Heather Ashley has not only learned from failure — she teaches it as well.

As a nurse educator at Wallace State Community College, Ashley has the opportunity to share with her students daily the medical knowledge they will need to empower them as health care workers. But she’s also quick to share with them something else, something she wished she had learned earlier in her career. Now, failure is a part of the education she offers to advanced students at the place from which she graduated, the School of Nursing & Center for Science.

“What we do in my course, in the fourth semester critical care, is that we talk to them as though we’re on the same playing field — because we are,” Ashley said. ”And we talk to them about failure, because sometimes failure happens: nursing programs are hard. But out of that failure, we can choose to keep going, or we can just put our head down and run. The failures I’ve had, as far as nursing failures, have come to be successes in the years down the road.”

Never one to put her head down and run, Ashley knew from a young age what she wanted to do to have a successful life.

“In high school, I knew I wanted to be a nurse,” she said. “I liked taking care of people. And, I’m a very big planner — so I had it planned from senior year, I’m going to follow ‘x, y, z’ to be a nurse.”

And so she did. But she didn’t stop there.

Early on, she said, “I thought about being a nurse practitioner. But when I worked as a nurse at Cullman Regional — the only hospital I’ve ever worked in — I loved it. I loved everybody there. But my unit manager said, you’re young, you need to further your degree. So, I started a BSN program and finished my bachelor’s (of science in nursing degree).

“From there, I figured out that I could teach clinicals here at Wallace … and I just came to fall in love with it. I loved the thought that I was teaching the future of health care — or I was teaching people who would be taking care of me and my kids or my grandparents.”

It was a love that would turn into a passion for education.

“After that, I decided to do my master’s in nursing education so that I could work here at Wallace,” she said. “Wallace was always where I wanted to end up. At Cullman (Regional), we always had Wallace students coming in and participating in clinical groups and there was just something different about them. They were just wonderful — well-prepared, professional, highly educated. I knew that I wanted to be here, so I got my master’s soon after that. It was just laid out perfectly.”

Today, a large part of Ashley’s “perfect” career includes doing what most fulfills her — interacting with students.

“I love the students,” she said. ”They are so fun. I just really like having that personal relationship with them. That’s where a community college is different from a university. I feel like I can have a better one-on-one relationship with them. We start out at the beginning of every semester just telling them that we are no better than you, we’re all human. You’re human, and we want to be here for you. I really like that relationship.”

But for Ashely, relationships are not limited to a college campus. Among other “extracurricular” activities, she is a board member of the Good Samaritan Health Clinic in Cullman, acts as the chair for Let’s Pretend Hospital which helps young children learn about possible hospital or emergency room visits and has coached a successful Department of Nursing Education Alabama SkillsUSA champion team.

All of this, in addition to running a local mercantile business with her husband, has cemented Ashley’s own relationship with Cullman County.

“We’re big community people,” Ashely said about her family, which includes and 8- and 5-year-old. “We love the people, the community, and we stay busy all the time. We love Cullman and never want to leave.”

Today, such commitment to community and college does not go unnoticed among Ashely’s peer educators — some of who were once teachers when she was a student.

“I am very proud to call her my colleague,” said Wallace’s DNE director Deborah “Pepper” Hoover.