History comes alive with Dr. Graves

by Caroline Basile, sports editor

 

For Dr. Laura Graves, the days do anything but slow down.

With teaching and being an academic advisor, she continues to help students in many different ways.

“I teach American history and American Indian courses,” said Dr. Graves, professor of American History at SPC. “That’s my field [American Indian studies] and what I studied in graduate school, and I get to teach a course geared specifically toward what I studied. It’s a really neat course, and we do a lot of different things, like looking at an event from different perspectives.”

Dr. Graves has been at SPC since 1993. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University in anthropology and museum science.

“I was a museum curator for years until I went back to get my PhD in American Indian history and political science,” Dr. Graves said. “I left the museum world and became a college professor. I was at a number of museums. The largest was the University of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff, and that is where I chose to attend graduate school.”

Dr. Graves looks to improve on her classes by participating in Title V, a government grant with the purpose of helping faculty reorganize and develop their courses and bring in different teaching methods and tools.

“This summer project will let me reorganize both of my history courses with new lectures and new approaches,” Graves said. “I am extremely excited about that, because it will give me a chance to talk about things that I don’t normally talk about and give me some new approaches. It’s just starting fresh and doing something new.”

Dr. Graves also will begin recording her lectures, starting with her fall 2007 classes, and providing them to students through Podcasts on SPC’s website.

“By making my lectures available online,” Dr. Graves added, “if a student misses class, they will be able to log on and get what they missed. Then, for my online classes, they will also be able to hear the lectures, and I think those will improve those classes. I’m hoping that the Podcast lectures will improve learning with Internet classes and make them more appealing.”

In addition to teaching history at SPC, Dr. Graves is also the official scorekeeper for the Texan and Lady Texans basketball teams.

“I keep the official game book for the men’s and women’s basketball games,” Dr. Graves explains. “I enjoy that a lot. I never played sports in school and wasn’t very athletic. I like the observation part of it. Being the official scorekeeper lets me learn a lot about basketball, and I have learned an awful lot about players, coaches, and group dynamics. It’s a very interesting process to watch, not just the game, but the strategy around the game.”

Dr. Graves added that while she was in school, there were not that many opportunities for women in athletics.

“When I went to school, it was before there was any kind of equity in women’s sports,” she said. “Women’s sports had absolutely no support. There wasn’t a lot of encouragement for girls to play sports either.”

Dr. Graves also is a very active academic advisor, taking on undecided majors and assisting them with everything they need.

“My advice to them is: Don’t rush into a major!” Graves said. “There is no reason to rush into it. You still have to have the same requirements, and you’ve got plenty of time to figure out what you want to do. Eventually, there will be that moment when you realize ‘This is it. This is what I want to do.’”

Before she began her career as a college professor, Dr. Graves spent several years as a museum curator.

“I always thought I would end up teaching,” she said. “I loved the museum work. I really enjoyed it, and it was an amazing career. But I always knew that while I was doing that, I would go back and get my PhD and teach. I was supposed to be here for two years and then was supposed to go somewhere else. But I’ve been here almost 14 years now.”

Dr. Graves said she appreciates the small, tight-knit community and enjoys living in the West Texas area.

“I like the people that I work with,” Graves added. “I am given an incredible amount of support and freedom to do what I do. Levelland isn’t the prettiest place in the world, but it is a nice place to live. I’ve lived in cities with millions of people in them, but I like the small-town atmosphere.”

Besides the small-town attitude of the West Texas area, Dr. Graves also enjoys the small class sizes at SPC, where she can work more closely with her students.

“I love teaching history, and I love being here at SPC,” Graves said. “I like the small classes. I have taught classes with 400 students in them, and I can do those, but they are not nearly as rewarding as a class with two dozen students. I think that I am a better teacher if I have a handful of students and I can work with closer with them than 400, where you don’t know their names.

“If the financial bottom line is the thing that makes decisions,” Graves added, “then you will have an education that is based on an economic approach. Ours at SPC is based on what is good for the students. So where we may have a class with four students, those four students are going to get an incredible opportunity to learn compared to a class of 400.”