About Blayne

Hi! I'm Blayne.

In my professional life, I’m Blayne A. Stewart. In my creative life, I go by Blayne Allan. Some friends started calling me B years ago, and it stuck. So, you can call me B.

I work in education because it helped lead me to a better life than I ever expected. I come from a poor family of manual laborers. People outside my family cared enough to support me and teach me. Most of them were educators. That’s why I kept coming back to education, even after detours through healthcare, programming, and photography.

I’m the Dean of Learning and Communications at UACCB, a community college in rural Arkansas. Most days, that means I work with faculty on what happens in the classroom, support the teams helping students outside the classroom, and help the college tell the story about what we do and why it matters.

I am not an innovator or a disruptor and have no interest in credit. I just want to help students like I was once helped. If a system is making teaching harder, I want to fix it. If a tool saves faculty time, I will try to build it. If a student is getting lost in a process that was supposed to help them, I am going to have questions.

The phrase I keep coming back to is simple: Teach Them.

Teach them regardless of who they are, where they come from, how old they are, or how they identify. Students, faculty, staff, our community members, and whoever walks through the door. Education is more than handing people information. It’s about creating the kind of environment where someone can learn, grow, and maybe end up with a better life than the one they thought they were stuck with.

That same thread runs through my photography. I mostly take photos of people, and I care less about making someone look like a model than helping them see themselves clearly. Confident. Worthy. Enough. I have watched people change in front of a camera because, for a moment, they felt what everybody else always sees in them. That never gets old.

I also build things. Nerd stuff. The kind of thing that does not require a tape measure. Nobody wants that. I write about whatever idea has me distracted, fly drones, drink good coffee, and own a completely unnecessary number of shoes. The shoes were not supposed to become part of the brand. They did anyway.

I live with my wife and our three goofy dogs in downtown Batesville, Arkansas.

Educator. Photographer. Creative Nerd. Coffee Snob.

That’s me.