Kenneth Kunz, Professor of Automotive Technology
As an automotive professor, I always believed education in a community college is a place for growth for people of all ages and levels. It is a place with a positive atmosphere where one can grow academically and socially. While imparting automotive knowledge to my students, I view myself as a facilitator of learning, more than just a teacher imparting automotive knowledge. My role in this environment is to provide learning opportunities for students to discover and develop themselves.
As facilitators of learning at Waubonsee Community College, we are here to help students discover their full potential and expose them to the many opportunities that our disciplines have to offer. Many students come into a field of study with little or no idea of what opportunities are available after leaving Waubonsee. Our job as educators is to expose our students to the entire arena that our field of study has to offer so that our students can reach their goals and dreams. These opportunities are not limited to lectures or formal means of study, but also through learning engagements that allow students to grow, discover, and set new goals. In the Career Tech area, often these opportunities to grow are evidenced through extracurricular activities such as field trips, skills competitions, job opportunities, past students coming to speak to current students, and other opportunities that allow exposure to our field of study and may also test a student's knowledge of the field.
Within Waubonsee’s Automotive Technology Program, the college provides an ideal learning environment for students to learn technical information, skills, professionalism, and positive self-esteem, which will ultimately help them pursue their own interests and dreams. Ultimately, my job as a facilitator is to prepare, encourage, and motivate our students to be successful in today's world, which are not only just words that are written in Waubonsee's new mission statement but modeled and lived by every day in our classrooms and labs.
