Today’s blog features Dr. Chimene Gecewicz, who graduated from the Master of Arts in the Teaching of Languages (MATL) program at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) in 1999 with an emphasis in Teaching English to Speaking of Other Languages (TESOL). Her perspective is quite an interesting one, as she is not only an alumna, but she is also now a faculty member in the program. Since being hired at USM in 2021 as our primary TESOL faculty member, Dr. Gecewicz has had the opportunity to teach all of the MATL core courses (i.e., Teaching Methods, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Practicum). She has also developed and taught a range of TESOL classes, including courses on multiculturalism, advocacy, and world Englishes. She is an attentive advisor, an invaluable colleague, and an instructor who good at drawing out the best in her students.
This interview with Dr. Chimene Gecewicz took place in June 2024, on Zoom. Read along to hear about her experience in the MATL and how her trajectory led her to USM in the first place and then back again twenty years later. Then, if any of you out there want to talk more to Dr. Gecewicz or if you have questions about TESOL, click on “Contact the MATL.”
Dr. Katie Angus: How did you get into TESOL? Tell me about the path that led you here.
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: It's really an a non-traditional route to getting into TESOL. I came from a family of teachers, but I thought I would never follow them into the field of teaching, so I was doing all sorts of other things. I was interested in travel, I was interested in languages, I was thinking about anthropology, and maybe being a flight attendant. Just anything to keep me involved with travel and being around people from other cultures and experiencing other cultures. Then the reality of needing a job hit me. I had a friend who had completed the MATL, and he was in Colombia, in South America, teaching English at a university, so I contacted him to ask him how he got that job and if he thought that the MATL would be a good thing for me to do. He told me that absolutely, he thought I needed to take a look at the MATL. I already knew Dr. Powell, who coordinated the MATL at the time, because he had been on my anthropology thesis committee, so I called him up and started talking to him. We decided that it would be a good fit. At first, I was thinking of maybe doing French, but then he talked me into TESOL. The rest is history.
Dr. Katie Angus: Nice. And what did you do after the MATL?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: While I was in the MATL, I had a teaching assistantship, and I was teaching French at Petal Middle School for those two years. The second year, Oak Grove Elementary School decided that they needed an ESL teacher, so my TAship was expanded to include teaching ESL in Lamar County. When I graduated, they gave me a full-time job in Lamar County, as the one and only ESL person in the district. I did K-12 ESL for about eight years, and then I shifted to an Intensive English Program at the University of South Alabama. I taught international students at the University of South Alabama in the Intensive English Program, and I ended up becoming the director of that program. While I was doing that, I went ahead and finished up my doctorate. It just so happened right about as I was finishing up my doctorate, the position here at USM opened up, and old colleague reached out and said, “Hey, you want to put your name in the hat?” I did, and I couldn't be happier that I did that. It's been wonderful.
Dr. Katie Angus: Nice! So how would you say the MATL has impacted you?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: I think the MATL was really life changing. It gave me some direction. When I started the program, I really didn't know what I was doing. I really didn't know anything about ESL or teaching ESL. I vaguely understood what it was. So it gave me a chance to get my feet wet in the classroom, teaching French and learning a lot of methods and techniques that I needed that I could then transfer over to the ESL program. Being able to do the TAship over in Lamar County, led to a job, which opened up an entire career. I think everything professionally, stemmed from my experience in the MATL.
Dr. Katie Angus: That's so good to hear! Just to let everyone know, currently Dr. Gecewicz often supervises the undergraduate student teachers, but her biggest teaching role is to teach the core classes in the MATL and to teach the TESOL classes. I want to know, what is your favorite class to teach?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: That would probably be a tie between the TESOL Fundamentals class and the Professionalism and Advocacy class. I really liked the TESOL Fundamentals because, like I mentioned before, when I came into the MATL, I really didn't have a very good idea of what TESL was or what it meant to teach English as a Second Language. So when I'm teaching that class, I really enjoy exposing other professionals to the field of ESL and TESOL, to the professional organizations, and to all of the varied settings where you can teach ESL. It's fun to watch as the students explore the field and start to understand all of the possibilities that majoring in TESOL gives them access to.
Then I also really love the professionalism and advocacy course, particularly when I'm working with students who already have experience in the classroom or they've already been teaching for a number of years, because a lot of times they don't know about the legislation that's in place to protect ESL learners in the United States. They don't know what the requirements are in terms of civil rights for the students and social justice issues for the students. It's really empowering for the MATL students as they go through that advocacy class, and they start to get the tools that they need to really be able to be a voice for the students and to be able to make sure that they're getting the education that they're entitled to. Those two classes are my absolute favorites.
Dr. Katie Angus: Those both sound really practical, and, as you said, impactful for the students. I was wondering if you had any tips, strategies, or activities you use in the classroom, when you're teaching our MATL students, or just things that they really seem to enjoy? Or things you do to help them be better students?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: That's a really good question. So, since the MATL, and the TESOL classes in particular, are an online program, all of the TESOL classes that I teach are online using Canvas. Sometimes it can be hard to create a sense of community or the kind of sense of community that you would have in a face-to-face class, so when I'm designing the classes, I really try to keep that in mind and find ways to foster that sense of community despite the distance between the students. There are two things that I've seen that have really helped the students to feel like they get to know the other students in the class. I use a platform called Perusal, which is a social annotation platform. When the students are doing the readings, they are annotating, they're making comments on the readings in real time, they can see their classmates’ comments, they can engage with each other in the platform, they can use emoticons. It's a way to somewhat simulate the kind of discussion you would get if you had a face-to-face class. The students’ personalities start to come out. They can be a little bit less formal in that platform. I'll start to see certain people will start commenting on particular people's comments, and they'll start to build relationships. So maybe you're always commenting on me, I'm always commenting on you, and we start to build a relationship. We start to know about each other’s students and each other's classrooms. It feels like a genuine relationship there between the students.
I also really love flip for that, and that's with a video platform. Because then the students can see each other, and they can hear each other's voices. It gives them a more personal way to engage with each other than then the discussion boards, which can get a little bit dry sometimes.
Dr. Katie Angus: Great suggestions! Another question I have for you is: what advice do you have for graduate students in TESOL?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: I think one of the big things for TESOL students who are working on the MATL is that most of our students are teaching full-time and have other obligations, other life obligations, so they don't have a lot of time. I think that also sometimes they don't think through how much time graduate classes are going to take, so they're underestimating their thinking of the class in terms of the amount of time that they would dedicate to homework in a face-to-face class, but they're not thinking about the face-to-face hours for a face-to-face class, if that makes any sense. They end up shortchanging themselves in terms of the amount of time that they're budgeting for the classes. So one of the things that I try to do is I try to meet with the students when they're early in their first course with me, and tell them, “you really need to put some time on your calendar that's designated for that class, just like if it were a face-to-face class, and you had to go to class three days a week for this much time. Put it on your calendar, and then put the homework time that you would have had for face-to-face class on top of that. Just put it in the calendar.” Because it's so easy to procrastinate. It's so easy to let it slide to the side. It's so easy to let the obligations at your job take over. Then you don't have the time you need to really be able to enjoy the class. You're just surviving the class. By upfront putting it on your calendar and prioritizing it, you can actually enjoy the process. I think for a lot of our students, it just gets to be overwhelming. We're here (a lot of us) because we love learning.
So by really planning that time, you can enjoy the process a lot more. You feel like if it's already on your calendar, you don't feel like you're taking it away from something else. It's there. It's part of your weekly plan. That way, it's easier for you to plan around it and balance your life because, you know, you're trying to balance your family life, your work life, your school life. That can be hard.
Dr. Katie Angus: Speaking of all the balancing you're trying to do in life… in addition to teaching and advising our TESOL students, you also research as a tenure track faculty member. Could you tell us a little bit about your current research?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: Yes. I have two things going on right now. One is a paper that I'm writing. I did some work looking at burnout and secondary traumatic stress and compassion, satisfaction, comparing world language teachers and English as a Second Language teachers. When I first started teaching here in the MATL, it was really interesting to me. When I was talking to my students, the experiences and the needs of our world language teachers and our ESL teachers were strikingly different in some interesting ways. Because the ESL teachers are so involved in advocacy for their students, there were situations where they were confronting trauma that the students experienced as they were coming to the United States, or maybe as refugees. We ended up needing to address that, especially in the advocacy class that I was mentioning earlier. Talking about how do you protect yourself from secondary trauma when you're dealing with students who have experienced so much trauma, if, just in the course of normal classroom assignments, students wrote about their scariest experience, for example. Well, their scariest experience could be really traumatic. Preparing our pre-service teachers or even teachers who are already out in the field to be able to deal with that trauma, and also to have the tools to protect themselves from succumbing to secondary traumatic stress as a result of exposure to trauma started to become something that I was more and more interested in. So in this study, we've been looking at that in both World Language and ESL teachers and finding some really interesting differences. I'm still working on the analysis of the data, so I don't want to get into too much detail about it, but I'm really looking forward to getting that finished and out there and sharing more of that with all of you in the future.
Dr. Katie Angus: Nice! And you said there was another project you were also working on?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: Yes, thank you. The other project: I also mentioned that I'm using Perusal in my classes, and so I've been collecting longitudinal data. Since I started here in the MATL, I've been collecting data on students’ attitudes towards using Perusal as an alternative to discussion forums. Now I'm drawing the data collection part to a close, and I'm starting analysis of that data next month. So far, preliminary looks at the data show students are much more enthusiastic about using Perusal than using discussion forums. I'm really looking forward to digging into that data a little bit more next month.
Dr. Katie Angus: Good luck with that. And now to talk about one final question that's hopefully lighter than time management, advocacy, research, and publishing. I know you have limited free time because of all you do, but what do you like to do in your free time? What do you do for fun?
Dr. Chimene Gecewicz: I love photography. I love traveling when I have an opportunity. That lets me kind of merge photography and traveling. I love travel photography. I like to read. I have a pretty long commute. So lately instead of actually reading, I've been doing a lot of audiobooks, and I love going to movies. I especially love foreign films, and I have binged more than my share of international series on Netflix.
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