How an English Major Found Her Calling in the Classroom

Emmy King arrived at George Fox University in the fall 2021 with the intention of becoming a teacher. Like many first-year students, she declared a major and began taking a few elementary education classes, alongside general education courses in the university’s Cornerstone Core Curriculum.  

Last May, the California native graduated at the top of her class as an English major. Emmy was also a semifinalist for the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, and is already realizing her dream of becoming a teacher after volunteering in Newberg’s Community Language Program and instructing non-native speakers on the challenges of learning English. 

Emmy’s four-year journey at George Fox reflects the power of general education courses to help students discern the work to which God has called them, as well as the potential of a Christ-centered education to transform students’ lives, but also the lives of those they encounter in their communities.

A Shift in Focus—and a New Calling

Being an elementary education major is the right path for some students, Emmy is quick to note, but a semester spent in Writing 111, a first-year general education course, helped her decide that an English major might be a more fulfilling direction for her. She thrived in her new program, and in a short time earned an endorsement to teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), one of many vocational concentrations the English major offers.

In her last year at George Fox, Emmy used her TESOL skills to help lead classes for Newberg’s Community Language Program, a free service for adults interested in learning English. Initially, she and a handful of George Fox students worked with Dr. Holly Shelton, an assistant professor of English, in creating class plans for the program. Later, Emmy and the other students (Arabelle Bruner, Sarah Frey and Caleb Henderson) were completely on their own, designing curricula and planning each class’s activities.

Newberg’s Community Language Program represents a unique partnership between the Newberg Public Schools, Friendsview Retirement Community and George Fox University, offering a much-needed service in a town that has a significant immigrant population. The program meets at Edwards Elementary’s Centro de Bienvenida (Welcome Center), and is the brainchild of two George Fox alumnas, Jody Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Edwards Elementary, and Elizabeth Todd, the English Language Learner program coordinator at Friendsview. The twice-a-week classes are free, as is the accompanying childcare.

Helping new English speakers learn a complicated language is a challenge Emmy meets with joy, evident on a spring evening when she and her peers taught their adult students the seemingly inexplicable rules of determining past and present verbs in English. The room thrummed with laughter and with mutual support, as students cheered their classmates’ efforts to speak and write irregular verbs.

Conveying the particularities of English to adult learners has sometimes been difficult, Emmy admits, but doing so has also helped her understand better the complexity of the language she’s spoken her entire life. Knowing this, Emmy says, will help her be a stronger teacher.

“We take the way we learn language for granted,” Emmy says. “We don’t consider all the nuanced things we learn in knowing languages. Teaching in the Community Language Program has helped me recognize how complicated our language is, and I’ve had to re-learn how to navigate our own language and how simple it seems, when it’s not.”

Teaching English to adults might be more challenging than children learning a new language, Emmy says, pointing to studies that show how quickly children can pick up language skills. Still, working in the Community Language Program has come with its own rewards, including helping adults integrate what they’re studying in practical ways, applying new words and concepts to their day-to-day experiences with work and family. 

“We were talking about medical terms, including injuries,” Emmy remembers, “and a student was able to tell me that his son, in Haiti, was going to the doctor because of a shoulder sprain.” That small moment of connection between student and teacher was especially rewarding, Emmy says, because he was able to articulate an important concern, in English, allowing Emmy to show compassion for him and his separation from family. 

Living Out the ‘Be Known’ Promise

Indeed, it’s this personal connection that Emmy values most about her experience with the Community Language Program, and she sees a direct line between her time at George Fox and the work she does with adult learners. 

“A Christ-centered education is about empathy and humility in vastly different situations,” she says. “Teaching in this program has helped me realize that we are all humans, despite our differences. The world is very big, and we get to know [these students] in a humble, Christ-centered way.”

After graduating, Emmy took the skills she learned at George Fox and her TESOL certification out into the world – specifically, the Czech Republic, where she is teaching English in a rural school.  

As her time with the Community Language Program came to an end, Emmy says it was the relationships she built in the adult classroom that will remain a significant part of her George Fox experience. 

"The ghost side of the statement about the Be Known Promise is to know others,” Emmy says, echoing the school’s motto that students will be known at the college, by professors, staff members and their peers. 

“I think I’ve gotten to know others within the community who I wouldn’t otherwise know,” she says. This personal connection with people in the Newberg community is not something Emmy anticipated when she arrived at George Fox. Then again, she hadn’t anticipated being a star in the English department, either.