Susan Hardebeck

Year Hired
1998

Degree
PhD in English Language and Literature - Northern Illinois University 
Master’s in English Language and Literature - Northern Illinois University
Bachelor’s Degree in English - University of Chicago
Associate in Science - McHenry County College

Awards & Recognitions 
2001 Assessment Award
2002 Outstanding Student Organization - College Bowl
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 Student Congress Outstanding Professor Award
2005 KC Outstanding Faculty Award

Student Organizations
Sponsor of Fusion Gay-Straight Alliance

Professional Affiliations
Member of the National Council of Teachers of English

What are your goals as a teacher at Kaskaskia College? My goals as a teacher are to help my students understand that writing is a form of thinking and that through writing, they can discover what they think and that they do have a writing voice, something unique to them. I also want my students to realize that learning can be an activity that feeds their souls, whether it comes in the form of reading an engaging novel or watching a movie that speaks to them. I want them to understand that an art form as young as film shares the same motivations as other older art forms: inspiration (divine or not), communication, and self-expression.

Who inspires you today and why?The person who inspires me the most even today (almost 20 years later) is Professor William Johnson (now retired from Northern Illinois University). I took several literature courses with him, and he directed my dissertation. He was able to make 16th and 17th-century literature seem like it had just been pulled off the printing press for the first time, and he was a big proponent of mixing the silly and the serious, in an effort to help his students discover that they actually enjoyed that dusty, musty old Shakespeare and Milton.