UNIVERSITY

VIU professor of the year
viu.edu
Dr. Rebecca Sachs:
Everyone at this University Dreams Big
University Magazine catches up with one of VIU's most distinguished professors
UM: First of all, congratulations on your academic
achievements, the success of the conference, and for
receiving VIU’s Professor of the Year award. What do you like
best about being a professor, especially in an international
university?
Thank you very much! What a humbling experience it was
to receive this sort of recognition. One of the best things about
being a professor at VIU is the inspiration I get from everyone else
who works and studies at this university. I’ve been so impressed
with the developments at VIU in such a short time I’ve been here:
an inaugural conference, multiple speaker series, new academic
programs, career fairs, and more. I see such passion, ambition,
and long-term vision among my colleagues, and I was astounded
by how many members of the VIU community put their efforts
toward helping to make the School of Education’s conference a
success – we had more than 60 volunteers! There’s really a sense
that we’re all in this together, and it’s easy to be dedicated when
you’re surrounded by people who set the bar so high.
And not to state the obvious, but interacting with students
from all over the world is a luxury. Every day, I’m surrounded by
proactive, fascinating people who are taking risks and challenging
themselves to pursue admirable goals, often related to improving
life back home based on the knowledge they’ve gained. As a
teacher, every year a whole new set of students enters my life,
bringing with them a whole new set of perspectives and a whole
new set of reasons for me to work on expanding my own mindset
and improving myself so that I can try to keep up with all the
developments they’re showing! Being constantly surrounded by
the drive to learn and grow is pretty energizing.
UM: You have experience at Georgetown, American
University, and several other prestigious universities. What
was the reason that you chose to be a part of VIU’s family?
I first heard about VIU from Dr. Ana-María Nuevo, a friend
and colleague from Georgetown who has taught in VIU’s TESOL
program. She mentioned how rewarding it was to work here, and,
knowing that so many students at VIU have learned English as
an additional language, I was very excited about the prospect of
being able to combine my experiences as an ESL teacher with my
knowledge of applied linguistics while also helping international
students get accustomed to academic expectations and writing
conventions in the United States while teaching content courses
in linguistics, language acquisition, research methods, and other
topics I’m passionate about. I also wanted to get more involved
in teacher training, and I was intrigued by the possibility of
gaining exposure to such a wide variety of previous educational
experiences among the pre- and in-service teachers in VIU’s
School of Education.
More generally, I was also very impressed by VIU’s mission
statement and philosophy, which highlight the importance not
only of academic and professional excellence, but also of values
such as integrity, open-mindedness, compassion, collaboration,
generosity, and service. During the interview process, it was
already clear to me that people here really do take VIU’s motto
of “building the future together” seriously, and I was attracted
by the fact that VIU is able to make a high-quality education so
affordable and accessible to people from all over the world. As
it turns out, I now have a lot more reasons to want to be part of
VIU’s family, but those were the initial ones.
UM: A “can-do” attitude permeates VIU’s School of Education,
as was evidenced by its successful conference. Educators
cannot wait to see what the School of Education will do next.
What, in your mind, are the next projects, overall goals, or
innovations?
I’m very excited to join Kevin Martin and other SED faculty
in announcing that we will be hosting our second Conference
on Language, Learning, & Culture on April 9-11, 2015, with a
focus on best practices and emerging trends in assessment. We
hope that bringing people together to share ideas in this area
will help educators, policy makers, and community members to
reconceptualize how assessment can work toward meeting the
needs and achieving the goals of all stakeholders.
For the Fall semester, we’re planning an Education Summit
on the Common Core standards, and we’ll also be continuing
with our monthly Voices from the Field Speaker Series, in which
we invite local community leaders, teachers, language program
administrators, and other visionaries in the field of education to
give practical advice, raise our students’ awareness of new trends,
and expose them to opportunities for hands-on experience,
professional development, and volunteering.
One of our goals in the SED is to promote more research
on campus, and with the recent launch of our Master of Science
program in Applied Linguistics, I can’t wait to see what sorts of
original research will come out of VIU as our students pursue
their thesis projects. Among my own projects, the one I’m most
excited about at the moment is a collaborative action-research
study on pre- and in-service teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and needs
regarding training in pronunciation instruction, which is often
neglected in teacher-preparation programs. Our MA TESOL
program is already innovative in offering a course focused
specifically on that topic, and I hope the results of this study will
produce research-based recommendations for improving our
curriculum even further in ways that are both tailored to our
student population and attractive to prospective students who
can’t find these sorts of courses elsewhere.
14 University Magazine, VIU Summer 2014
Summer 2014 University Magazine, VIU 15