Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellow Spotlight: Anna Chaewon Jeong

Anna Chaewon Jeong teaches second grade ESOL in Philadelphia. Her interest in working with immigrant and multilingual learners sparked as a high school student when she began volunteering as a Korean heritage language teacher for local elementary school students in Queens, New York. Working with young first generation Korean American language learners helped her realize the importance of language as a conduit for connecting with identity and ancestral history as a person of the diaspora. As an educator, she has come to love sharing and crafting poems about identity, place, and space with her students.

When I started working as an ESOL teacher, I sought after a curriculum for young learners that explicitly honored their languages and positioned them as experts. I wanted my students to feel comfortable and proud to share the ways in which they language in order to make sense of the world. PIO’s curriculum and fellowship does exactly that for me, especially as I learn from so many dedicated educators committed to empowering multilingual learners.

As a newcomer classroom teacher I work with students who have come from many different parts of the world. All of my students have been in the country for less than one year and they speak Spanish, Arabic, Rohingya, Bangla, Hindi, and Khmer. My students are eager to share their languages, cultures, and experiences, and seek to share, connect, and learn with each other. My students teach me and their peers how to creatively language with one another each and every day.

I love competitive word games!