Meet Lisa
I found OLC online, actually, because I was looking for opportunities to interact with internationals. I started teaching one class a week a year and a half ago. Before that, I was a tutor. My husband and I have been involved with internationals for decades. He is a professor, so we’ve always had international friends at the schools where he’s taught. And we’ve lived in China twice before with our family. Even when we were in graduate school, we were involved with a program that matched American students with international students. We had a friendship with a young family from Venezuela. When I was in my undergraduate program, my husband and I tutored Cambodian refugees in downtown Chicago. And so, that was our first exposure to befriending international people. When we moved here, I was just looking for opportunities to continue that.
I am a teacher for the advanced class. I am teaching life skills and a class about community involvement. What I’m trying to do is build on what we learn in the life skills class and look for service learning opportunities to get involved with different organizations in the NWA area. So, some of the things that we might do in that class would be to visit the GivePulse website to identify what volunteering opportunities are interesting to the class. We are going to visit, I hope, a few of the top interest organizations and take a field trip there or possibly have someone come to speak with us. Another idea is to develop some type of welcome resource here at OLC. This might be something that can be handed to a new student or that they can find online. We’re trying to learn more about the community and how the talents and skills that we have can be plugged in, regardless of where your English proficiency is. I’m hoping that this will make NWA feel more like home, so it’s not just OLC feeling like home when they come, but the larger area. There’s nothing worse than living in a place and leaving feeling like you’ve never made a meaningful friendship, or you’ve never been involved in a meaningful activity there.
Practically, you will be able to have a fuller experience if you can speak to the people that live here outside of your culture and home language, in addition to day to day survival skills. Even to have a friendship with another international student here would be difficult without English, because usually English is the common language. I work with the advanced students. They can already communicate, but it gives a greater comfort level to feel like they can initiate conversation and not just respond when they are asked a question. We have our little community here. They get to practice in a safe environment, and that’s a good step before talking to the checker at Wal-Mart or a stranger on a bus.
We were just talking about what makes a community welcoming in class today. We used OLC as one example of community. A community is welcoming when it is comfortable and has a friendly and inviting atmosphere. Thinking about OLC, a welcoming community is a place where you can try out your English and not feel like you’re going to be judged if you make a mistake. Everybody else is learning too. It’s also a place where people connect and have friends. I consider what I do with my students as something I do, because I’m interested in who they are and getting to know them outside of class. So OLC is a resource and an entrance into the lives of people, whether it’s my students getting to know me, me getting to know my students, or students getting to know each other.
Initially, what comes to mind for defining literacy is the ability to read. That’s how I’ve always thought about literacy. But when I think of what we do here, literacy expands to being able to communicate. Having lived in China, I know what it’s like to be functionally illiterate, and to have no idea how to ask for what you need or how to read signs. The class I teach with advanced students has many students who are educated and speak multiple languages. There is an interesting feeling of frustration when you are living in a country where you cannot use the reading, writing, and speaking skills that you have previously used. When I think about what we offer at OLC, it is speaking, reading, and writing with a purpose of acquiring more information about life in Northwest Arkansas and a representative sliver of life in the U.S.
My greatest hope for the future of OLC is for more students to come. I’d love to see us have so many students that we outgrow our space. We would have more classes running. Maybe one day we could provide childcare, so moms who weren’t able to access class actually could. That would be a personal dream that I would have.
One of my favorite things to do with my students is to go to the blueberry farm that’s in Tontitown. It’s not far from my house, and I’ve gone three times now with people from OLC. It teaches them about a family activity in the area. Sometimes in my class we’ll cook muffins after we’ve picked blueberries, or we’ll go over to somebody’s house to make some type of a cultural food that we’ve tasted. Everybody likes food. That field trip also includes the students’ families many times. It’s a fun family day. That trip incorporates three of the things I love: internationals, food, and family.