By Sarah Boyd | March 5, 2019
Knowledge and experiences I’ve gained through World View programs have broadened my perception of my role as an educator. Instead of simply being an English language instructor, I now also try to expose students to multiple global perspectives.
Anne Tomalin is an ESL/EL teacher at Chapel Hill High School and a National Board Certified Teacher with 29 years of experience. She started her teaching career in Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked with refugee students from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. She then taught English at a British international school in Cali, Colombia before settling in North Carolina. For more than two decades she has taught ESL/EL in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. She is currently at Chapel Hill High School (with has roughly 1,500 students); most of her students are refugees from Burma/Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Syria.
Anne’s first World View program was World View’s Latin America and North Carolina seminar 10 years ago. She has also attended our Building Bridges: Cultural Respect and Equity in the Classroom program in 2016 with her school’s Equity Leadership Team. Anne was a member of our Global Study Visit cohort that traveled to China in June 2018 (a “transformational” experience that helped her experience culture, expand horizons and “better understand the background and perspective of Asian students”) and as preparation for the trip, she attended the East Asia: Traditions, Trends and Transformations seminar earlier that spring. Recently, Anne has served as a presenter for World View – during our 2018 fall symposium, she had a session on “Applying Global Competence in Your Classroom: Perspectives from an EL Teacher” and in our upcoming Global Migration seminar, she will present a session on “Meeting the Educational Needs of Immigrant and Refugee Students.”
“Knowledge and experiences I’ve gained through World View programs have broadened my perception of my role as an educator,” says Anne. “Instead of simply being an English language instructor, I now also try to expose students to multiple global perspectives and encourage their awareness of world events. I also serve as an intercultural interpreter for colleagues by writing a weekly email post in which I share facts about the various cultures that are part of our community.” Anne is currently working on her NC Global Educator Digital Badge to further “connect content to global themes and issues in order to help students understand how the wider world affects us all.” We at World View are so thankful for Anne’s commitment to cultivating a global perspective, and we are thrilled to have her expertise as a presenter for our programs.