Embracing technology early on, professor saw a future in electronic education

Dr. Sandy Breazeale is in her third year as an online faculty member for the graduate counseling program at Liberty University Online. She currently serves as the instructor for Counseling 504 and 507. To learn more about Dr. Breazeale and her credentials, visit her faculty bio page.

Dr. Sandy Breazeale began teaching for LU Online in the fall of 2006 with one course, Counseling 504, and has since added Counseling 507 and a course for the counseling of women.

“I have always loved teaching in the classroom,” Breazeale said. “But now I find the same satisfaction teaching online because I approach both venues in basically the same way.”

Breazeale considers it a privilege to be a part of students’ lives, so she “values students first,” and tries to create an atmosphere of warmth and acceptance without compromising academic excellence and spiritual growth. She credits God for engineering circumstances so that she could be part of the online teaching revolution.

In the mid-’80s Breazeale studied post-master’s counseling and education at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. There she had her first graduate teaching experience in higher education, teaching master’s students counseling theories and group process in theory and lab sections. After completing all her basic course work for her DAED at GMU, she had to abandon the degree program when her husband was transferred to Belgium with the United States Air Force. When he retired in 1989, she started working for the University of South Carolina as an administrator and was dually employed part time teaching undergraduates.

At USC, she began a Ph.D. program in Higher Education Administration while simultaneously completing a Master of Library and Information Science degree with emphasis in online resources and communication in research. Although it was still early in the adoption of online communication, she wrote her dissertation on the social and cultural phenomena of computer-mediated communication. Upon receiving her Ph.D. in 1999, Breazeale was already convinced of the ability to form meaningful social and educational relationships via computer, but not sure how soon it would develop as a credible, mainstream option for higher education.

In 1999, she left USC and founded a private practice in counseling. She also worked as the national intake and screening agent for the International Coaching Federation in the 1990s, giving her additional experience in computer-mediated communication. Breazeale said she is pleased to have the opportunity to begin teaching in higher education again, this time via computer, and hopes to continue for many years to come.
 

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