Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: "About Patricia Bennett." Bio. InterculturalClarity.com. 2015. On-line. Copyright Patricia Bennett; used with permission.
Source: English Department Gallery Photos. Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
Source: Document Collections and Photographic Archives of the Grossmont College English Department. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District.
Patricia Ann Bennett earned her San Diego State College bachelor’s degree in 1972 with a major in Cultural Anthropology and minor in English focusing on American Literature. In September of that same year, she began a tenure as an ESL instructor for a local community college district that lasted over fourteen years, for which she innovated ESL instructional materials and teaching techniques and published a variety of professional articles. Bennett was also an active member of California Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (CATESOL), a professional organization promoting ESL student needs, teacher preparation, and cultural appreciation. Bennett served on CATESOL’s Board and was a program co-chair, as well as a coordinator for its Intercultural Communication Interest Group (ICIG), and presented at several conferences for CATESOL.
During this time, she was also involved in SUNY Buffalo’s Cambodia project, teaching cultural orientation courses at refugee camps to Indochinese refugees coming to the U.S. Bennett served as Program Administrator at the Cambodian Economic Development Institute in Phnom Penh, Cultural Orientation Curriculum Developer and Program Administrator for the International Catholic Migration Commission, in Bataan, The Philippines, and Cultural Orientation Curriculum Developer and Teacher Trainer for “Experiment in International Living/Save the Children” in Galang, Indonesia.
Much of her international experience in English language instruction would serve as field work for her program of graduate study at the University of California, San Diego, which she began in 1978. She completed the program in 1985, earning her Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics with an Emphasis in ESL pedagogy, after which she was hired in 1987 by Grossmont College’s English Department to develop and implement its credit ESL program. Bennett was instrumental, not only in the design of methodologies for ESL student assessment and orientation, but also in innovating over a dozen new courses—with links to counseling courses—in several skill areas, across five different skill levels. Afterward, the ESL Program expanded to include more full-time instructors. Along the way, Bennett developed a pre-vocational ESL program, collaborated on the Cultural Student Learning Outcomes, and secured and administered grants for ESL research and development. In addition, Pat was the College’s site coordinator for the campus-wide teacher internship program of San Diego/Imperial County Community College Association (SDICCCA).
Patricia Bennet also continued to serve in international projects for English learners. From 1994 to 1995, she spent a year at Egypt’s Mansoura University (and, periodically, in Cairo), working for the Fulbright Binational Commission to train Egyptian teachers of English for assignments in the fields of science, medicine, law, and agriculture. From 1991 to 1996, she served with colleague Virginia Berger as a core member of the San Diego East County ESL Articulation Group (which developed out of a San Diego regional CATESOL conference).
Her status for the Grossmont College English Department changed when the English as a Second Language program, which had been emerging gradually from under the umbrella of the English Department as early as 1996, transitioned in 2006 to a stand-alone department in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences/English. In fact, by the following year, Bennett, herself, would chair the ESL Department.
Six years later, at the end of 2011, after twenty-five years of service creating, building, and improving the District’s first ESL Program, Patricia A. Bennett announced her retirement; in March of 2012, she was awarded the status of Professor Emerita, then officially ended her full-time tenure with Grossmont College.
It would not, however, be the end of her teaching for Grossmont, nor the end of her career in ESL. In fall of 2013, she returned to Thailand to volunteer her training services to Thai English language teachers in Cha Am schools; her methods workshop utilized Cuisenaire réglettes, teaching rods originally used to help students visualize math concepts but adapted by linguists and language instructors to help teach concepts of sentence structure and parts of speech.
That same year, Bennett began a private consultancy, Intercultural Clarity, her ESL and intercultural communication teacher training business, for which she represented University of California San Diego in Taiwan and Southern Thailand, led workshops on Cultural Student Learning Outcomes at the annual state conference of California and Nevada ESL teachers, and performed intercultural communication training for private language schools in San Diego.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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