Meet Adéṣínà

This persona is a fictional profile of a UMaine student. It was created using data to reflect the challenges, successes, and overall experiences of some of our students.

3/4 portrait of a young dark skinned woman wearing a black turban with gold motifs, a blue top with short sleeves and a red necklace and bracelet set, smiling at the camera while holding a saxophone, ready to perform.

Age: 22 years old

Work: Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at UMaine

Major: Ph.D. degree in Physics

Family: Single, second of three children

Challenge: Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), First year in the U.S., non-American English accent

Languages spoken: Yoruba, Hausa, English, Russian

Location: Orono, ME

Where is home? Ibadan, Nigeria

Pronouns: She/her

Accessibility accommodations: None

Adéṣínà was born and raised in Nigeria. Her older sister is finishing her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in Moscow, Russia, and her a younger brother is in elementary school in Nigeria. She is a proficient saxophonist and she traveled many times with her ensemble during her undergraduate studies. Adéṣínà is excited about her first year at UMaine. She has some experience teaching, but not at the college level, so running her own lab section is still very new to her.

“I am fully fluent in English. It is the official language of Nigeria after all… but my students make a big deal of my accent and act as if I was not competent enough to be a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA). This is both frustrating and demoralizing, and I don’t know how to go about it.”

“The hierarchy is not very clear here. I can tell that I am more formal in my exchanges with professors than some of my peers. It is hard to navigate.”

“Some of my students made fun of what I was wearing the other day. I just thought this sweater was nice, but apparently people only wear these colors for the holidays? The whole class laughed and I don’t know what to say to these remarks. It’s like they are trying to find anything to discredit me and it hurts.”

  1. Given that many students at UMaine are not used to hearing people speak English with an accent other than an American accent, here are two suggestions to help students learn to understand your accent. The first suggestion would be to use a microphone in the classroom and make sure to face the students when speaking. If a student is using automatic captioning as part of their accommodation, or if you are on Zoom, this will help with the quality of the captions. The second suggestions would be to record videos to be posted in the course with corrected captions to introduce yourself, the assignments, the lecture topics, the work for the week, etc, and communicate to the students that you have made these resources available to them so they can learn your accent faster.
  2. Use templates for important emails, so communication is less of a barrier between students and instructors and between instructors and mentors. This can be communicated through the syllabus or informally between mentor and mentee.
  3. Prior to teaching a class, review your syllabus with a mentor, colleague, or instructional designer at CITL to ensure that everything is clear, free of jargon, and US centric as far as class management goes.
  4. Get familiar with the instructional resources CITL has to offer and discuss the specificities of teaching in a US and in a UMaine classroom. You can use our Meet Your Students page as a way to start this conversation.
  5. Find a community of peer within or outside the department to break the isolation. CITL offers programming for graduate students, the Graduate School as well as the Graduate Student Government also offer opportunities for graduate students to get together.

“Events organized by the Office of International Programs to help new international students navigate life in the U.S.”

“Weekly check-ins with the instructor for whom I teach the lab section to discuss the content for the next class and lab but also whatever else is going on in the classroom, as well as classroom culture in the U.S., and more specifically at UMaine.”

“Training programs organized by CITL for graduate teaching assistant where I can meet other GTAs from different departments.”