Blue Ridge Scholars Program continues to thrive under Dr. Nathan Price
Dr. Nathan Price, assistant professor of political science and international affairs, has been actively involved on the Blue Ridge campus and in the surrounding community. Dr. Price received his Ph.D. degree in 2012 from Louisiana State University with a concentration in comparative politics and minor in American politics. He began teaching on the Blue Ridge campus in 2015 and has served as the Coordinator for the Blue Ridge Scholars program since 2018.
The Blue Ridge campus has continued to grow with in-state tuition now offered to students who reside in certain North Carolina and Tennessee Counties. The department is proud to offer a range of courses on the Blue Ridge campus to meet the needs of the surrounding community.
According to Dr. Price, the Blue Ridge Scholars Program, “is a learning community that ties together eight core courses with a course in leadership and service learning projects throughout the community. The courses come from five academic departments: English, mathematics, philosophy, political science, and psychological science.”
Our partner for our first two years was Fannin County Family Connection which is a public-private collaborative that works to address issues such as poverty, substance abuse, child abuse/neglect, and lack of opportunity in our county. We focused on drug and alcohol abuse in our region during our first year. Our students worked at a Teen Maize simulation that teaches the freshmen and sophomores in high school about the consequences of decisions regarding substance abuse, dropping out of school, and teenage sex. Additionally, our students explored these issues in each of their core courses that year, and gave a presentation in Fannin County High School about the effects on our area.
During our second year, we focused heavily on poverty in our region. Our students learned about the issue through working at Family Connection (which has a food bank and even a facility that houses are homeless). Our students also led a food drive on campus and gave a presentation to the community about what they had learned about the issue in their courses and through their service learning projects.
We are partnering with Fannin County schools this year to aid their efforts to promote literacy in accordance with the statewide Get Georgia Reading campaign. Our students have been designing lesson plans and going into the 2nd grade classrooms throughout the district to get students excited about reading.
For more information about Dr. Price and the Blue Ridge campus see below:
https://ung.edu/news/articles/2019/02/blue-ridge-scholars-promote-literacy-in-fannin-county.php
