TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Para mí, enseñar es una vocación, no (solo) una profesión.
Teaching is my passion and no matter the difficulties I might face as a teacher, I put in all my knowledge and experience to facilitate successful learning. In my quest to understand how learners learn a foreign language, and since 2000, I have traveled the world teaching in very diverse educational environments, such as The United Kingdom, the United States, Barbados, Spain, The Gambia, and Thailand. This ongoing search has helped me develop a student-centered approach that aims to create motivated learners willing to become independent language speakers.
I am an extremely motivated teacher who is willing to experiment with new methodologies, strategies and digital tools to make the learning adventure more interesting, exciting, challenging, and effective. My motivation is contagious, and my students can feel my passion in class, as they have stated in my evaluations (“she has a strong passion to teach her students”). Students are the center of my teaching practice and I see them as adventurers, because learning a language is a never-ending adventure. Learners seek to experience life in a new language, and learn to see the world through the lens of a different culture. My hope is to walk alongside them, to motivate them in every step, and to witness how they grow from inexperienced adventurers to language experts.
As teachers we make mistakes, such as transferring teaching methodologies from one context to another very diverse scenario. In 2011, at the University of The Gambia, I realized the dangers of this practice. I was the sole party responsible for the creation of all courses in an educational milieu characterized by the lack of human and material resources. There, I tried to implement a communicative approach, as I did in other contexts: it was a big failure. My students were not familiar with this methodology, so they did not participate actively. To overcome this failure, I conducted a critical in-depth methodological analysis in order to design a curriculum adapted to the context and the needs of learners. Furthermore, to ensure that my students had a productive learning experience, I created an online learning platform to upload didactic materials and to create a digital space where they could share their work, ask questions and practice the topics presented in class. This experience made me realize that teachers and students take risks when embarking on the adventure of teaching and learning a new language: we fall, get up, and struggle during the process. My goal is to assure them that all the struggles are worth it, and to do so, I make sure that I adapt the methodology to the context and their skills.
Curriculum design will determine students’ learning experience. I support a content-based teaching (CBT/CLIL) curriculum that is organized in a task-based approach because it fosters a student-centered methodology. Through this combination, learners are exposed to a dynamic and active learning process, in which content is the vehicle to acquire communicative competence in the target language. In the University of West Indies, in my course Spanish for Hospitality and Tourism, students had to create for their final tasks a real marketing campaign to promote a hotel in Spain. By interacting with authentic content, learners accomplish tasks that impact the development of their interlanguage, cultural, and pragmatic knowledge. To enable this, I promote a positive emotional learning environment by using group dynamics that encourage a high level of interaction among students, making them active learners and builders of their knowledge. In my class sessions, I motivate students to ask questions that are answered by the whole group. I am a facilitator and observer in the classroom and I seek to guide learners on a path for successful learning. Constant feedback and positive reinforcement are tools that help my students to self-assess their progress and stay motivated on the language-learning adventure.
Digital tools are a central element of my teaching philosophy because today’s learners belong to the digital era and they are familiar with the benefits and potential power of these instruments. The Covid-19 pandemic tested the digital literacy of the educational community. Although digital resources are present in our daily tasks, during the Covid-19 health crisis educators realized that the academic community was not formally trained in digital competence. Since the early stages of my teaching career and as a central part of my research, I have been using a wide variety of technologies to maintain students’ motivation. In addition, my use of digital tools ensures that students are exposed to meaningful input and that they develop autonomous learning strategies involving authentic written and spoken samples. This strategy helps students develop positive writing, reading, listening, speaking, and pragmatic skills.
The exposure to authentic and meaningful input also teaches students digital literacy skills that will be implemented beyond the use of the language: critical thinking in digital spaces, assessing the validity of a source, and sharing content in the digital world while being aware of their digital footprints. My students become digital citizens. Additionally, by completing digital activities in which grammar is contextualized within a cultural topic, technology helps learners to better understand grammar and cultural aspects. These kinds of activities promote a better understanding of grammar, instead of learning a set of decontextualized rules. I include digital tools and mobile learning inside and outside the classroom because technology breaks the boundaries that the physical classroom imposes. Consequently, an adequate implementation of digital tools fosters language learning at any time and in any place. Furthermore, I believe that technology can help to raise students´ self-esteem and to help them feel more comfortable to participate spontaneously in class. To prove my hypothesis, while teaching in Thailand, I conducted research on the impact of mobile learning on the spontaneous participation of Thai students. This study proved that the implementation of digital tools helps raise motivation and self-esteem. I replicated the research at Columbia, and I am currently working on the use of Virtual Reality to improve the learning of prepositions “por” and “para.”
Teaching effectively is an ongoing journey. I will always have something to learn to become a better teacher, however, I can affirm that this does not discourage me, the opposite, it is my motivation to continue teaching.
Teaching is my passion and no matter the difficulties I might face as a teacher, I put in all my knowledge and experience to facilitate successful learning. In my quest to understand how learners learn a foreign language, and since 2000, I have traveled the world teaching in very diverse educational environments, such as The United Kingdom, the United States, Barbados, Spain, The Gambia, and Thailand. This ongoing search has helped me develop a student-centered approach that aims to create motivated learners willing to become independent language speakers.
I am an extremely motivated teacher who is willing to experiment with new methodologies, strategies and digital tools to make the learning adventure more interesting, exciting, challenging, and effective. My motivation is contagious, and my students can feel my passion in class, as they have stated in my evaluations (“she has a strong passion to teach her students”). Students are the center of my teaching practice and I see them as adventurers, because learning a language is a never-ending adventure. Learners seek to experience life in a new language, and learn to see the world through the lens of a different culture. My hope is to walk alongside them, to motivate them in every step, and to witness how they grow from inexperienced adventurers to language experts.
As teachers we make mistakes, such as transferring teaching methodologies from one context to another very diverse scenario. In 2011, at the University of The Gambia, I realized the dangers of this practice. I was the sole party responsible for the creation of all courses in an educational milieu characterized by the lack of human and material resources. There, I tried to implement a communicative approach, as I did in other contexts: it was a big failure. My students were not familiar with this methodology, so they did not participate actively. To overcome this failure, I conducted a critical in-depth methodological analysis in order to design a curriculum adapted to the context and the needs of learners. Furthermore, to ensure that my students had a productive learning experience, I created an online learning platform to upload didactic materials and to create a digital space where they could share their work, ask questions and practice the topics presented in class. This experience made me realize that teachers and students take risks when embarking on the adventure of teaching and learning a new language: we fall, get up, and struggle during the process. My goal is to assure them that all the struggles are worth it, and to do so, I make sure that I adapt the methodology to the context and their skills.
Curriculum design will determine students’ learning experience. I support a content-based teaching (CBT/CLIL) curriculum that is organized in a task-based approach because it fosters a student-centered methodology. Through this combination, learners are exposed to a dynamic and active learning process, in which content is the vehicle to acquire communicative competence in the target language. In the University of West Indies, in my course Spanish for Hospitality and Tourism, students had to create for their final tasks a real marketing campaign to promote a hotel in Spain. By interacting with authentic content, learners accomplish tasks that impact the development of their interlanguage, cultural, and pragmatic knowledge. To enable this, I promote a positive emotional learning environment by using group dynamics that encourage a high level of interaction among students, making them active learners and builders of their knowledge. In my class sessions, I motivate students to ask questions that are answered by the whole group. I am a facilitator and observer in the classroom and I seek to guide learners on a path for successful learning. Constant feedback and positive reinforcement are tools that help my students to self-assess their progress and stay motivated on the language-learning adventure.
Digital tools are a central element of my teaching philosophy because today’s learners belong to the digital era and they are familiar with the benefits and potential power of these instruments. The Covid-19 pandemic tested the digital literacy of the educational community. Although digital resources are present in our daily tasks, during the Covid-19 health crisis educators realized that the academic community was not formally trained in digital competence. Since the early stages of my teaching career and as a central part of my research, I have been using a wide variety of technologies to maintain students’ motivation. In addition, my use of digital tools ensures that students are exposed to meaningful input and that they develop autonomous learning strategies involving authentic written and spoken samples. This strategy helps students develop positive writing, reading, listening, speaking, and pragmatic skills.
The exposure to authentic and meaningful input also teaches students digital literacy skills that will be implemented beyond the use of the language: critical thinking in digital spaces, assessing the validity of a source, and sharing content in the digital world while being aware of their digital footprints. My students become digital citizens. Additionally, by completing digital activities in which grammar is contextualized within a cultural topic, technology helps learners to better understand grammar and cultural aspects. These kinds of activities promote a better understanding of grammar, instead of learning a set of decontextualized rules. I include digital tools and mobile learning inside and outside the classroom because technology breaks the boundaries that the physical classroom imposes. Consequently, an adequate implementation of digital tools fosters language learning at any time and in any place. Furthermore, I believe that technology can help to raise students´ self-esteem and to help them feel more comfortable to participate spontaneously in class. To prove my hypothesis, while teaching in Thailand, I conducted research on the impact of mobile learning on the spontaneous participation of Thai students. This study proved that the implementation of digital tools helps raise motivation and self-esteem. I replicated the research at Columbia, and I am currently working on the use of Virtual Reality to improve the learning of prepositions “por” and “para.”
Teaching effectively is an ongoing journey. I will always have something to learn to become a better teacher, however, I can affirm that this does not discourage me, the opposite, it is my motivation to continue teaching.