30th Anniversary History Book

ENVISIONING THE WHOLE INNOVATING and WEAVING the CORE ELEMENTS

President Marsha Glines chats with a student.

Glines had completed her doctorate in higher education administration at Union Institute & University. She also had completed a post- graduate year as a special studies student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She knew how to develop nontraditional curricula and was specifically interested in teaching differently based on brain plasticity — the way students’ brains change over time. of faculty, had taught nontraditional students for most of their careers. Dr. Marsha Glines, the college’s first president, and Dr. Kathryn Jarvis, Beacon’s first dean

She also knew that students’ learning styles vary, with the four primary types of learning defined as visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic or tactile. “We always had a multimodality approach,” said Glines, now the dean of academic student services and a professor at Regis College in Weston, Mass. “Multimodality” refers to the classroom use of visuals, audio, text, and hands-on experience to accommodate the different learning styles of students. The two of them trained the tiny Beacon faculty of four to five full-time instructors and a similar number of part-timers, most from the Leesburg area. Jarvis’ doctorate from Florida State University was in higher education, with a minor in

special education, and she was a speech clinician by training. “So many people looked at these students as ‘special ed,’” recalled Jarvis, who was a faculty member and administrator at Auburn University until she retired in 2015. “They didn’t have a lot of information about the fact that they were young people with special learning needs. Knowing typical development is very important. I did a lot of training about what to expect from a traditional 18-year-old.” Glines created the curriculum for Beacon’s first degree — a bachelor of arts in human services, designed to prepare students “for entry-level positions in helping careers,” Glines said. “When we opened Beacon, it wasn’t fancy,” Glines said. The goal was to make learning

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