Cheshire, Leeson Honored with Awards

Two Pierpont Community & Technical College of Fairmont State University faculty members were honored at the recent Academic Awards Banquet.

Nancy Cheshire, Professor of Early Childhood, has been named the recipient of the sixth annual Paul E. Edwards Award for Teaching Excellence. Adjunct faculty member Loretta Leeson received the Rousseau-Wolfe Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Award. These awards are made possible through gifts made in support of faculty development to the Fairmont State Foundation, Inc.

Each year the Faculty Development Committee recognizes a Pierpont C&TC faculty member who devotes an inordinate amount of time and energy to both professional and student development by bestowing the Paul E. Edwards Award for Teaching Excellence, which is named in honor of Dr. Paul E. Edwards, former provost for the community college.

Nancy Jane Cheshire has been a member of the Fairmont State faculty since 1998. In addition to her teaching duties, she serves as the Early Childhood Program Coordinator and Director of the Fairmont State Laboratory Preschool.

Cheshire is actively involved in many early childhood professional organizations. She represented West Virginia on the Southern Early Childhood Association (SECA) Board of Directors for seven years. She is currently on the SECA Editorial Advisory Committee. She is a member of the state governing board of the West Virginia Association for Young Children (WVAYC) and the state Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialist (ACDS) Council. She is a state approved ACDS instructor. She has presented many early childhood workshops at local, state and national conferences, as well as serving as key note speaker at early childhood meetings. She has served on several state early childhood committees. She has authored articles published in the West Virginia Early Childhood Provider Quarterly; co-authored "Join the Global Family," a curriculum resource guide developed by the Southern Early Childhood Association; and served as a member of the curriculum writing team for the United Methodist Publishing House.

Before coming to Fairmont State, Cheshire was the first Executive Director of Lasting Impressions Child Development Center located at the FBI Complex in Clarksburg. She planned and implemented the start-up of the center. For 11 years, she also served as the first director/teacher at the Bridgeport United Methodist Preschool. She and her husband, David Burr Cheshire, reside in Bridgeport and are the parents of four sons, David, Robert, Edward and Michael.

Adjunct faculty members help to deliver higher education both on campus and throughout the college's 13-county service area. The Rousseau-Wolfe Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Award is named in honor of Roger Rousseau and Marilyn Wolfe, two very dedicated former community college employees.

Lori Leeson has been teaching for Fairmont State since 1992. She started teaching at the Gaston Caperton Center in Clarksburg and has continued to teach developmental or college level math classes at either the Caperton Center or on main campus ever since.

"As Fairmont State begins to revisit adjunct expectations, Lori Leeson is certainly one whose behavior and work ethic we need to model for the establishment of such standards," said Tim Oxley, Assistant Vice President for Academic Services.

Leeson is dedicated to her students and teaches with passion. She utilized WebCT, an online course delivery system, when it was first released and always updates her classes using all the recent software and technology available for instruction. She is always available to students; she holds extensive office hours and works patiently with students before and after class. Her lesson plans are well prepared, and she is always willing to share worksheets she has personally written with her colleagues. She is concerned about her students and their learning, continually assessing her teaching and revising her approaches in an effort to reach more students.