Academic tutoring
I am currently serving as an academic tutor at the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes (ASPSA) of the University of North Carolina at Chapell Hill. I tutor Portguese as well as general study skills.
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This experience feels somehow familiar and entirely new all at once. I had some experience with tutoring students from my time at Auburn, so I knew what to expect from student-directed, open-ended sessions (I was also trained to teach in these settings during my adult education master's). I also had some experience with teaching online and with tutoring Portuguese. However, being an ASPSA tutor made me significantly hone these skills by using them on a daily basis. This is my first time with tutoring student athletes, and I am excited about getting to know my students and helping them achieve their academic goals.
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This experience is still pretty new to me! I started tutoring at ASPSA very recently and am still learning the ropes. Feel free to check my ePortfolio again in a few months to know more!
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eportfolio program assistant
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Photo: AU Libraries
Photo: Nicoly Monteiro
For a little over two years, I served as a program assistant at the ePortfolio Project at Auburn University. Most of my responsibilities involved supporting our student population as they developed their ePortfolios. To that end, I facilitated several workshops and presentations, and helped my coworkers run several student programs.
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Most of the workshops I facilitated were designed to introduce students to the ePortfolio or to help them with specific aspects of ePortfolio creation, such as setting up a platform, writing reflections, and choosing what experiences to showcase. For some workshops, we were invited by faculty or campus partners as guest lecturers. For others, as was the case of our student programs, we promoted and hosted the sessions ourselves. Student programs that I facilitated included 50-minute introductory workshops; a series of six 90-minute workshops designed to help students create a working draft of their ePortfolios from scratch; and one-on-one, student-directed tutoring sessions which mostly focused on providing feedback or technical support.
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At Auburn, the ePortfolio Project is housed under the University Writing initiative. As a result, I have also taught several writing-focused workshops; some topics I've taught include using feedback for revision, reading difficult materials, crafting personal statements, and writing literature reviews. I have also participated in several career fairs on campus, where I introduced students (and, sometimes, parents!) to University Writing.
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Teaching was the most rewarding part of my work at the ePortfolio Project. I loved interacting with and learning from my students, so I actively sought to take on as many workshop and presentation requests as I could. This sometimes meant that I was teaching something for the first time, or presenting on topics I wasn't intimately familiar with before. To prepare, I sought the advice of my coworkers, who always gave me teaching tips or they introduced me to supplementary material that I could study. I also practiced my delivery several times, especially if it was my first time doing a workshop.
The experience of facilitating workshops greatly sharpened my classroom management skills, especially in regards to planning and delivery. I learned to make lesson plans with distinct times for lecturing, class participation, and activities. I also learned to efficiently carry out these plans, keeping track of time and developing strategies to extend or cut short sections depending on the needs of my students. The most interesting experiences happened when I had to adjust on the fly, like when a great question or an enriching discussion arised, and I had to consider how long to let it happen, when to get back to the original lesson plan, and what changes to the lesson plan I would need to make. Overall, I left the ePortfolio Project as a confident facilitator with a deep love for helping students.