Teaching Philosophy My career in TESOL began after spending the summer of 2008 in the village of Hoe, in the Volta

Region in Eastern Ghana as a volunteer educator. I then spent over a year in Seoul, South Korea, first as a private academy instructor teaching young teens and later adults. It was while teaching adults that I really fell in love with teaching. I began studying at UIC in the program for Applied Linguistics and TESOL. UICs program provides a balanced approach between theory and practice in the field of TESOL education. It was during this program that I met peers and professors who continued my education on what it meant to be a teacher and educator. The program at UIC greatly benefited me. I have met other teachers, most with far more experience, and learned from their examples of hard work, discipline, and pedagogical approaches. In addition to this I have been exposed to the history and conventions of TESOL pedagogy and SLA research. Without the guidance and advice of my professors and classmates, however, these resources would be merely information, and not an education. The coursework at UIC gave me the opportunity to practice with syllabus design and lesson planning and with translating written lesson plans to a live classroom of peers during practicum. Based on research and theory revolving around the Communicative Language Teaching approach to SLA, I built and experimented with course designs and lesson planning that required me to apply theory to practice and reflect on the results. This blog, as part of the coursework, has given me a space to outline my teaching philosophy, present my style and materials, and connect to an online network of TESOL educators and teachers worldwide. This network will be essential to my continued exposure to new and upcoming ideas in the field of TESOL, SLA research and educational movements. It will also serve as a database for my future lesson plans and course designs, a journal of my experiences in and out of the classroom and, most importantly, a space to reflect on what works and what does not work for my teaching. The good teachers I know are constantly working to revise and improve their coursework and refine their expectations and goals to get the most out of their students. It is my hope that I learn the same habit of revise, revise, revise, so that my lessons and teaching style are always evolving and developing. My reasons for getting into the field of TESOL are varied but interconnected. I believe in education, and in its potential for enriching peoples lives and perspectives. I have been taught to have an endless appetite for knowledge and to broaden my perspective at every opportunity, and I would like to pass these habits along to my students. Classrooms, textbooks and tests are a means of spreading information. I believe that teachers are responsible for weaving that information into knowledge. It is my belief, and not an uncontroversial one, that English language education (as well as education in mathematics, economics, and computer technology) is the first step in granting people negatively affected by globalization and its related phenomena the means to participate and change the systems that impact their lives. Only through access and participation, I believe, can victims of powerful market forces mediate and ideally reverse the negative outcomes of exploitative economic practices. For this reason, I wish to use my experience and training in English language education and work with nonprofit and non-governmental organizations that develop micro-finance and micro-lending programs designed to put communities on the road towards self-sustainability and market participation. In addition to being an educator, I would like to become involved in the process of micro-finance and micro-lending somewhere down the line, specifically in communities that have been traditionally excluded from participation in global markets, yet are heavily influenced by global prices, outsourcing and developments that lead to phenomena such as brain-drain, community erosion, joblessness, low wages, and resultant social unrest.

I am also interested in staying up to date with the latest innovations in pedagogy and latest markets for English language acquisition, including the private sector. Ideally I would like to work in the public sector for a number of years, taking a few months out of the year to volunteer my time with not-for-profit projects, gradually increasing my involvement in the not-for-profit sector, specifically working with adult literacy campaigns, community development projects and small business start-ups. My idea of a teacher is a person who reaches beyond classroom activities and examinations and encourages students to apply their education to tasks in the real world. TESOL is an ideal gateway to become involved in community development and enrichment that would, ideally, ensure the continuity of culture, language and tradition for communities who are at risk of losing all three in the face of the transforming powers of foreign markets. English language education allows for market access, and participation in markets means having a viable voice. I wish to help my students achieve this access.