Chelsea is a PhD Candidate in Language and Literacy Education in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a teacher of Honors and IB French at Davidson High School, in Mobile, AL.

In 2011, Chelsea received her B.A. from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, with the double major of French and Spanish. She spent the following year in Lexington, KY, working for the Ameri-Lingua Group as a contract translator and interpreter while teaching a high school French independent study course and substitute teaching.

In the spring of 2014, she completed her M.A. in French with an Applied Linguistics emphasis at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, working with Dr. Isabelle Drewelow. During this time, she also worked as a teaching assistant for the French Department. Her research focused on embodiment in and outside of the French language classroom, and her thesis was entitled “Embodied activities and communicative strategies: A case study of French informal and classroom conversation.” Chelsea has given a number of conference presentations based on various aspects of this study.

She began taking courses as a Ph.D. student in the Education program at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the fall of 2014, working with Dr. Amy Kyratzis. Chelsea is pursuing interdisciplinary emphases in Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) and in Applied Linguistics. Her M.A. research project at UCSB was titled “Socialization to French and English Conversational Practices and Intercultural Communication,” and was completed in summer 2017. While studying at UCSB, Chelsea taught French as a teaching assistant through the Department of French and Italian. She also worked part-time during the summer and academic year as an instructor in the McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic.

Chelsea advanced to candidacy during the summer of 2017, and spent the 2017-2018 academic year in France. There she collected the data for her dissertation, which focuses on the experiences of study abroad and teaching assistant visitors to France, and is titled “French Language Socialization Abroad.” She also worked as an English teaching assistant at the primary school level through the Teaching Assistant Program in France, while completing a Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate through the International TEFL Academy.

Since her return from France, Chelsea has continued her dissertation work while teaching French courses at the University of Alabama (Spring 2019) and at Georgia Gwinnett College (Fall 2019). In Spring 2020, Chelsea began work as a Remote Instruction Teaching Assistant at the University of California at Santa Barbara, assisting various departments through the transition to online teaching as a result of COVID-19. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she taught French remotely as a Teaching Assistant for UCSB’s Department of French and Italian.

Chelsea’s research interests include second language learning and education, second language socialization, issues of identity and investment, (inter-/trans-cultural) communicative competence, and the co-construction and negotiation of meaning in interaction.