I am a first-generation college student. I grew up in the suburbs of Paris in a working-class family. My dad was a electrician by trade: he never went to high school and hated his job his whole life. He instilled in me and my two sisters a drive to do well in school so that we could have more choices than he did. 

It was so important to my parents that we do well in school, and, for the most part, us three daughters did. Two of us succeeded in being admitted to one of France's most prestigious higher education institutions, the École Normale Supérieure. All three of us have at least one master's degree, and I now have my PhD. Even in the face of this success, however, I've never quite been able to shake an impostor syndrome that developed as I started on my path in higher education. I felt uneasy in my undergraduate and graduate work, and I constantly battled with the feeling that I was not good enough, that I did not belong amongst my peers. If I did well, it was sheer luck; it was only a matter of time before I failed. I still feel it now, every day as I sit down at my desk to write or to plan a class. 

It was the key support of a few instructors and professors who believed in me that helped me stay in school and that got me to where I am now. Today as a teacher and an on-going learner, I have strong opinions about the structure of college-level learning and assessment that both favor a certain way of thinking above other, and unquestioningly values a way of writing and thinking above others, be it in France or in the United States.

As a teacher myself today, my main mission is to empower all learners and provide a variety of learning practices that value different ways of learning and writing.

I believe that learning is a collaborative process that involves interactions between not only the teacher and the learner, but also between the learners. This belief is founded in the principle of learner-centered instruction, which values the learner's agency and ability to co-create their own learning experience. Because I believe in giving learners agency within the classroom, I strive, as an instructor, to foster a learning environment that is collaborative: neither bottom-up nor top-down, my teaching practices focus on the creation of a classroom community in which the learners turn to each other as much as they do to me, and in which I myself are attentive to the learners needs. This manifests in the classroom through different practices, from the simple one of giving learners choices as to how to perform an activity (alone or with peers, at home or in class), up to the more complex one of collaboratively creating grading rubrics for major assignments. In activities themselves, it often translates into collaborative and transactional tasks in which, for instance, each learner in a group has a different element of information they have to transmit to the other in order for a broader meaning to emerge.

I am motivated to create a collaborative learning experience for my students because I believe that individual differences sharply influence learning experiences and that by paying attention to individual differences, an instructor can increase motivation amongst their learners. This belief is anchored in a principle of identity and in identity theory. Identity Theory in Second Language Acquisition research determines that what to teach and how to teach it should be decided based on investment, on the notion of communities of practice, the notion of imagined communities and on right to speak.

Individual learners each come to the classroom with different sets of social, cultural and linguistic knowledge and skills; by paying attention to these, the instructor can optimize the learning experience for each student.  For my own teaching practice, this implies spending time, as an instructor, understanding the socio-cultural background of both the context in which I am teaching, and of each learner. The activities I design aim to help learners rely on and utilize their own background knowledge, be it linguistics, cultural, historical or other. I believe that this helps foster motivation amongst learners, as their individual identities are valued and their individual voices allowed to be heard in the classroom.

Embedded in my belief that learner differences and identity should be considered in the process of language teaching is my belief that a language classroom should be a multilingual space. A multilingual paradigm should be the basis of language teaching in the US: I base this claim on linguistic theories of language variation that understand languages as a continuum rather than separate and autonomous entities. The average US learner is not monolingual. In my language teaching practices, therefore, I move away from an immersive model of language teaching in which only the target language is practiced in class. I encourage learners to rely on their personal linguistic backgrounds to enhance their learning experience. In teaching vocabulary, for instance, I often rely on the etymological history of words because it allows learners to draw bridges between the target language and other languages they speak and therefore helps them memorize vocabulary.