Oluwatoyin Margaret Olanipekun
Everyone calls me Toyin. I received my BA and MA in Education and English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria and have taught English for many years. Through the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Fellowship, I taught Yorùbá at the University of Michigan (2019/2020) and have since had multiple reasons and opportunities to teach it. I am presently a project assistant at the Language Institute at UW Madison.
With my MA thesis, I assessed the English Language teacher training program in the faculties and colleges of education in Osun, a state in Nigeria. I analyzed the courses offered and their content with the National University Commission’s Benchmark Minimum Academic Standard and evaluated the extent to which the programs improve pre-service teachers’ communicative competence and prepare them for teaching. My research interest has since then evolved into transcultural communications, Yorùbá pedagogy, identity (re)construction and writing. With my dissertation, I am exploring the ways international graduate students, for whom English is a second language, construct and reconstruct academic identities in their writing.