Today I’m going to share a personal story. I teach English
as a Second Language (ESL) as a volunteer. In March 2020, the local in-person
program I was working with shut down. I was fortunate to find a class at the
local university that focused on American English pronunciation for non-native
speaking graduate students serving as teaching assistants. The classes went online
in spring 2020, and all went well. At the end of this spring semester, however,
the university stopped offering the class.
For the summer and fall semesters, I couldn’t find a local
ESL opportunity that was easy to volunteer for or where I would feel safe. In October,
I was visiting a newly-retired friend in Boulder CO who was very excited about volunteering
as an ESL teacher online. I followed up with the sponsoring organization and
have now been assigned to my own student.
I am very impressed with how nimbly this ESL program
transitioned to providing their services online at the beginning of Covid, and
how this transition has enabled the program to greatly expand their services,
probably permanently. Intercambio was started
in 2001 to connect volunteer teachers with Latin American immigrants needing to
learn English (the students pay a small monthly fee to have some “skin in the
game”). Intercambio developed an ESL curriculum and offered in-person classes
that taught English with an emphasis on cultural exchange. Both teachers and
students were drawn exclusively from the Boulder Colorado.
Once Covid hit, they developed a Zoom-based online platform
to host their existing curriculum and started offering classes online. Not
having had any experience teaching online before, they limited class size to
one teacher and one student. As a volunteer teacher, I can access all
curriculum materials and PowerPoint slides for class presentation through the CC English web platform. Both teachers
and students can message each other through the CC English web platform, and
use that to access the zoom link for each class session. The various
capabilities of PowerPoint and Zoom enable me as teacher to add to the slide
materials in-the-moment, allowing prompt response to my student’s questions
during class.
At the beginning of Covid, CC English teachers and students
came from the Boulder area only. By now, they have recruited volunteer teachers
from across the US and students come from outside the Boulder area as well. I
live in Salt Lake City and am working with a student in Colorado. My friend lives
in Boulder and is working with a student in Maryland. The geographic boundaries
for this program are limitless, but I don’t think they’ve expanded internationally
… yet. CC English also plans to start offering ESL instruction in the new year with
larger-than-one class sizes. Who knows how big this program could get?!
