Bringing a Piece of Kentucky to the Taiwanese Classroom
For the 2017-18 academic year, my alma mater, Western Kentucky University (WKU), hosted a Taiwanese Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) to help tutor students currently studying Mandarin Chinese in the university’s Chinese Flagship Program. As a recent graduate of that program, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the two of us essentially switched places—she went to WKU and I came to Taipei. The FLTA was named Pia Lin. She also happened to be the co-founder of The World In Your Classroom (TWIYC), a non-profit organization that provides foreigners living in or visiting Taiwan the opportunity to share information about their home country with Taiwanese students by guest lecturing at local middle and high schools. Around March, Pia contacted me to ask if I would be interested in volunteering as a guest lecturer for TWIYC. After reading about TWIYC and their work, I figured this would be a great opportunity to share a piece of my home, the great Commonwealth of Kentucky—a place most Taiwanese people know very little about, compared to U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles—with students. On April 28th, I attended the second of two training days held
