COVINGTON, Ga.—Blink once, and you might miss Hosanna Fletcher.
The 2024 Civic Engagement Award winner is always on the go. In the past year, she’s coordinated a field trip for Newton County high school students to see an Atlanta Shakespeare Company production on the Newton Campus, participated in International Education Week planning and activities, and overseen her students volunteering at various community organizations such as mentoring young students at the county housing authority, volunteering with the local food pantry, and assisting in community cleanup efforts. She’s also the faculty co-advisor for the Newton campus Earth Club and the service-oriented Circle K program on campus—the collegiate version of the Kiwanis Club.
These are just a few of the projects she’s worked on—while teaching her classes.
All the activities dovetail into her sociology courses, helping students see how their coursework can be applied in their communities. Fletcher is one of the leaders in the campus-wide Academic Community Engagement (ACE) program, and sees the value in this method of teaching college students. ACE is a high-impact teaching practice unique to the Newton Campus and connects Newton Campus classroom academics with community and county partners to help the students understand — and in some cases, address — community needs and issues, such as voter education, literacy, criminal justice and mental health and health disparities.
“We are helping students understand their own communities,” she said. “From the very beginning of our course, we are looking at how our community, government and nonprofits intersect.”
Fletcher received her bachelor’s at the University of Georgia, but both her master’s in sociology and public health at Tulane University.
“We moved to Georgia in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina,” the New Jersey native said. She had been a program coordinator, working in outreach and education at Tulane University, before evacuating first to Houston, and then to Covington, to be close to her husband’s family.
While working for a nonprofit leadership group and then the local county government, teaching for Georgia Piedmont Technical College—and a stint as both a health columnist and publisher for The Covington News-- Fletcher started as an adjunct professor teaching sociology on the Newton Campus in 2010. She became a limited term instructor at the college in 2018—just as the ACE program was launched. In 2021, she became full-time faculty, splitting her time between Newton, Clarkston and online.
In 2023, Fletcher added CETLOE faculty associate for High Impact Teaching practices (HIPS) to her workload. “We are charged with working on ways in which CETLOE can support the two main areas of the Strategic Plan: Blueprint to 2033 than include HIPs: Student Success 2.0 and Beyond College to Career,” she said. “I am especially passionate about service-learning/community-based learning and collaborative assignments and am currently focusing Core Curriculum (PC) classes.”
Both the ACE program on the Newton Campus and the HIPS CETLOE post check all the boxes for Fletcher.
“This is the way I’ve always wanted to teach,” she said. “I enjoy getting my students to better understand their own community and its concerns, while seeing how their curriculum is connected to them.”
She continues to broaden her curriculum focus with an exploration into Virtual Exchange, first in the fall 2023 and again with a new international partner in Fall of 2024. “There’s no better way to learn about your own community than to introduce it to someone else,” she said.