October 2025 Volume 9 Issue 3

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Hello Nashville State!

We’re bringing back the Basadur Profile — a working style survey that shows how you individually approach problem solving and innovation.

• Not a personality test (not Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, etc.)
• Identifies whether you lean toward generating ideas, conceptualizing, optimizing, or implementing
• Results are plotted on a graph for each person. When team members are grouped together, the graphs reveal how the team fits within the overall innovation process—highlighting strengths, gaps, and collaboration styles.

Action:

• Complete the Basadur Profile by October 1 (instructions below).
• Skip if you’ve taken it in the last 6–9 months.
• Retake if it’s been a year or more.

What’s next:
Beginning in October, supervisors will be able to schedule a session with me and their team to review results together. These conversations will show how individual styles combine at the team level, spark discussion about collaboration, and help identify opportunities to strengthen innovation.

You are invited to take the Profile from Basadur Applied Creativity. Please use the following directions to create an account and take the Profile.

1. Click on the following link to get started:
   https://basadurprofile.com/invitation/accept/?key=DSMXBXJM
2. Upon reaching the invitation page, you will be prompted to join our team: Nashville State CC F2025
3. Click Accept and Continue.
4. You will be asked to log in or create a new account.
5. Once your account has been created or you have signed in, you will be prompted to complete the assessment(s). That’s it!

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Human Resources Update

By Connie Daniel, Senior Administrative Assistant, Human Resources

October 2025

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Nashville State’s newest employees! New Hires
NAME	TITLE	DEPARTMENT
Nicole Baines	Sr. Administrative Associate	School of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
Regina Gilbert	Assistant Director	Office of Financial Aid
Alexzandria Johnson	Financial Aid Technical Clerk	Southeast Campus
Cameron Johnson	Laboratory Assistant	Clarksville Campus
Jonathan Washington	Student Services Specialist III	North Davidson Campus
Jonathan Willey	Admissions and Records Clerk	Office of Admissions and Records

Please join us in congratulating Nashville State’s employees who are in a new role! New Roles
NAME	TITLE	DEPARTMENT
Alexander Daniel	Director, Industrial Process Control Technology	School of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
Sandra Timberlake	Student Services Specialist I	Southeast Campus
Jeremy Wright	Financial Aid Counselor	Office of Financial Aid

Please join us in saying farewell to this NSCC employees! Separations
NAME	TITLE	DEPARTMENT
Erin M. Black	Student Services Specialist III	North Davidson Campus
Paul Brennan	Director, Culinary Arts	School of Business & Professional Studies
Jennifer Byrd	Director, Financial Aid	Office of Student Affairs  Enrollment Management

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What do Kevin Wilson, Lisa Marie Presley, and Malcolm Gladwell have in common? Their works are part of the new Libby collection that Nashville State is participating in with other TennShare colleges. This allows us to have a wide variety of books for you to peruse, both ebooks and audiobooks. The collection covers both fiction and nonfiction, popular and academic. And member libraries are adding titles every day!

To create your NSCC Libby account:

1. Visit the NSCC Library A-Z Database list and find and click “Libby”.
   1. Or go to https://nscc.libguides.com/az/databases?q=Libby
2. Click “Sign in with my card”.
3. Select Nashville State from the list of libraries (it may show up as Tenn-Share Academic)
4. Click “Next” and start browsing!

Prefer using your phone? Just download the Libby app from your app store and follow the steps 2-4.

If you have any questions or need help getting started, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the library staff!

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There have been several staff changes over the past year, so we wanted to do a re-introduction to our office staff.

Keri LaPrairie – Interim Director
Regina Gilbert – Assistant Director, Scholarships, Outreach, and Compliance
Laura Lifsey – Loan Coordinator
Jasema Wordlaw – Scholarship Coordinator (TN Promise and Externals)
J. Michelle Tolbert – Scholarship Coordinator (TN Reconnect and Institutional)
Lisa Shaw – Scholarship Coordinator (Lottery and Foundation)
Lyle Jones – DE & FWS Coordinator
Cory Brunson – Counselor (A-K)
Open position – Counselor (L-Z)
Jeremy Wright – Counselor, Extended Campuses
Kendred Laws – Technical Clerk
Alexzandria Johnson – Technical Clerk
Gregory Pagani – Temp employee

We look forward to continuing to support our front-facing offices and our students. As we strive to improve processes and offered trainings, we encourage you to reach out with feedback. Also, I would like to say a final farewell to this wonderful school that has been my home and family for the last eight years. I will miss working here and am glad that I will be able to still support the NSCC staff and students in my new role. I can’t wait to see all of the good things still to come through all of the hard work and excellent ideas.

I will start at THEC on November 3^rd as the Senior Director of State Aid Programs (over TN Reconnect, TN Promise, TCAT Reconnect, and TSAA).

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We’re thrilled to launch an exciting expansion of our Mini-Grants initiative, supporting projects that advance Vision 2030, our data targets and biennial priorities, and the LEADS core values! 

Full-time faculty and staff are invited to apply for up to $1,500 per project to bring creative ideas to life. Funds may support projects such as: guest speakers, life-skills workshops, specialty supplies, field trips, clubs, campus projects, and more. (Grant funds may not be used for certain expenses. See details in the link below.)

Awardees will submit a brief report upon project completion. Grant Application and more information can be found here: https://www.nsccf.org/fsgrants  

Questions? Contact Jordan Weinstein at jordan.weinstein@nscc.edu

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On any random day, lots of stuff can happen to remind me I’m no longer a groovy hep cat.  But I didn’t expect one of those happenings to happen at Guitar Center.  I went in to buy a small practice amp, as my stage amps aren’t really practical for not offending the neighbors.  I just need something relatively small so I can make a relatively small racket.  The salesperson, a young girl about the age of many of our students, showed me some amps and was really hyping up using Bluetooth with this or that amp and saying, “you really need the app to get all the features out of this amp!”  I finally said, “I just want something with knobs I can turn. I don’t want to use Bluetooth and an app.” 

She gave me a look that translated as “OK Gramps, don’t burst a blood vessel,” and then directed me to some small, basically crappy, amps that just had knobs, no Bluetooth, no apps. 

I had the feeling that technology was heading out to sea without me, and I was left stranded on the barren beach of Old and in the Way.  It’s not like I don’t embrace technological advances in music. I’ve been recording on a computer for years (well, since it became basically the only option).  But it never feels fluid to me. It never feels as organic and analog as pressing “record” on a tape recorder.  It doesn’t feel – and I cringe at using this word – artistic. 

Really, this need to utilize a different technology to get the benefit of another technology speaks to something that makes me feel disconnected from younger people, but also makes me concerned about becoming disconnected, both for me and humans as a species, from the very things that make us human.   I don’t know; maybe I’ve just watched The Matrix and read Fahrenheit 451 one too many times.

This all brings me around to my visit to Eric Richardson’s Digital Audio Production class.  Eric’s students are learning to record using Pro Tools, which is basically the standard for recording studios.  One danger with a digital audio workstations (DAW) like Protools is that it is easy to become overwhelmed with the technology side of it and lose sight of the music part of it.  It’s easy to become overwhelmed with parameters and options and plug ins and amp simulations and on and on.  And it is very, very easy to just Google settings for a compressor or an EQ and slap those settings on a musical track and – and this is the point – not really need to relate to the music with those things stuck on the sides of our head: our ears.

This temptation to slap on a template, generated by someone else, can outweigh the loss of touch with the creative process.  And the sneaky thing about it is that it feels like you’re doing work.  You’re Googling and adjusting things and et cetera, and it’s easy to spend hours lost in that ecosystem of technology, rather than spending hours in the world of creating – and listening.

So, when I visited Eric’s class, the first thing that stood out to me is that his students are learning how to be artists.  Eric makes sure they understand the analog equivalents to the digital tools they are using.  He makes sure they understand what a reverb send and return is.  He helps them visualize what the signal path looks like, rather than having them just use a template or go through a bunch of steps to create something without really understanding what’s underneath it.  

Eric also shared the wisdom and practicality of experience with his students in a very humble way.  He discussed the issue of recording with effects and how to get around that, and he provided practical examples of how effects can be used, from more obvious, integral, sounds like The Edge’s guitar arrangements, to the subtlety of utilizing two reverbs to create one overall reverb effect.  As is so often the case when I visit a class, I wanted to take the class. 

Big picture, with these insights and fundamental tools, Eric was laying the foundation not for technology to be the master, but for creativity to be the master (and to master creatively – there’s some silly wordplay right there for the recording students).   Eric is teaching his students to be artists at the recording desk – to learn skills that aren’t easy to replace with more technology.

From a teaching perspective, a part of the class that I really loved was the focus on it feeling like a lab, and it struck me how much more I could do with in my classes in terms of creating this lab-type feel.  Eric’s students were exposed to a concept, and then they were provided with some raw material to manipulate using that concept.  Finally, they discussed what happened and what they observed.  Although students weren’t creating hypotheses and running experiments, they were being set up to effectively do that on their own.  It was a fantastic example of active learning, and it immediately got me thinking about how to more consistently structure the active learning I use in class by thinking about it through the lens of it being a lab. 

Visiting classes is one of my favorite experiences, and doing so always gives me new things to think about and try in my own teaching.   If you haven’t visited a class recently, I encourage you to give it a go. 

As for the practice amp, I’ve decided to get the one with Bluetooth and an app.  I might even order it online.     

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Greetings Nashville State!

Here’s the October photos:

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