My time as Dean of TCNJ’s School of the Arts and Communication is the absolute highlight of my higher ed career. My journey with TCNJ started in early 2022 when I was invited to the college to lead a program on inclusive education, and then the next week to give a keynote address “How Good Teaching Can Change the World” at your Inaugural Excellence in Teaching & Learning Summit. I was impressed that winter with the knowledgeable and passionate educators I met. I also took note that TCNJ was investing to promote the core values that give my professional life purpose: transformational teaching and learning in a diverse and inclusive educational environment.
Leading our School of the Arts and Communication is deeply meaningful and rewarding work for me. These are the fields that require us to attend closely to the expression of others– whether their words or stories or scholarly arguments, their images or designs or music. When we engage these expressions, we are giving our own consciousness over to the knowledge, experience and perspectives of others. We can feel empathy for our fellow travelers in this life who may be from other nations or cultural backgrounds, people who may have more or less money than us, people with different and deeply held political and religious convictions. Anyone who has watched a Greek tragedy in horror or sung along to an early American hymn or African American spiritual knows how we can connect with others across the very ages. The TCNJ Arts Comm education builds open-mindedness and open-heartedness, and that deepens and elevates our humanity. When we create and communicate through any of these mediums, we also contribute our unique voices to the human enterprise of meaning making. As multifaceted as our disciplines are in the School of the Arts and Communication, we hold these aims and outcomes in common. Each of our departments gives us knowledge and methodologies for developing nuanced understandings of the world, for envisioning new possibilities, for collaborating with others to solve problems and be citizens in a pluralistic democracy.
Here, in the School of the Arts and Communication, we offer an array of academic programs in the arts, communication, design, emerging technologies, media, music and more that will allow students to fuse their own futures. We welcome our students, faculty, visiting artists and especially our neighbors in Ewing and Trenton to experience the arts and express their talents through TCNJ Center for the Arts and our incredible facilities. We are a place for creativity, communication, connections and careers.
Whether you are a current student, prospective student, parent or alumnus, I invite you to discover the possibilities of expression within our school. This is a vibrant community of scholars and makers, creators and communicators, educators and performers, artists and musicians, thinkers and doers. I look forward to connecting with you!
Sincerely,
Dr. Pamela Barnett