks in HyperCard on early McIntosh systems. But our kids had text, video, graphics… It was phenomenal, but we got fried for it.
Moving into Instructional Design at Gulf Coast
So what was your next step?
I was getting towards finishing my Masters and a position opened up for an instructional designer at Gulf Coast and I applied for it. The principals had saw what I did with technology and they liked it, so my job became helping to integrate technology into the class room at the college. I taught other teachers to make a classroom like I had. So it ended up working out for me.
Conclusion
About the Author
Samuel Lane Lourcey
Student - Spring 2018
