User:JPearce
Jan Pearce, Professor of Computer and Information Science, Berea College (KY)
Dr. Jan Pearce is a professor at Berea College, a liberal arts work college which admits only undergraduate students whose families are economically disadvantaged. Berea awards each admitted student a four-year full-tuition scholarship. With an emphasis on service, Berea College was the first coeducational and interracial college in the South and remains among the most racially diverse private liberal arts colleges in the United States. Berea currently enrolls 1,600 students from 40 states and 60 countries.
Dr. Pearce served as the Director/Program Chair of the Computer Science Program from 1992 through 2012., founding the major in Computer and Information Science in 2007. She served as the innagural chair of the division which houses the Computer Science program from 2011 through 2016. She is happy to have seen these terms of service through so she can refocus more of her attention on teaching and research.
Dr. Pearce's utilizes highly active pedagogic practices such as Process Oriented Guided Learning (POGIL) in her teaching which has ranged across the entire CS curriculum, but her most recent teaching has been in CS0, CS1, CS2, and Computational Complexity. Her scholarly interests have ranged from computational applied mathematics to humanitarian robotics to computer science education.
When not computing, Dr. Pearce teaches, performs, and enjoys a wide variety of types of social dance types. She has performed with the Lexington Vintage Dance performing troupe for a decade and a half, worked as a dance extra with the Kentucky Ballet Theatre on a number of occasions, and has appeared in several historical films and documentaries. She has also co-organized and co-led four dance focused international courses which have taught students Argentine Tango. She also enjoys hiking and cooking.
