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was 28 years old, roughly 10 years prior to her participation in this study. Since she arrived in the
United States, Vasiliki has been teaching Greek as a second language at various institutions in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Her connection to education was not only through
her role as
teacher but also as a graduate student. Altogether, Vasiliki has been teaching for almost 20 years,
and her interest in being an educator began at an early age. Her father was a lawyer, her sister
was currently a lawyer, and her
mother studied economics, so Vasiliki was the first educator in
her immediate family. Initially, her interest was in working with
children, and she had recently
developed interest in working with adult learners, as she recalled:
Ah, so I remember myself as a student I was always saying that I want to become a
teacher, I love teaching other people and
I love working with children, of course, but now
I have cultivated an interest in working with adults as well,
and this year, actually, I had a
class with adults. I’ve been teaching them Greek.
This new interest in working with adult learners had led Vasiliki to seek further studies to
prepare to pursue new opportunities in the public education sector rather than the private sector
as
she explained, “And even now that I am, you know, pursuing this master’s degree, and I can
become an instructional designer at a company, I feel that I would be in an educational setting
rather than a company.” To pursue this aspiration to become an
instructional designer at a
school, Vasiliki was currently finishing a master’s program in instructional technology at a
public university in this region.
Intersectionally, Vasiliki indicated the following characteristics as part of her identity:
able-bodied, White, heterosexual cisgender woman, English language learner, mother, daughter,
wife, teacher, and student. Vasiliki was a mother of two children, and she liked watching soccer
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games on television with her children. Although Vasiliki shared these characteristics of her
intersectionality, it is important to her to stress the point that she had no special affiliation to any
of these intersectionality groups as she stated, “But I don’t feel that I belong to a certain
particular group . . . I would say that I am a human on earth.” It appeared Vasiliki
had or sought
to transcend political affiliations and sought a neutral identity by embracing humanity as the
group she identified with the most. Vasiliki had completed various HyFlex courses as part of her
master’s degree program and stated satisfaction with the delivery mode and with her entire
educational experience in the United States.
