During my time as a doctoral student, I have been a part of the AAAL Graduate Student Council (GSC) Steering Committee in various capacities. First, I served as a member of the Social Media Sub-Committee during the 2017-2018 academic year. As a part of this committee, I worked with Jui-Hsin (Renee) Hung on the webinar, “Meet a AAAL Scholar Language Testing for Immigration and Citizenship: Issues of Fairness and Justice” that featured Dr. Tim McNamara. Additionally, I created and publicized blog posts related to the 2018 conference in Chicago. After serving in this role, I then became part of the Steering Committee during the 2018-2019 academic year as a member-at-large. In this role, I maintained consistent communication with our members through social media, organized a sub-committee to assist with webinars and the website, and co-developed a YouTube channel with Andrea Lypka that was piloted in Spring 2019.
As an incoming co-chair for the AAAL GSC Steering Committee, I am inclined to refer to a slogan that was often used by my predecessor, Michael Amory, of “maintain and improve”. In my role, then, I seek to maintain what we have been doing in the GSC and to improve upon those aspects. Specifically, I am working with members of my team as well as others to further the diversity initiative that I would like to implement this year. While we are working through what this might look like or be, I encourage our fellow graduate students to provide your input related to increasing diversity within our organization as well as in the various events that we offer to our graduate students. As my research interests are related to issues of sexual diversity in language teaching and learning, I consider this as well as all aspects of diversity as important in relation to my upcoming tenure as a co-chair of the AAAL GSC Steering Committee. As such, I seek input from all graduate student members, and I encourage you to reach out to our team. I look forward to serving the graduate students and the organization as I assume my role this year.
The members of the current GSC Steering committee can be found here: https://www.aaal-gsc.org/gsc-steering-committee
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Learn about various AAAL GSC initiatives in this new video by Dr. Peter De Costa.
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