Department of English | Central Washington University

TESOL NEWS Darkest Challenges Breed Brightest Opportunities Every challenge has in it the seeds of opportunity. To plant these seeds this Spring Quarter 2020, TESOL graduate students in ENG 592: TESOL Practicum successfully designed and delivered online ESL/EFL courses. Over the years, the Department of English has collaborated with CWU’s UESL program to schedule practica, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UESL enrollment decreased dramatically and so limited practicum students’ opportunities to only class observations. At the core of our TESOL training is helping candidates prepare for classroom teaching. To ensure that our future teacher candidates were well trained, TESOL faculty and graduate students turned to international contacts and recruited up to 13 young English learners in China and 4 young English learners in Saudi Arabia, totaling 17 with an age range of 6 through 15 and with beginner, intermediate-low, and intermediate proficiency levels. We divided them into four classes—beginner (one class), intermediate-low (two classes), and intermediate (one class). We trained ourselves to use Zoom in the shortest time possible and used it as our teaching platform along with Canvas for posting teaching materials, assignments, etc. Given that we were short of textbooks for this special group of English learners, TESOL faculty developed the first five lessons as guidelines for our graduate students to design their own teaching materials for their young learners’ proficiency levels. We also selected and rewrote a few short fairytales by Andersen and Brothers Grimm for use. We met every Tuesday on Zoom to discuss a range of issues related to remote teaching, including typical behaviors of second language students at various proficiency levels, materials development, lesson-plan writing, virtual-class management, time management, virtual-class dynamics, contingency preparation, technical issues, student attendance, teaching evaluations, etc. Aside from labor-intensive coordination of weekly classes across three cultures and three time zones, starting from the second week of the quarter, we found our practicum students already beginning teaching their own assigned students. They have since been teaching every Friday morning (one class for Arabic learners) and every Friday evening (three classes for Chinese learners). As first-time virtual teachers, every trainee is excited about these teaching opportunities. We have also set up a two-way evaluation system. We received the students’ parents’ feedback about our teaching (some parents joined our classes), and we sent our evaluations of student performance to every student in about two hours after each class. The parents spoke highly of our teaching, praising our teaching as professional and asking if we would continue after this quarter. The darkest challenges of COVID-19 have turned out to generate the brightest opportunities, which our practicum students--now confident front-line virtual teachers--are cherishing. Below are what our practicum students, listed alphabetically based on their last names, say about their valuable training and teaching experiences this quarter. Rebecca Fisher: “Being an online educator has changed my opinion about online education. At first, I thought it was just the cheaper and easier alternative. Now, I am seeing how hard my students work. I have also gained a lot of insight on developing appropriate teaching material for my young students. Every week, I design an English lesson to teach to students 7,000 miles away in China. This is my first time having to design lessons using only PowerPoint and Zoom. Although I cannot see them literally in person, I can still see their faces light up when they learn with me. I can still watch my students improve. I can still interact with my students and ask them questions about their daily lives. This practicum has given me a great opportunity for my future career.” Mousa Khuwayjah: “Teaching can be a challenge sometimes. However, being a student in the TESOL program has taught me the importance of developing teaching materials to support students’ effective learning. Taking the practicum course is a great experience because it helps me to learn about my future career and students. I am thankful for this beneficial opportunity of learning and teaching." Kinzee McDanald: “This quarter has been a challenge all around, but the practicum has been the most challenging part. It has also been the most rewarding. The newly added requirement to teach international students online has been a true test of my competence and perseverance. I have gained invaluable experience in creating and carrying out lessons in an online platform. The pandemic that has altered society actually led to a beneficial learning opportunity that we would not have had in the program otherwise. This new element should continue to be implemented in the course for future TESOL students. Thanks to my practicum, I feel much more confident in my abilities to teach and to put what I have learned to practice.”

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To Our Students:

We, the faculty and staff of the English Department, stand united with you in grief at the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and countless other Black individuals who have been brutalized by police violence and white supremacy. We are in the midst of a global pandemic that further exposes rampant racist inequities in health care, social protections, income, and representation.

There must be a change.

There must be an end.

We commit to do our part.

The English Department faculty and staff are striving to engage in ongoing work toward more equitable and anti-racist curriculum, classrooms, programs, and university. Our disciplines are not immune to the racist legacies and exclusionary systems that drive the dominant culture. But our disciplines offer us an important vantage point from which to become actively involved in the interrogation and dismantling of those legacies and systems, particularly within academia.

The English Department can and must learn more about our own biases and improve.

The English Department commits to taking the following actions, at minimum, to address issues of systemic racism:

Prioritize the hiring and retention of historically minoritized faculty into the tenure-track
Establish a student advisory council that prioritizes voices of minoritized students
Review possible barriers for Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) students including recruitment methods, advising practices, access to scholarships, and standardized test requirements
All English Department faculty will receive training in anti-racist pedagogy in consultation with BIPOC faculty
Arrange graduate school and career preparation workshops for minoritized students
Incorporate more texts by BIPOC into our curriculum and invite BIPOC faculty from across campus to speak to these texts
Establish a department Diversity and Equity Committee to coordinate department efforts and hold the department accountable

We recognize the importance of mourning and of social action. We commit to making accessible the tools for social change in our classrooms and programs. We also commit to learning how we can best support you, our students. This will be an ongoing effort, and we will remain accountable by reviewing our progress at the end of each academic year.

Your voices are important. And we welcome your suggestions. We are listening. You can always contact the department chair confidentially at Katharine.Whitcomb@cwu.edu, and, in the near future, you will be able to communicate directly with department’s Diversity and Equity Committee as well as the student advisory council.

Sincerely,

The Department of English