Dr. Peaches Hash is no stranger to App State. Before joining the English Department as an Assistant Professor in 2024, Dr. Hash received her doctorate in educational leadership from App State in 2020, as well as her M.A. in English and B.A. in English, Secondary Education from App State. By high school, Dr. Hash had decided to become an English teacher, despite her desire to be an art teacher when she was younger. After being told that it would be more difficult to find a job as an art teacher, Dr. Hash began pursuing a career as an English teacher and after graduating with her undergraduate degree, began teaching high school English. While looking for terminal degree programs, she saw that App State offered one of the only expressive arts graduate certificates in the country. The expressive arts graduate certificate gave Dr. Hash purpose as for how to incorporate artmaking into the classroom and shaped her research goals from that point forward.
“I felt like I was trusted to design what I was passionate about and execute it.”
While in the EdD program at App State, Dr. Hash completed a dissertation in practice which involved her work as a lecturer in the English Department and involved a research study on using arts-based multimodal components with her Rhetoric & Composition students. Rather than a traditional dissertation, Dr. Hash completed several articles for journals she selected and submitted them for publication. Dr. Hash’s current research is mostly geared toward Rhetoric & Composition, since that was the majority of the subject matter she has taught. Some of her most recent projects include an article soon to be published by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) on using the arts to teach, as well as a book chapter co-written with four students from a 3000-level seminar within the Honors College.
During the Fall 2024 semester, Dr. Hash has been teaching RC 1000 and 2001 Honors, as well as an honors seminar for first-year students called Art as a Way of Knowing. Dr. Hash also is an instructor for ENG 3900, the internship for English Secondary Education majors. Dr. Hash considers her teaching style to be very student-centered, with a focus on peer discussion and less amount of time spent lecturing. In many of her classes, she brings her art cart so students have the opportunity to create with multiple methods and uniquely express their voices without remaining restricted to alphabetic text. In the future, she intends to branch out beyond her fully themed arts-based courses, instead of one theme for students all semester. Dr. Hash says that she appreciates the autonomy and leadership options which she has had at App State both as a lecturer and her current position. Dr. Hash says, “I felt like I was trusted to design what I was passionate about and execute it.”
There are many aspects of Boone that Dr. Hash appreciates, having lived twice in the area and married a Boone local. The large number of events that people can attend to experience different cultural representations is one of her favorite aspects, especially events at the Schaefer Center and the Turchin Center. She especially loves the live performances that can be found around Boone and on App State’s campus, such as the on-campus performance of Carrie the Musical which she saw last semester. Dr. Hash loves that she can easily be part of the community without having a long commute or staying only within the department she works in.
Written by Grace Buckner
