The year after I graduated college with a B.A. in French and Spanish, I taught French as a substitute teacher in a local high school. After this experience, I immediately and loudly declared to anyone who would listen that I would never want to be a teacher. Over the following two years as I worked on my M.A. and taught French as a teaching assistant, I began to realize that I had been hasty in my declaration. The more time I spent learning about teaching, the more rewarding I found every aspect of my position as a teaching assistant. I began to enjoy crafting lesson plans, developing assessments and rubrics, creating a positive and engaging classroom environment, and building relationships with my students.
Becoming a French professor has been my ultimate career goal since I finished my M.A. in French in 2014. I love taking part in my students’ language journeys and encouraging the development of their transcultural communicative competence. While students learn and grow at different paces, I hope for each of my students to grow in (1) their knowledge of and ability to use the French language; (2) their understanding of French and francophone culture(s), and, through this knowledge, their understanding of themselves and their own culture; and (3) their desire to continue learning French after the end of the course. My goal in my language classes is to guide my students in the development of their transcultural communicative competence and prepare them for multimodal interactions in a global world.
Dr. Chelsea Tanous 