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DUNWOODY, Ga.—Twenty years ago, Tamra Ortgies-Young took a leap of faith, pivoting from higher education administration to teaching. It’s a decision she’s never regretted.
The 2024 recipient of the Cole Fellow Award started at Perimeter College as an academic advisor on the former Lawrenceville Campus before receiving her first teaching position at the college. That job as a political science instructor has led to more than two decades of engaging students in understanding civic engagement and the responsibilities of being an active citizen of the United States.
Her path to teaching wasn’t a straight line, working in various roles in higher education administration, financial aid and admissions in Iowa and Illinois before landing at Perimeter College.
“I was working in Arizona at a nonprofit and my husband was offered a transfer to Atlanta,” Ortgies-Young said. We decided to go for it. That year was pivotal. Besides the move to the South, she also lost her mother, and she decided on a major career change.
“I had been offered a job in administration in continuing education at Southern Polytechnic State University. I remember it because it was the same day my mother passed away. After serious reflection, I turned the job down.”
Instead, she took a part-time job at Perimeter College as an academic advisor, with the intent to use it as a launching pad to teaching. “I was in my 40s and it was a complete career change from the administrative side of higher education to the teaching side—it was a big gamble, but it’s what I really thought I was supposed to do.”
Within a year she was hired as an adjunct political science professor, traveling back and forth to both the Lawrenceville and Dunwoody Campuses. That position morphed into a full-time teaching position on the Dunwoody Campus. As the daughter and granddaughter of teachers, Ortgies-Young already knew some of the challenges that educators faced—and she had taught at few continuing education courses. But she wasn’t quite prepared for that first semester as a college professor, she said.
“It was rough. I knew my students were hazing me because they knew I was green,” she said, looking back at that first semester, “I went to a seminar with Debi Moon and Pamela Moolenaar-Wirsey (former Center for Teaching Administrators and GPC professors) “on how to control a classroom and engage students.”
After that course, I was fearless,” she said. She credits the support and encouragement of her colleagues for helping her get her bearings in the classroom and directing her to other helpful teaching seminars and workshops.
A University System of Georgia Governor’s Teaching Fellow appointment helped cement her confidence in the classroom, she said. “It was a seminal career moment, and I would recommend that experience to any of my colleagues,” she said. “I learned how to teach in ways that jived with my personality using civic engagement as my ‘hook’ in teaching.”
She continues to be involved in the program as a distinguished faculty workshop leader. She notes that the GTF experience also led to other fellowships in her career including as University System of Georgia SoTL Fellow.
Ortgies-Young’s teaching style is using both civic engagement and developing strong critical thinking skills in her students. She was one of two Perimeter faculty who received the 2022-23 Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Online Education Teaching fellowship. Her emphasis was helping faculty develop courses in critical thinking in the age of misinformation.
“Civic engagement is its' own pedagogy— it’s a logical fit for political science,” she said. “I harness this as a teaching tool to help students become engaged, informed and active citizens. And if students are engaged with citizenship they are also engaged with the course materials, and it’s a double win.
Students in her political science courses also benefit from insight and experiences from her working in assistantships on the federal, state and local level, in both her native state of Iowa, and in Chicago and Boston.
She has used an ‘embedded’ librarian in all her Political Science courses working closely with Georgia State librarian Amy Stalker to help students learn how to research topics by lateral reading, verifying information accuracy, and creating accurate citations without “Googling” their work. Her webquest discussions are weekly mini-research endeavors. Students may spend time analyzing political campaign commercials from a past campaign cycle for content, message and images; or delve into a “significant” U.S. Supreme Court case. Each module is designed to help students reflect and develop critical thinking skills, she said.
“Lately I’ve been working a lot with informational literacy, fact checking and that sort of thing, so our students are better consumers of information, less likely to succumb to misinformation and understand the motivations behind those who spread disinformation.
This semester, she is teaching online courses in American Government and a Perspectives class, called “This Sacred Earth: Politics, Ethics and Nature.” The Perspectives course came out of a seminar she took at the Emory University Piedmont Institute on Teaching Sustainability, she said.
While keeping her students engaged in the classroom is important to Ortgies-Young, she also remains committed to her discipline and profession. Her colleagues have benefitted from her 10-plus years in leadership roles in the Georgia Political Science Association (she was president in 2016) and as co-chair of Georgia State’s Perspectives theme proposals and assessment committee. Ortgies-Young served as a chairman of Perimeter’s Faculty Awards committee for two years and is currently university Faculty Affairs Committee representative in history and political science.