Rachel Kirk’s journey from country roots to college classrooms

Rachel Kirk grew up surrounded by the rustling woods of Ashland City, Tennessee — a town so small it had only one stoplight.

In the quiet stretches of country life, she often found herself alone, especially after her older brother went off to college. But solitude bred imagination, and with paintbrushes in hand and Bob Ross on a mirrored television, young Rachel discovered her passion.

“I was always the artist growing up,” she recalled. “My parents supported that. They bought me art supplies, they let me paint and make a mess on the front porch. I followed along to recordings of Bob Ross while looking through a window into a mirror placed in front of the console TV. And when I mailed a photo of my first painting to Bob Ross, he even sent me a letter back.”

That early encouragement turned into a lifelong pursuit. Rachel, who now serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Humanities, is a Professor of Art at Central Washington University, where she carries forward a legacy rooted in education and creativity — a legacy that began long before her own teaching career.

While Rachel’s mother worked as a floral designer and held various positions in banking — careers that mixed precision with creativity — her father and extended family lived in classrooms. Her father taught high school wood shop and spent summers doing construction.  Her grandmother was her third and fourth-grade teacher.

“Both my dad and grandmother were in the same school system,” Rachel said, adding that her brother, aunt, stepmother and sister-in-law are also K-12 teachers. “They were award-winning teachers. Everyone knew who they were.”

However, having her grandmother as a teacher presented its own challenges.

“There was concern about her giving me preferential treatment,” she laughed. “But she actually doubled down on me a lot. She was tough but fair.”

Even with that strong educational lineage, Rachel didn’t initially see teaching as her path. Art was always her first love, and it remained her focus through college and graduate school. Still, teaching, like a genetic thread, eventually surfaced.

Finding Her Calling

After graduating from high school, Rachel faced a choice: follow her fascination with Egyptology or pursue a future in art. It was an exhibition catalogue her mom brought home from Memphis that first sparked her interest in ancient Egypt.

But it was the offer of a full scholarship to Austin Peay State University in Clarksville that ultimately steered her path toward art.

“I was in the President’s Emerging Leaders Program, a small and competitive program with its own curriculum kind of like CWU’s Douglas Honors College. That leadership program paid my way through school,” she said.

It was during her freshman year that she discovered the pull of teaching. Two art professors — Kell Black and Billy Renkl — inspired her.

“They were teaching adult students, having real conversations, and I thought, ‘I want to be just like you,’” Rachel said.

From that moment, she charted a path to becoming a college professor, earning her MFA at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

But she quickly learned the road to a tenure-track job in the arts would not be an easy one.

Persevering Through Hustle

After graduate school, Rachel returned to her alma mater, Austin Peay, where she spent six years in temporary teaching roles (three as an adjunct, and three as a visiting assistant professor).

In Tennessee, state policy limited visiting professors to three years, so when her contract expired, she faced a hard truth: there were no long-term opportunities at her chosen institution.

Rachel then entered a grueling period of “hustle” — teaching at up to three institutions at once, commuting long hours between classes, often teaching until 10 p.m., and living without health insurance.

“There were years where we were barely scraping by,” she said. “It was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting piecing together all the part-time work.”

During this time, Rachel and her husband, Jason — whom she met during her college years — bought a small house in Nashville after securing a federal loan.

“A week after we signed on the house, the school that wrote my support letter for the home loan pulled my teaching appointment,” she said. “But we found a way. We always have.”

A Leap of Faith

After a decade of part-time teaching, Rachel gave herself one final window to find a tenure-track position. She applied to dozens of schools across the country. The offer from CWU in 2014 was the one that changed everything.

“We sold our house and used what little we had to move to Ellensburg,” she said. “It was a leap of faith.”

Rachel and Jason, a journalist and Army brat accustomed to frequent moves, settled into their new home in Washington with two West Highland terriers and, eventually, a cat. The cat, she explained with a smile, was part of a long-standing agreement with her husband: if she landed a tenure-track job, she got to adopt one.

Today, Rachel teaches art to college students in Ellensburg with the same energy and integrity she admired in her own mentors. Her classes are more than skill-building workshops; they’re spaces for critical thinking, creative risk-taking, and exploring what it means to live as an artist.

She carries with her the strength of her family’s legacy — teachers who shaped young minds, and parents who supported her creativity despite lean times. She carries the quiet woods of Ashland City, the mirrored porch painting sessions, and the Saturday mornings with Bob Ross.

“I didn’t start out thinking I’d be a teacher,” she said. “But looking back, I think it was always in me. It’s in the family, in our bones. I just had to find my way to it through art.”

From a one-stoplight town in Tennessee to the classrooms of CWU, Rachel Kirk’s story is one of passion and purpose — a living legacy, built brushstroke by brushstroke.

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Author Staci Sleigh-Layman is the former Associate Vice President of Human Resources, who retired from CWU in August 2025. She completed a series of CWU employee features last year, and they are running periodically on Central Today.