Dr. Tim Mossman
Simon Fraser University
Tim Mossman, Ph.D., is an educator, qualitative researcher, and English as an Additional Language (EAL) specialist. He has his Ph.D. in Education (Languages, Cultures, and Literacies) from Simon Fraser University. Before SFU, he earned both his Master of Arts degree in English Education (TESOL) and Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of British Columbia. He also has his professional teaching certificate from the BC Ministry of Education. Tim currently coordinates the EAL Services in the Student Learning Commons (SLC), a position he has held since 2007. In this role, Tim contributes to and participates in SLC activities such as individual consultations with students, developing and presenting workshops and short -term courses, and mentoring graduate students and student peers, all with a focus on EAL support. His professional interests include studying the identities of multilingual immigrant youth through ethnographic and discourse analytic methods.
Sessions
Forming Student Peer Support Communities on Campus
In this presentation, a case study of international student peer support communities in a private university in Japan will be reviewed. In particular, two pilot studies of training international student peer supporters will be explained. Also, the presenters will explore how to build an interactive and reciprocal community of teaching/non-teaching staff and students for intercultural understanding on campus in Japan. Possibilities of encouraging autonomous learning in language education in Japanese universities will be discussed.
Us-Them: Navigating (Un)familiar Social Practices
In this session, I analyze how one immigrant student from Hong Kong studying at a Canadian university invokes her identity as a member of the local Chinese community when composing an essay. Utilizing membership categorization analysis, I present two excerpts from an essay written by the participant for an education course on the social mechanism of “resistance” in the Canadian educational context. The paper highlights the complex processes of identity construction for immigrant youth.