They came from as far away as Hawaii and as nearby as a quick ride on the D.C. metro, bringing vast resources of experience and enthusiasm, ready for their assignments as the 2024-2025 cohort of Alumni Ambassadors. The destination was steamy Washington, D.C., in late July, for a five-day kickoff and training as honorary representatives of the U.S. Department of State’s English Language Programs. Throughout the week, the ten new Ambassadors put their dedication and knowledge to good use during policy and program meetings, panel discussions, brainstorming sessions, action plan workshops, and more. Now, with their year-long tenure underway, these seasoned Fellow, Specialist, and Virtual Educator alumni are on a mission to recruit and raise awareness for English Language Programs with a shared conviction – being a program participant is a life-altering experience, providing opportunities for educators to be, in their words, “game changers,” “peacemakers,” “bridge builders,” and “pathbreakers.”
A Front Seat to “Aha” Moments
These alumni have certainly had their share of impactful projects. For Robbieana Leung, currently an English for Specific Purposes instructor at the University of Hawaii, her “Film Pals” initiative, a project that she spearheaded while a Fellow in Thailand, proved pivotal to her students. Leung, an advocate of experiential education, reached out to overseas educators, including other Fellows, to recruit their students to create and exchange five-minute videos about their cultures. The result: Her 92 Thai students and 183 students in eight other countries – among them, Algeria, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uruguay – produced, shared, discussed, and reflected on their films, which touched on numerous cultural topics. According to Leung, this classroom-without-walls allowed many of her Thai students to interact for the first time with foreign peers and “view the world through their eyes.” Not only did they learn how to conceptualize, narrate, film, edit, and even write English-language subtitles, they were able to “see their shared humanity,” she says. In one particularly meaningful series of exchanges, her Thai students sent video messages of support to their Ukrainian counterparts, who, because of wartime conditions in their country, filmed their project by candlelight due to lack of electricity.
For Monique Grindell, an online English language instructor for Interlink International Institutes, the “aha” moments for the teachers in her workshops came in the form of a reading assignment. As a Virtual Educator and then Fellow in Morocco, she chose Yaa Gyasi’s historical novel Homegoing, which deals with the legacy of the slave trade between Ghana and America. Initially reluctant to tackle this 320-page narrative, the teachers were soon thoroughly engaged, discussing culture and values, as well as “topics not typical of the language learning classroom,” notes Grindell. “From the fictional to how it relates to the reality of their own lives, they were able to make those connections.” They also designed ways to use such challenging texts to develop English language skills with their future students.
New Technologies and Time-Honored Methods
For other Ambassadors, such significant moments were grounded more in the immediacy of today’s classroom concerns. Christina Cavage, Director of Language Programs and E-Learning at Immerse, tackled the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom during her virtual Specialist projects with Russian and Belarusian educators. She knows how daunting this new technology can be for instructors to contend with, let alone embrace. Cavage saw this assignment as an important way for her to be a bridge builder, a term she uses to describe her entire career as an educator. Indeed, for these participants, Cavage’s workshop opened a new door in education, one that uses AI to benefit educators. But first, Cavage had to calm their worries. “One of my students, an engineering professor, said she feared for the future of education because of AI,” she recalls. But Cavage, an advocate of this technological advance as a classroom ally, focused her workshop on the power of effective AI lesson prompts to encourage critical thinking, thought-provoking discussions, creative projects, research-based activities, and more. One unexpected outcome: The final slide in a presentation by that initially concerned engineering professor stated, “AI is my friend.”
Technology concerns, of course, take many forms when it comes to overseas assignments. As a Virtual Educator, Nicole Jefferson, a foreign language teacher with the Harrison County School District in Gulfport, Mississippi, worked on a marketing collaboration between the Panama Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Department of State aimed at promoting tourism in Panama City. Her participants, many of whom had only basic technological expertise, were tasked with creating an online program that incorporated videos with voiceovers, digital itineraries with QR codes, and radio interviews. Over the course of her two-month assignment, Jefferson saw her students gain both confidence and expertise. And she grew as well, expanding her own technology skills, as well as making strong connections with the students and their country. In fact, she recently took a trip to Panama with her mother and sister, where she met her former students and the Regional English Language Officer, received a personalized tour of the capital, and took Afro-Panamanian cooking classes.
While Dr. Quanisha Charles, an associate professor of English at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, utilized functionalities of technology, including AI, in her virtual teacher training as a Specialist in Lebanon, she primarily highlighted classroom tools such as backward design lesson plans to clarify learning goals and the cubing method to enhance students’ critical thinking skills. “I considered the main point of this project to be providing the teachers with insights as to how to better focus on their students’ needs and classroom engagement,” she says.
Professional and Personal Growth
These educators take great pride in the increased knowledge and understanding gained by their projects’ participants, but they count their own breakthroughs as an important benefit of being a Fellow, Specialist, and Virtual Educator. For John Chi, his time as a Fellow ultimately changed the course of his career. Throughout his fellowship in China, Chi struggled with his identity as a Chinese American, navigating an uneasy path as an American in a country where “the people saw me as one of them,” he says. The confusion often intensified for Chi, fluent in both English and Cantonese, “not wanting some people to see me as Chinese and not wanting others to see me as American.” He grappled with this issue while teaching traditional education classes to the English language majors at his host university, but when he returned to the United States, Chi realized he had changed his view of language learning and teaching, and his career focus. Originally planning to work toward a research-oriented doctorate in bilingualism, he is now a doctoral candidate in Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland, with a focus on humanizing language pedagogy, specifically as it relates to K-12 teachers. The idea, he says, is to embrace translanguaging – the ability of students to move fluidly between languages – “not erasing students’ heritage languages and replacing them with English, but viewing and using the heritage language as a useful resource, not a deficit.”
For Dr. Brandon Sherman, an educational researcher at Indiana University in Indianapolis, theory-driven professional learning with an emphasis on pedagogical coaching has long been his professional focus. No surprise then that he approached his three-month virtual Specialist assignment in Russia from a researcher’s vantage point, developing and recording videos on various aspects of sociocultural theories of learning and coaching to present to English language educators from all regions of the country. But soon after the assignment began, Sherman discovered that many of the participants were unfamiliar with the idea of school-based teacher coaching as a means to model professional learning. As a result, he quickly pivoted, adapting not only his materials but his approach to their time together. The result: a more collaborative project that allowed the Russian educators to take ownership of their professional growth in a way that was grounded in the reality of their classrooms and culture. Sherman found that “the seeds of pedagogical coaching can be planted in many soils” and while the result may differ from the original intent, it can still be successful.
For all of these Ambassadors, expanding understanding and appreciation for global perspectives has been a key takeaway. As a Fellow in Turkiye, Alison Jones, an English as a second language (ESL) teacher with the Minneapolis Public School District, gained the confidence to establish designing and leading professional development workshops and presenting at educational conferences as core components of her career. In addition, she has since delved more deeply into studying international relations and political science. During her Specialist assignment in Vietnam, Paula Wilder, Director of International Programs and an instructor in the master’s TESOL program at Greensboro College in North Carolina, took a two-week, ten-city train journey with the RELO team, meeting with teachers and students from north to south who continuously inspired her with their insights and willingness to explore new teaching strategies.
The 2024-2025 Alumni Ambassadors visit the photo booth at the closing reception of the Fellow Orientation
For Karen Jury, adjunct assistant professor at Temple University and adult ESL teacher at The Garage Youth and Community Center in Pennsylvania, an unexpected request to leave the comfort of her fellowship in Thailand and fly to Vietnam to teach a class of mid-level customs department officials turned out to be anything but the “lonely, boring week” she had anticipated. Instead, she found a classroom filled with “warm, genuine, funny, hardworking, and kind” participants, who invited her to lunch, took her on trips around the city, and presented her with speeches, songs, and flowers on her last day. “What planet am I on?” she remembers asking herself. That experience led to numerous return trips to Vietnam and ongoing contact with her students. Today, she says, “my fellowship stories empower me professionally,” providing opportunities not only to advance at her university, but also to fulfill a personal dream to develop and help run a weekly bilingual storytime program at the library in her hometown.
Ways to Connect
It should be no surprise given the breadth and depth of these Ambassadors’ experiences that they are charging ahead with ideas to spread the word about English Language Programs. To bring more visibility to the Fellow program, Cavage, for example, has implemented 30 Days, 30 Fellows, which highlights a new or returning Fellow each day in September. Then, next June she plans to return to those Fellows and ask them to reflect on their assignments. Chi expects to connect not only with participants in TESOL and linguistics degree programs but also with those in world language departments, while Jones intends to go beyond language associations and reach out to other education-related organizations such as teachers unions. Then there are the outreach strategies for community colleges, K-12 school districts, social media, webinars, blogs, and videos – just some of the additional approaches percolating in these Ambassadors’ minds as ways to pique interest. “As teachers, sometimes we’re in a kind of bubble,” says Leung. “But English Language Programs takes you outside that bubble, opening you to the world. And oh, the stories you’ll have to tell!”
Stay tuned for our next featured Alumni Ambassador story with Nicole Jefferson.