About the Pearce Center
The Pearce Center was created in 1989 from an endowment by R. Roy Pearce and his wife Marnie Pearce to foster strong, broadly based communication skills in Clemson graduates. Since that time, hundreds of faculty from the humanities, sciences, and applied disciplines have attended Pearce-sponsored workshops to learn how to incorporate communication into their teaching and learning. The Center supports faculty in developing communication across the curriculum projects and nurtures communities of faculty working on these projects. The Pearce Center regularly joins with campus efforts such as service learning. It is currently partnering with Clemson’s ePortfolio initiative through the Class of 1941 Studio of Student Communication and the Robert J. Rutland Institute for Ethics. The Pearce Center’s Corporate Advisory Board assists the Center in identifying the kinds of communication skills and competencies that Roy Pearce envisioned for Clemson graduates. The Center has a research team of faculty and works closely with Professor Art Young, the Robert S. Campbell Chair in Technical Communication.
The Pearce Center fosters communication and learning initiatives in the community, the region, the nation, and abroad. In the past, the Center has offered summer seminars for high school and college students, as well as digital portfolio institutes for university faculty. In keeping with its mission, the Pearce Center has supported communication across the curriculum in K-12 settings. In May 2006, it hosted the Eighth International Conference on Writing Across the Curriculum.