Faculty Friday: Meet Jana Gurley, English Instructor

Not a one-and-done assignment. Not a last-minute sprint. Step by step. Draft by draft. Revision by revision.

It’s a lesson that reaches far beyond the page. Because Jana has lived it.

After high school, she headed off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and quickly realized she wasn’t ready. “I was academically prepared, but I didn’t have any soft skills to enable me to be successful,” she explains. After moving back home to Cleveland County, NC, she went to work for the NC Department of Transportation, spending 12 years as an Engineering Technician. It was good work. But she knew there was something more waiting for her.

When her husband deployed to Iraq with the Army National Guard in 2005, Jana decided it was time to return to school. She enrolled at Cleveland Community College and started fresh. She even retook English 111.

An instructor who later became a lifelong mentor and friend saw potential in Jana and encouraged her to pursue a degree in English and eventually return to Cleveland to teach. Jana took that advice seriously. She earned her associate degree at 32, her bachelor’s at 35, and her master’s at 37, then returned to Cleveland Community College to teach, where she rose to the position of Department Chair.

It felt like her dream job, but little did she know what would happen next.

“The idea of relocating to Oak Island, where we had vacationed so many times, came up,” said Jana. “We had a family meeting and took a vote. Mine was a no because I was happy where I was and didn’t want to uproot the family. They outvoted me, so off we went.”

That move led her to Brunswick Community College, where she truly found her home. Now in her eighth year at BCC, Jana pours her energy into every class she teaches. Her upbeat personality fills the room, and her office has become a gathering place where former students return to study, chat, and soak up her ever-positive vibe.

She looks at her students and tells them, “I’m Jana Gurley, and I can do anything. And if I can do it, you can too.” Sometimes they laugh. But by the end of the semester, they get it.

Jana is also expanding her students’ horizons through Cultural Studies as part of BCC’s Global Scholars of Distinction program. Each week, her class travels virtually to places like England, France, Germany, Japan, and India.

“It’s an awesome class,” she says. “It’s an incredible way to give students who may have never left North Carolina a peek at a whole new world of possibilities.”

Jana can’t imagine teaching anywhere else. For her, education was not a straight line. It was a process. A restart. A rediscovery.

Now she reminds her students every single day that they are capable of more than they think. On graduation day, they prove her right.

March 2026