"Leave the world a little better than you found it."

This adage is certainly true of Production Electrician/Sound & Light Supervisor David Liles’s time as an educator. With a career spanning over 17 years, Liles has worn a variety of hats and expanded theatre opportunities for many young people in Lubbock.

Liles’s own journey with theatre started in middle school, when he was cast in a production of The Happy Scarecrow by I.E. Clark. He proceeded to be an actor all the way through high school, before taking a pause in college to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“Fate drove me into a teaching degree. My parents said, ‘Don’t become a teacher.’ So, I absolutely did not listen to them,” he says when he described why he chose his college major. “I did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t even know I wanted to be a theatre teacher. This is where the world took me.”

His alma mater, Lubbock Christian University, allowed him to specialize his teaching degree, and he chose to focus on English and Theatre. This paid off in 2007 when he got the call to teach theatre at Hutchinson Middle School. With ten days to move back to Lubbock and be at school with lesson and production plans in hand, he dove right in to direct seven classes featuring, of course, The Happy Scarecrow.

This was the beginning of a 15-year career at Hutchinson, during which Liles served as Theatre Director and completely transformed the curriculum:

When I started at Hutch, they only did general theatre classes. And by the time I left, I had diversified the classes to be beginning, intermediate, advanced, one act, technical and musical theatre. I was the first teacher in LISD to start and specialize the technical theatre and musical theatre programs for the middle schools.

Liles taught all the courses himself at various points, instructing students in sound, lighting, costumes, makeup, and even set construction: “I took middle school children and gave them power tools and hand tools and a design, explaining how to realize their imaginations on the stage. They were very resilient; a lot of them discovered what they loved.”

After 15 years at Hutchinson, Liles decided it was time for a change and moved to become the Technical Theatre Director at Lubbock High School. Still, something was pulling him in another direction. The effects of post-COVID education were starting to settle in, as well as increased demands after becoming a small business owner in 2021. It was time for a career shift, and this was when he applied for the Production Electrician position at Texas Tech.

“It’s been a really good change,” he says of joining the School of Theatre & Dance in January. “I miss working with my kids, but I will say that this new position has contributed mightily to improving my quality of life.”  

He is greatly appreciative of his time at LISD for giving him the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in his new career path. Although he readily acknowledges that certain technical skills were not as advanced as others due to his background, he views this as an opportunity for growth:

Being in this position, I’ve been challenged in a lot of ways that I’ve never been challenged before, which has forced me to learn a lot of new things, which I enjoy. I was fortunate to experience strong mentoring when I first started at TTU, and now I’m getting to that point where they are really trusting my ideas and opinions, which is a good feeling. I’m excited to start running the shop the way they want to see it.

Of course, Liles has no plans to cut ties with the community either, with one of his major initiatives being to bridge the gap between Texas Tech and local middle and high schools. This has the two-fold benefit of sending TTU practitioners into schools to teach students and educators how to use and fix their equipment, as well as encouraging these students to come to Tech and experience all that the School of Theatre and Dance has to offer. Through building relationships, he says, “everyone can benefit from each other.”

The core of being an educator is to both teach and learn from your students, and to try and leave all involved a little better than when you found them.

Outside of work, Liles has been a martial arts practitioner for 15 years. He holds a black belt and co-owns and teaches at Texas Karate Institute in Lubbock. He is also the proud dog parent of Oreo and Snickerdoodle, and enjoys reading, playing video games and binge-watching Schitt’s Creek.