TEIS Newsletter - June 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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LEADERSHIP UPDATES LETTER FROM THE CHAIR Heather Linville, University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, La Cross, Wisconsin, USA
It is my pleasure to write my first Letter from the Chair for this edition of TEIS News. As I write, I am finishing up a year of sabbatical from my position at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. This year has been an amazing gift—a chance to fully engage in a research project without the everyday distractions of teaching. I spent my time this year working on a project entitled We Live in La Crosse: Stories of Belonging. In this project, I aimed to highlight the voices of multilingual individuals in my town in order to challenge monolingual and homogeneous misunderstandings of who lives, and belongs, here. In other words, I spent my sabbatical collecting and thinking about stories, specifically digital stories. Not a bad way to spend a year! In this newsletter, to continue the theme, I have three stories. The first story for this Letter is our recent leadership shift, which occurs each year at the TESOL Annual Convention. A big “thank you” to James Whiting, now TEIS Past-Chair. Polina Vinogradova is now Chair-Elect and we welcome Grazzia Mendoza as Chair-Elect-Elect. In addition, Vu Tran-Thanh has joined Khanh-Duc Kuttig and Bridget Schvarcz as Co-Editor of this publication. Abdulsamad Humaidan continues as our Community Manager. Please check the Meet the Committee section to read more about each person in our leadership team. We also added Rai Farrelly as our new TESOL Board of Directors Liaison. Thank you, Rai, for your support to TEIS! The second story is about all the TEIS happenings at the Conventions, both face-to-face in Portland, Oregon, USA, and online. At the face-to-face convention, TEIS joined the LGBT PLN to present an intersection session entitled “TESOL Teacher Education and Allyship: An Inviting Conversation.” We appreciated the opportunity to collaborate on this important topic! We also organized the TEIS Academic Session, “Putting TESOL Advocacy into Practice in Teacher Preparation.” Amber Warren, James Whiting, and William Fox and April Salerno presented the ways they work to prepare new ESL/EFL teachers to act as advocates. There was a heavy focus on the virtual, as Will and April explained how they use avatars to assist in this work, and Amber explored advocacy in online language teacher education. We loved the focus on preparing teachers to teach for social justice and equity! At our Annual Business Meeting, we were small but mighty. In addition to welcoming new leaders, we highlighted our successes from last year (8 webinars, 3 newsletters, and 2 town hall meetings—wow!) and shared our visions for this coming year. At both conventions, TEIS was able to connect via the TESOL Fair with new, potential TEIS members and share the goals and work of TEIS. Our final story, for this newsletter, is our vision for TEIS this year and how we will work to reach the TEIS goal: fostering quality in teacher preparation programs regardless of the context in which ESOL teacher preparation is delivered. This year, we hope foster quality in teacher education by exploring storytelling in language education and language teacher education. How many of you open a class with a story to break the ice or tell a short anecdote to help students understand your point? Or maybe you use stories to help engage your students and make your class more relatable and memorable. Or perhaps you use stories to be vulnerable with your students, showing them that you, too, were once a first-year teacher with a lot of great ideas but few skills to enact them. I firmly believe that we are all storytellers. For whatever reason you tell them, stories build community and help usher new teachers into our community of practice. As teachers, we are also adept at listening to our students’ stories. No matter who our students our, we want them to feel authentically welcome in our classrooms, and able to share who they are. Yet we know that some of our students’ stories aren’t told as often or as loudly. As teachers, we strive to raise up students’ stories, empowering all to tell their own stories and to challenge negative or inaccurate information about them that others may say. To this end, this year’s TEIS webinar series is all about storytelling. (Click here [https://tinyurl.com/3c4wbwx8] to view past TEIS webinars on the TESOL YouTube channel.) We hope you will join us each month as we build our professional community and enhance our expertise together. Each hour-long webinar will start with about 30 minutes of presentation from a teacher educator, sharing theory, research findings, and/or best practices related to storytelling in language teacher education. Then we will have about 30 minutes of time for questions and sharing amongst all the participants. In our first webinar, on May 22, Rachel Toncelli and Leila Rosa shared how they use counternarratives to encourage pre-service teachers to question stories they normally hear about multilingual learners and to develop more asset-based perspectives. Stay engaged on myTESOL (https://my.tesol.org/) to find out when each webinar is happening, and start a thread or comment on what others are saying to learn, share, and keep in touch with other teacher educators. By the way, YOU can also be a webinar presenter! What story would you like to tell about your teacher education context? We hope to see you online, and we hope to hear your stories! Reference Vinogradova, P., Linville, H. A., & Bickel, B. (2011). “Listen to my story and you will know me”: Digital stories as student-centered collaborative projects. TESOL Journal 2(2), p. 173-202.
Heather Linville is current Chair of the Teacher Educator Interest Section, and Professor and TESOL Director at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. |
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