The Center for History and Cutlure
"There is a history and culture to everything"
AT TCC's Southeast campus, we have developed an innovative center for students to come explore the rich legacy of sources and material culture that the founders of The Historical Underground have donated and placed out on display for student use. When you visit the CHC, you can work through historical puzzles, read books, observe historical maps, and engage with primary sources related to all aspects of the human experience.
Come visit us on the 3rd floor of SE 06, room 3125A
A Multidisciplinary Faculty and Student Learning Initiative
“Everything has a History and a Culture.”
Executive Summary
The Center for History and Culture is a faculty-driven initiative dedicated to preserving, exploring, and sharing the accumulated history, culture, knowledge, and material heritage of human civilization across all academic disciplines.
The Center is founded on a simple but powerful principle: there is a history and culture to everything.
Every discipline at Tarrant County College emerged through historical processes, cultural developments, intellectual debates, technological innovations, and human experiences. By helping students encounter those histories and cultures directly through books, artifacts, documents, maps, images, objects, and interdisciplinary dialogue, the Center seeks to strengthen student engagement, intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and campus community.
What began as an informal collaboration between two faculty members has evolved into a thriving learning environment containing thousands of books, historical sources, magazines, maps, newspapers, artifacts, educational games, puzzles, photographs, and research materials collected over more than sixteen years of teaching, scholarship, travel, and community engagement, ranging from locations all over the world.
The proposal seeks to formalize and expand this initiative into a permanent interdisciplinary learning center that serves students, faculty, staff, and the broader community.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Center for History and Culture is to foster interdisciplinary learning by interacting with the historical and cultural foundations of human knowledge.
The Center promotes intellectual curiosity, democratic dialogue, mentorship, critical thinking, historical understanding, and cross-disciplinary collaboration through the preservation and use of physical learning materials and educational spaces to create a campus-wide network of interdisciplinary learning environments where students and faculty can explore the historical and cultural dimensions of every field of study while building meaningful intellectual communities.
Guiding Principles
Everything that humans do has a history and culture.
Learning is strengthened through physical engagement with ideas, objects, texts, and sources.
Knowledge grows through dialogue across disciplines.
Students benefit from identifiable, visually-academically appealing spaces that encourage mentorship and intellectual curiosity.
The humanities, sciences, arts, mathematics, and technical disciplines are interconnected rather than isolated.
The Vision
The Center for History and Culture provides a unique opportunity to create a highly visible, low-cost, faculty-driven educational initiative that strengthens student engagement, promotes interdisciplinary collaboration, preserves material culture, and demonstrates the enduring value of human inquiry.
The Center exists because faculty and students built it.
With institutional support, it can become a defining feature of Tarrant County College Southeast Campus and a model for future development across the college system.
The Mission
The mission of the Center for History and Culture is to foster interdisciplinary learning by interacting with the historical and cultural foundations of human knowledge.
The Center promotes intellectual curiosity, democratic dialogue, mentorship, critical thinking, historical understanding, and cross-disciplinary collaboration through the preservation and use of physical learning materials and educational spaces.
The Vision
To create a campus-wide network of interdisciplinary learning environments where students and faculty can explore the historical and cultural dimensions of every field of study while building meaningful intellectual communities.
The Wall of Missing Pieces
A signature feature of the Center is the Wall of Missing Pieces.
Students and faculty work collaboratively on donated historical puzzles, which are then framed and displayed throughout the Center.
Many puzzles arrive with missing pieces.
Rather than hiding these imperfections, the Center embraces them as a metaphor for historical inquiry.
Just as historians reconstruct the past from incomplete evidence, students learn to interpret, question, and imagine the missing pieces of our collective human experience. The wall symbolizes both the limits and possibilities of historical understanding.
Click on the Native Seeds Search image to enter in the Center for History and Cultures Seed Bank and Garden Complex
Click on the Native Seeds Search image to enter in the Center for History and Cultures Seed Bank and Garden Complex
Empowering
Growth Through Knowledge
A Historical Game
3-D Historical Puzzle of Rome
The Faculty Fellows
Our Dedicated Team
Meet our Faculty Fellows at the Center of History and Culture, who each bring a unique expertise and passion to our mission. Together, we explore, preserve, and analyze the material culture from the past that provides understanding for the way we live our lives today.
Bradley J. Borougerdi, Ph.D.
Program Director
Faculty Fellow of History
"Dr. B" is a cultural historian who has taught history courses at TCC for 19 years.
Eric Salas, M.A.
Program Director
Faculty Fellow of History
Eric is a Civil Rights
Mike Downs, M.A.
Program Advisor
Faculty Fellow of History
Mike has been a faculty member at TCC for over two decades. His graduate school training comes from the University of Texas at Arlington, where is also taught history courses for several years and became ABD with his research into the historical figure name John Dee. He is a voracious reader and an avid Star Wars fan.
Teresa Moss, Ph.D
Faculty Fellow of Philosophy
Teresa is excited about being a Faculty Fellow and is looking forward to contributing to the vision of the Center for History and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy and her dissertation area of focus was environmental philosophy, specifically water issues in North Central Texas. She also has a passion for social and political philosophy and the philosophy of education.
Shahzad Nazir, M.A.
Faculty Fellow of Kinesiology
Students refer to Shahzad as “Coach” Nazir. He has been at the Southeast Campus since 2002, but he became a fulltime Instructor in the Kinesiology Department in 2008. He is also a Tarrant County College alumnus. Before starting his career at TCC, Coach Nazir taught every grade level from K-12. He considers it a true blessing to be able to engage with the community in diverse ways here at TCC.
Much of his time away from work is spent with his wife and three blessed children (all boys), who were all infants at the same time! He is fond of saying that "they are a lot of fun!" Prior to becoming a fulltime dad to his three kids, his hobbies included building a children’s library, antiquing/thrifting, traveling to Hot Springs, Ark., or adding to his family's TMNT collection! He has also worked at numerous historical societies helping to save and preserve the history of small towns.
Angel Hidalgo, Ph.D.
Faculty Fellow in Spanish
Our Mission
Parisa Khaghani, M.A.
Faculty Fellow in Biology
Parisa Khaghani is a Biology Instructor at Tarrant County College and a Ph.D. student in Molecular Biology at Texas Woman’s University. She has taught biology at both the secondary and college levels and is passionate about helping students develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the life sciences.
Her interests include molecular and cellular biology, genetics, and cell signaling, and her doctoral research focuses on how genetic changes can affect cell signaling and development.
Mohammad Borougerdi, M.A.
Faculty Fellow in Economics
Get Involved
Angela Inman, M.A.
Faculty Fellow of Drama
Angela Inman, Associate Professor of Drama, is a tenured faculty member who served for many years as the TCC-SE Director of Theatre. Prior to her time at TCC, she was a full-time faculty member for nine years in University of Texas at Arlington's Department of Theatre. In addition, she has worked extensively in professional theatre throughout New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Texas. She holds a M.F.A. in Theatre (Directing) from Baylor University.
Laurie Ertle
Faculty Fellow of Biology
Explore History
Craig Burnside, Ph.D.
Faculty Fellow of Biology
"Thee" Dr. Burnside Was born in San Jose CA and grew up in the NY/NJ area. He earned an A.S. in Business in 1985 from County College of Morris in NJ and a B.S. in Biological Sciences in 1989 from Rutgers University. He & his wife moved to Arlington where he earned a M.S. in Biology in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Quantitative Biology in 1998 from UT Arlington. He then spent a year as a Postdoctoral research fellow at Kansas State University.
Burnside joined the faculty of TCC-SE in 2013. He teaches biology and Human Anatomy & Physiology "I could make a better difference in the world by helping community college students."
Away from campus he enjoys traveling, playing ice hockey, reading, gardening/forestry, spending time with his dogs, and he and his wife Penny are big Dallas Cowboys.
One of his personal and academic passions is the history of the people of science. He is fascinated with the lives of important scientists and has published videos about the lives of Charles Darwin (Evolution), Gregor Mendel (Genetics) and Andreas Vesalius (Human anatomy).
Currently Dr. Burnside is officed in SE06 2216A and he would enjoy a visit to discuss anything you would like.
TBA
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Our Mission
