Community as Curriculum: Expanding TESOL Education Through Local Partnerships
Dr. Andrew Blick and Lisa Brisbois, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA
The Western Washington University TESOL Program has faced challenges with reductions of campus-based English language education programs, changes to community-based partner programming, and shifting student interests. As a result, we have worked to create a dynamic program that is responsive to the changing landscape of English language education, centering our program on community-engagement and student-centered learning experiences.
Introduction
Changing priorities, funding, and programs can lead to cascading effects throughout an institution of higher education, including ELT and TESOL programs. However, with changes come the opportunity to review programs and build community. In this article, we discuss how the TESOL certificate program at Western Washington University (WWU) is working to respond to institutional changes and challenges. We begin with an introduction of our program, followed by our process for (re)thinking community engagement and how we changed our curriculum, and end with a reflection on where we think our program will go next.
Program Overview
The TESOL certificate program at WWU went through a significant redesign in 2020 in the face of declining enrollment, competition from other online programs across the country, changes to institutional structures, and faculty and staffing adjustments. We reviewed and revised the curriculum with three overarching goals:
- Create a student-centered program that introduces theories, instructional methods, and professionalism in the field linked with opportunities to practice and see strategies in action.
- Engage with community partners to provide volunteer opportunities in a variety of settings.
- Reduce the number of courses and credits required for an undergraduate certification (from 27 quarter credits to 12) and align the new certificate program with the TESOL standards for short-term certificates (TESOL International Association, 2015).
Based on student and community feedback, and through conversations with academic partners, we decided to streamline the program, allowing for a variety of courses from allied programs across campus in language education, linguistics, and education to fulfill program requirements. The final program consisted of four courses or sequences selected from four different areas:
- A course from the applied linguistics and language awareness block (4-5 credits)
- A course or sequence from the instructional theories and methods block (4-7 credits)
- A course on professionalization and the status of the field (2 credits)
- A community-based volunteer practicum experience (2 credits)
(WWU TESOL Program, n.d.)
The four courses were carefully reviewed to ensure that the program, in total, addressed the five domains of the TESOL standards, providing students with an opportunity to learn critical strategies for teaching and learning English as an additional language.
We decided early on that flexibility was key. Western’s TESOL program is built on providing a flexible, student-centered certificate that can meet the needs of students in a variety of majors and professional environments. In lieu of requiring students to attend class at a specific time each week, we surveyed students to understand their preferences and created a schedule that can accommodate a variety of needs. Classes are offered in an online format, including asynchronous lectures, assignments, and discussions, with optional synchronous weekly meetings to review concepts, practice teaching, and discuss questions about the material. Additionally, we schedule a weekly in-person and live streamed “TESOL Talk and Tea,” in which we discuss current issues in the field, class projects and assignments, and any general questions. In our Talk and Tea sessions, we alternate between having a defined topic, such as “Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Teaching Languages” and “The Future of the Field of TESOL,” and having an open session where students can bring questions and we can get to know each other. We have found that the mix of opportunities provides great experiences for current students, former students, and faculty to support one another and build community across the program. In classes, we provide a range of assignments that allow students to select an option from a menu; all of the options relate directly to the weekly outcomes and the course objectives, but the menu gives students an opportunity to showcase their learning in a way that best fits their interests.
Rethinking Community Engagement
With the reduction of WWU’s English language education programs, the TESOL certificate program needed to pivot from providing students with both on-campus and community-based volunteer experiences to primarily community-based opportunities. This presented a new challenge because our community partners were simultaneously facing budget cuts and increased demands on staff and faculty. To begin our review process, we discussed options and opportunities with our community partners. We outlined what was working with student volunteers and identified areas of improvement. For example, our practicum experience course requires students to spend a minimum of 40 hours volunteering in an English language education setting. Our community colleagues indicated that this was a good amount of time for students to spend during the term to help in the classroom and get familiar with their programs.
As a result of these conversations, we learned that we needed to make some meaningful adjustments. One of the practicum expectations was that students teach a classroom lesson that they co-designed with their mentor teacher and the practicum supervisor. We learned that this requirement presented challenges for the mentoring teachers, who were being asked to take on additional work as their institutions and organizations faced budget cuts. As a result, they could not dedicate the needed time to work with our students to create lesson plan materials and carve out classroom time for a lesson delivery. In consultation with our community partners and our students, we elected to reframe this practicum requirement. We wanted students to have the opportunity to practice teaching, but we needed more options. We kept the option for TESOL students to teach in their volunteer classes since this will not be an issue in some practicum settings. However, we created an option where students could instead develop and deliver their lesson to the cohort of TESOL practicum students or at the weekly TESOL Talk and Tea, receiving feedback and support in those contexts. This change added flexibility that not only supported our students by increasing the number of volunteer practicum opportunities, but better situated the volunteer practicum work within our community partners’ needs.
The next problem that we needed to address was thinking of what practicum opportunities are available for students. We value our program’s strong community focus and ability to provide students with different ways of thinking about supporting English learners in a variety of contexts. After revising the practicum requirements, we broadened the opportunities for students, allowing for experiences that may have previously not fit within the prior practicum model to be available for students. This created new opportunities within the program design to structure scaffolded volunteer choices in the community.
Program Design Considerations
One aspect of the program where we wanted to re-focus our efforts was our commitment to community engagement. After rethinking the practicum experience, we wanted to ensure that students could begin thinking of options and opportunities for volunteering earlier in their TESOL coursework. We decided to develop a new course:
Title: TESOL 240: English Language Education, Advocacy, and Community Engagement.
Description: Introduction to strategies for integrating English language teaching with community outreach and engagement. Covers principles of cultural awareness, language education and advocacy, and fostering inclusive learning environments. Includes practical experiences in community-based projects, service learning, volunteering, and partnerships with local organizations.
(WWU Catalog, 2025)
We created this course as a lower-division, general education course so that our primarily upper-division coursework would include a new course with broader access and appeal. In this course, students analyze language education, policy, sociolinguistics, and community-based work to develop knowledge about the field and consider the various ways they can advocate for English learners.
Students also complete a community engagement project, in which they volunteer in any community setting and investigate how these opportunities connect with language education. To illustrate, a student could volunteer at the food bank and consider how the community organization reaches out to and supports English learners. The TESOL student would then create a project around supporting the multilingual community. Ultimately, if students identify a new opportunity for a community-based practicum directly working with and supporting English learners, they can continue volunteering and design their own practicum experience.
Reflections and Moving Forward
As our program, the field, and the needs of the community continue to shift among institutional, local, and national policies, our plan is to continue to revise our structure, ensuring our program meets the needs of the community and provides a valuable learner-centered experience for our students. Over this next year, we plan to continue to engage with our community partners and students to identify areas of improvement, and then keep making programmatic adjustments. We are learning from our successes and our challenges, and we want to continue to grow and support a strong student- and community-centered program that can provide a quality learning experience in times of turbulence across the field.
We invite the HEIS and TESOL community to learn more about this topic in an upcoming recorded presentation, “Making our work visible and valuable across higher education: An applied linguistics and higher education intersection session,” as part of the 2025 Virtual TESOL Convention with Miriam Moore (University of North Georgia), Matthew Allen (Purdue University), Andrew Blick (Western Washington University), and Lisa Brisbois (Western Washington University).
References
TESOL International Association. (2015). Standards for short-term TEFL/TESL certificate programs with program assessment. TESOL Press.
WWU Catalog. (2025). 2025-2026 Western Washington University Catalog. Western Washington University. https://catalog.wwu.edu/
WWU TESOL Program. (n.d.). Courses and curriculum. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Western Washington University. https://pce.wwu.edu/tesol
Andrew Blick directs various programs at Western Washington University, advises students in the TESOL program, and is interested in language education, rhetoric, curriculum/instructional design, and professional identity development.
Lisa Brisbois, an ESOL instructor with a background in linguistics and ESOL education, specializes in teacher training and language instruction, with extensive experience supporting non-native English-speaking educators.