Nancy Wood

Adjunct ESL Instructor

Nurturer/Questioner/Learner

“I went to Europe with a one-way ticket. I got job teaching English in the Netherlands. I could have gotten away without learning Dutch, but didn’t really want to. In my Dutch-as-a-second-language class, I was the only English speaker in a group of people, from all over the place. When I later started teaching ESL in the U.S., I knew from my experience how it feels to walk into either a university or a community college speaking a different first language than the language of the school. You have to try to survive in the language that you’re trying to learn at that moment. So I guess that would be the thing that probably shaped me most.”

Designing for Growth

Human-driven growth

“I love my students. I love teaching them. Part of the reason I love teaching my nursing-assisting class for English language learners is I’m teaching them about the human body. I’m not just teaching them English — we’re doing the class in English, and my job is to teach them English AND basic human biology at the same time. When I’m teaching content, and English is simply the tool to learn that content, I feel comfortable.”

AI-driven growth

“A student can actually interact with [an AI] bot in real time, and work on their oral fluency. I think that would be a great tool … for language learning. If you have students who are just too shy to talk to people in real life, having an AI tool where they can practice actual interactive conversations — that are not the same every time — is totally fantastic. In language, speaking a second language is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger you get, the more competent you get … So that active piece [using an AI tool] is the piece that is most exciting.”

An illustration that represents AI and technology with three lines evolving in colors with a gradient. The primary graphic are the letters AI inside of a technological chip

AI vs. Human-driven growth

“If I’m teaching, and I want to make my class … a little bit more vibrant, or give the students a listening activity or a roleplay to do in class, I’ll use AI to generate a rough draft of a dialogue that is very generic. I’ll even tell it to be very generic, and then I will fix it. Then I will take the generic dialog that I get and put in some humor sometimes … it saves a ton of time. When I was writing [dialogues] without AI, I would sometimes hit brick walls, or I just couldn’t get started. But I also didn’t want to lose my creativity or sense of humor … I like to tweak things a little and make them funny. And I didn’t really trust AI to do that. And I kind of didn’t want [it] to. That’s why I ask it to be generic, because then I get something that I can play with.”

“In our program, we have both international students who might come from countries where they’ve had a lot of digital access. They are highly literate with digital tools and maybe already use AI extensively. But I also have students coming from countries where they still don’t know how to type on a keyboard and are struggling with using their phones and don’t know what a URL is. What am I teaching? Am I teaching digital skills? Am I teaching digital literacy? Or am I teaching the English language? And what’s more important to them right now?”
Nancy Wood

Designing for Agency

Human-driven agency

“I’ve not always been just an English teacher … I know how to teach a lot of different things. When English would dry up, I would go and teach fitness, or I would work in a gym. I taught yoga. So for me, the agency comes from self-teaching. I took a Dutch as a Second Language class, but the majority of my language learning was self-directed. I also taught myself how to teach yoga and Pilates, drawing upon knowledge from my background as a dancer and figure skater. I think the agency for me was in teaching myself whatever I needed to know in order to get a job. And then I would make that happen.”

AI-driven agency

“One of the biggest barriers is just pure overwhelm. People don’t know where to start. Our college president has convened a task force for exploring AI, and I have done some work as a part of this task force. As I talk to faculty on campus, I see a huge divide among faculty members in terms of both experience with AI and attitudes about AI. The faculty members who really don’t know anything about it are not comfortable, don’t know what to do with it, and feel that they have no agency because they don’t know where to start. There needs to be training provided to educators; they can’t just run around and do this on their own … There needs to be guidance for faculty. It’s hard to figure out how somebody is going to have the time to both continue to teach their own thing and then learn a whole new way to teach. My adjunct colleagues and I feel the burden of needing to be nimble and embrace emerging technologies while at the same time receiving little to no paid support from our institutions on how to make this shift … Exhausting and demoralizing a large group of underpaid educators can not be a part of any pathway to AI use in education, and certainly not part of a human-centered approach. Human educators must be provided with training, support, and fair remuneration as they adapt to and develop innovative ways of implementing emergent technologies. If human educators are centered as much as human learners are, [AI in] education will have a bright future.”

AI vs. Human-driven agency

“I think where the human-led part comes in is at the leadership level of an institution. Humans have to decide. As educational institutions, we are grappling with trying to figure out how we want to use it at our institution. How are we going to make sure that there’s equal access for everyone who is part of our institution? Then there’s this third ethical piece: If someone is worried about data mining, how does somebody ethically opt out? Do we have to? Do we have to let someone opt out if they really don’t want to use it? And then what if we have a class with 30 students in it? And five of them choose to opt out? Does the teacher have to suddenly teach two classes in two different ways? I mean, how do we do this?”

“[AI] would be a great thing for my students just to practice having conversations. But I’m not sure if I can ethically ask them to do that yet. I’m not sure if I know what’s happening with their data when they use it, and I don’t know if [they] know how to protect themselves. [Sometimes] their language skills are low or intermediate, and they don’t have digital abilities to know what I’m talking about when I say data. You know, agency [with AI] is for people to be able to make their own choices around how they want to use it.”
Nancy Wood

Designing for Belonging

Human-driven belonging

“I will allow somebody who can’t get a babysitter to bring their kid. I’ve had multiple children at all of my classes … One of my students had twins, and it was really cold, and they were dressed as bear cubs. That was really great, because she had 8-month-old twins, and she [said], ‘I don’t think I can come to class, my babysitter is sick.’ I said, ‘Bring the kids …’ Whenever anybody’s kid comes, in all of the classes that I’ve taught, everybody’s interacting with the kid … everybody was taken care of. It wasn’t just me that was holding the little boy, but it was everybody, holding the little boy. Learning didn’t suffer that day. It was enhanced.”

AI-driven belonging

“In the past, the [language learning] bots were not good enough [at speech recognition]. And I think students with slightly accented English were getting penalized and it was demoralizing. They would say things and the bot wouldn’t recognize it. And that’s not great. But if speech recognition gets to the point where it really understands accented English at the same rate that most English speakers would understand multiple accents, that’s a fantastic tool because it gives those shy students the chance to build up confidence and … feel more comfortable going out into the world.”

AI vs. Human-driven belonging

“If I’m only teaching English, for the sake of learning English, I have to know why I’m teaching it now. Especially for my international students … who are using AI a lot, who are looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I don’t need you to teach me the same way you did in the past. I need you to help me learn for the future.’ [They’ll say,] ‘Why do we have to do this, we’ve got this thing that we can put in our ear, it’ll translate for us. I can translate all my essays. I can translate every book I get.’ If they don’t see the value of English, I’m not sure if I have to force them to see the value of English … My colleagues [felt] like English was something that we should value. It’s a skill [the students] really needed. It’s going to get them places … But I understand somebody saying, ‘Hey, I don’t need to be perfect in English anymore, and it’s OK for me to say that.’ One friend of mine who is really comfortable with that idea is a Spanish teacher. Spanish is one of her primary languages and she teaches Spanish. She said, ‘Yeah, maybe in the future, people won’t need to focus on English as the only lingua franca as much as they do now.” To me this is an interesting thought. Could it be that with AI, English is not going to be the dominant path to belonging in global spaces as much as it is now?“

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