About Me 

My name is Bushra Elfandi (بشرى الفاندي), and I am a graduate of the Language Teaching Studies Master's Program. I graduated from the University of Oregon in 2022 with my Bachelor’s in Psychology and a certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). Where am I from? Well, to me home is everywhere but also nowhere. I was born in the States and moved around often as a child, from Washington to Oregon, then from Libya to the United Kingdom. Being immersed in such multicultural and multilingual environments from a very young age allowed me to realize that language interacts with our world in a beautiful but also very complex manner, which led me to pursue the field of linguistics. 

As a simultaneous bilingual speaker of English and Arabic, language was intertwined with my identity as a “third culture child.” My bedtime stories not only consisted of ‘Bambi,’ or ‘Snow White,’ but I clearly remember the nights of listening to my parents read the funny Arabic stories of ‘Juha’, and the majestic fables of ‘Kalila wa Dimna’. Every day, I would go to my international school in the United States and then in Libya, surrounded by languages such as Urdu, Korean, and Swahili, where my peers and I celebrated our cultures by holding language exchange sessions during recess. We would share with each other songs, greetings, and various vocabulary from our heritage languages; and as an international community, this exchange is what brought us together. In the latter stages of my education, I delved into learning French, German, and Japanese. Throughout my time learning these languages, I have never forgotten the excitement of being able to utter meaningful sentences, where each new phrase learned was not only a matter of grammatical constructions but connections to new perspectives and cultures. This is why I aspired to share that delight as a teacher to allow my learners to explore the connections between language and the real world.

I entered the field of childhood education during my undergraduate studies, and one of my very first interactions was with a dual-language learner who spoke Korean at home. Although my knowledge of the Korean language was limited, I have never forgotten the child’s face lighting up as I attempted to connect with the child through some words and phrases. Seeing the child grow and learn new skills through both languages brought me much joy which ignited my passion for working with children. Working with children brings me delight, given their honesty, innocence, and never-ending curiosity. This never-ending curiosity gravitated me toward the Language Teaching Studies program to further enhance my pedagogical skills.

This portfolio is a curation of work I completed during my undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Oregon. It highlights my competence in the six pillars of the LTS program: language dynamism, design, assessment, digitally-mediated language learning, teaching, and research. After graduating from the LTS program in August 2024, I embarked on my next adventure as a kindergarten teacher in Hangzhou, China, where I am gaining valuable experience within the field of bilingual education before pursuing a Doctorate. My current research interests focus primarily on language acquisition in children and the teaching of pragmatics. Please feel free to reach out if you are eager to chat, collaborate, or have any questions about this portfolio!