Communications pro shares his real-world experience in the classroom
Scott Hays had never planned on being a teacher.
Yet, for more than 20 years, Hays has been doing exactly that, serving as an instructor at Santiago Canyon College since 2017 and at multiple community colleges in Orange County since 2001.
“It’s a great campus,” Hays said. “It’s got a great staff. It’s got a great student body, and I really enjoy teaching there.”
With a master’s degree in communications and English literature, along with decades of experience in mass media as a print and broadcast journalist, a producer of television and radio programming, and video documentaries, Hays combines his real-world experience and education to teach a variety of subjects.
His teaching resume includes courses in journalism, critical thinking, mass communications and literature.
“And every semester is a different set of classes,” Hays said. “It keeps me engaged creatively and intellectually.”
This semester, Hays is teaching an English composition class and a critical thinking class at SCC.
After earning a master’s in communication from Cal State Fullerton, Hays plunged right in, first as a freelance journalist, writing for newspapers, magazines and books before transitioning to radio, television and video projection.
In 2007, he earned a master’s in English literature from UC Irvine.
Hays’s latest venture, and arguably most successful, has been the formation of OCWorld, an award-winning, nonprofit multimedia company that produces programming in and about Orange County.
As the only nonprofit multimedia firm in the county, OCWorld produces a weekly public affairs show that airs on KLCS-PBS and is broadcast to 15.5 million households from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
“We look for stories that aren’t being told,” Hays said. “We interview people that may not necessarily always have a voice.”
The OCWorld documentary “Hope Dies Last,” which focused on the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on California communities, was awarded a Golden Mike for Best Long Form Programming or Documentary at the 73rd Annual Golden Mike Awards.
In 2022, OCWorld also took home a Best in Show award at the Los Angeles Film & Script Festival for a documentary short titled “Coastal Crisis: California’s Vanishing Beaches.”
The documentary also took first place in the Real OC category at this year’s Orange County Press Club Awards event.
Hays co-founded OCWorld with Manuel Gomez, who served as vice chancellor of community affairs at UC Irvine from 1995 to 2010, was interim vice president for educational partnerships in the University of California Office of the President, and was a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in Washington D.C.
Community colleges sector provides a crucial transition point between the K-12 education and the working world or for transferring to a university, Gomez said. The community college model is almost custom-made for an innovator such as Hays, he said.
“The community college was engaged in vocational training, in teaching, and in transition transfer research teaching,” Gomez said. “Scott Hays reflects all that inventiveness and innovativeness in his teaching and in his connection with students and in my relationship with him in the invention and creation of OC World.
Hays, who is himself a product of a community college education, was drawn to the classroom after seeing a fellow freelance writer teaching at a community college.
“I thought to myself, you know, maybe I’ll give it a try,” said Hays, who started his second career as a teacher at Saddleback College. “I don’t know if I’m going to even like teaching, and I wasn’t about to get into something I didn’t like. They hired me that semester, and I’ve never looked back. Luckily, I fell in love with it.”
“I have no doubt that he’s got to be an excellent teacher because he’s a wonderful collaborator,” said Rick Reiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who’s been with the Orange County Business Journal for more than 30 years, including 10 as an editor.
Reiff and Hays have collaborated on several projects together.
“He likes to hear different viewpoints,” Reiff said. “He’s not judgmental. He wants to know what your opinion is, so he’s got wonderful qualities. I’m sure as a teacher that works. I’m sure he doesn’t intimidate students. I’m sure he works with them.”
It’s the interaction with students that Hays finds most rewarding, especially when seeing a student “light up with a piece of knowledge that they didn’t have before.”
“My goal is always to allow each student to shine at least one time during the semester in my class. To give them an opportunity to feel like they’ve accomplished something in front of their peers, that’s just a great feeling.”
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