The Greenheart Travel team loves to stay in touch with their alumni and were lucky enough to sit down with Ellen Blackwell, a past Teach Abroad Italy, TEFL Italy Participant and current Trainer in their Language School!
GH: We’re here with Ellen Blackwell, can you start by giving us a quick rundown of your journey to your current position?
Ellen: So I actually started the first time with Green Heart through one of the Teach Abroad programs. So I went and worked out as a language assistant for three months here in Italy. And then that that wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I returned and did one of the TEFL courses through Greenheart, and I did that in Florence, Italy. And now I’m still here in Florence, Italy. I’m actually at the language school that the TEFL program is housed in, and I’m currently an English teacher there, but I’m also currently the TEFL trainer for the TEFL program now too.
GH: The Teach Abroad Italy program is a volunteer-based teaching position so you don’t need a degree but was the experience what made you want to come back and get the certification specifically?
Ellen: I was actually teaching for a few years in the United States before I did the teach abroad program. I wasn’t teaching English, I was teaching science, and I wasn’t exactly sure if that’s where I wanted to keep going in my career.
I thought I’d always wanted to live abroad, and I thought, well, we’ll try it out with the volunteer program. And I just really liked it. I really liked living abroad. I loved the culture here in Italy. And so I decided I wanted to find a way to stay and continue doing it.
GH: Do you have any stand out memories from either of your program experiences?
Ellen: For my first program, I think just living with an Italian family was the thing that stood out for me the most. I had traveled and I had been in Europe, but never to Italy. Didn’t ever study Italian or anything like that and to be almost thrown in there with them [the host family] was a really great experience to be able to, you know, learn Italian from Italian speakers and I was able to make a lot of local Italian friends through the family
GH: And from your TEFL Program?
Ellen: For the TEFL program, something that really stands out to me was the opportunity to actually teach real students from the community. Like I said, I taught before, but only ever high school and below. You know, even being here with the teach abroad program, it was more kind of like conversational classes, just talking to the kids. So, the opportunity to practice actual English as a foreign language lesson plans and teaching them to adults and groups of adults and things like that was like a really standout part of the program for me. It was a really great way to get experience and to practice before deciding this is totally what I wanted.
GH: When you were on the TEFL Program, you didn’t stay with a family but did you ever keep in touch with your first host family?
Ellen: Yes, I lived in an apartment with another girl who was also doing the program while on the TEFL Program. But yes, we do keep in touch, we’re still friends on social media and we send each other well wishes on holidays and things like that.
GH: That makes us so happy to hear! Alright you’ve talked about the journey from Teach Abroad to TEFL but now can you tell us a little about the road from the TEFL program to now being a trainer at the center?
Ellen: I was lucky enough that the school that the TEFL program is housed in was looking for teachers at the time. So when my trainer told me to treat this like a four-week job interview., I really took it to heart and took the program really seriously, used the job guidance information that we got throughout the program to help me apply and asked to work at the school that I was at and then luckily I was able to start almost right away. I finished the program and took about two weeks to do a little traveling and get settled and then started teaching English at the school. And then I was just teaching English there for about a year, maybe even a little less than a year when they needed a new TEFL trainer. That position took some time to get trained for and now I’ve been doing it for two years now.
To hear more about Ellen’s journey from a Teach Abroad Italy participant to a TEFL trainer, read part 2.
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