For the good of all: Pearce Center awards faculty and students for commitment to the community

The Pearce Center for Professional Communication awarded five Professional Writing and Communication Awards to faculty and students who have shown exceptional commitment to the community in their work.

The instructor awards celebrate the service-learning efforts of instructors in the Pearce Center’s Service-Learning Faculty Fellows program and Client-Based Program. Instructors are awarded for the best service-learning project design, including the work completed, the execution of the project and the impact of the project on the instructor, students and the community.

The undergraduate awards celebrate the efforts of students in the Pearce Center’s undergraduate internship programs (Pearce Interns and Visual Information Design). They are awarded for exceptional professional communication skills, teamwork, problem solving and client engagement.

This year, the 2025 faculty award was given to Kirk Bingenheimer, a lecturer in the Nieri Department of Construction and Real Estate Development. Bingenheimer is a 2024-2025 Service-Learning Faculty Fellow. For the program project, he developed a two-semester Creative Inquiry course that served Pickens County Habitat for Humanity as a client.

Students in Bingenheimer’s course applied their theoretical knowledge to real-world challenges by planning, executing and evaluating the Clemson Homecoming build. Students secured resources for the build, managed volunteers and participated in on-site construction. After the build, students reflected on their experience, determining more efficient, cost-effective and innovative construction methods for the next Homecoming build.

The 2025 graduate instructor award was given to David Williams, a graduate student in the Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design program. Williams was a 2023-2024 Service-Learning Faculty Fellow and is currently a Client-Based Program instructor. His client-based course worked with a non-profit professional development program that specializes in creating resources on Holocaust history for secondary educators: Echoes and Reflections.

As a part of the course, students collectively researched, scripted, recorded and edited a 20-minute educational podcast on the Holocaust. Williams’ students learned skills in research, rhetorical analysis, argumentative writing and multimodal composition, including skills in audio editing and podcast production.

“When building partnerships with community clients and students, it is important to have reciprocal relationships,” Pearce Center Assistant Director Ashley Fisk explained. “The partnership needs to promote learning through contexts that underlie the social issues the students address. Both David and Kirk’s projects create these reciprocal relationships by having clear lines of accountability and frequent and open communication. They also ensure students understand the reasons why these projects are important.”

The 2025 undergraduate awards were given to Pearce Interns Mary Provost, junior education major, and Kanyn Bloodworth, senior English major, and Visual Information Design (VID) intern Hailey Herzog, junior marketing major.

“It is often difficult to lead your peers, especially when you are new to a team and an organization. Both Mary and Kanyn stepped into their leadership roles and excelled,” Fisk noted. “They both were able to recognize when a team member needed encouragement, when to ask for help and when to follow up with clarification from their clients. These professional communication skills will translate into any career.”

Sarah Costley, program coordinator for the Pearce Center and head of the VID program, praised Herzog’s dedication to her client.

“Even though it was her first semester in this internship, she led the team working with South Carolina Watermedia Society, a local nonprofit that needed help creating a new website,” Costley explained. “She had little experience in website creation or design, but she jumped in fearlessly. Throughout it all, she made adjustments to meet the client’s needs, which often required her to write and alter code on the website — an in-depth and next-level strategy that was above and beyond what was expected.”

The Pearce Center for Professional Communication promotes effective communication as an integral part of the learning process throughout Clemson University undergraduate and graduate education. The Center offers undergraduate client-based internships, professional development for graduate teaching assistants and faculty writing workshops. The Center also offers professional editing services and peer tutoring for Clemson students with visual projects. The Center’s work is thoroughly and consistently interdisciplinary, collaborative and project-based.