College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

After 31 years at Azusa Pacific, 26 of them as chair of the division of communication arts, then chair of the departments of English and communication, and as department chair of English, Jim Hedges looks back appreciatively at the growth of the university and the department, now numbering in excess of 100 majors, with 15 full-time faculty. Hedges taught some 20 different courses in English and communication, including journalism and advising the student newspaper for five years. For the past 14 years Hedges has developed the children’s literature course and taught it to hundreds of students training to be teachers, including those in the Center for Adult and Professional Studies. Ongoing research includes work being done at the Huntington Library on a novel on Shakespeare’s England and the cathedral schools, and a series of essays on reading some of the “great” poems often assigned in literature courses in high school and college.