To contact anyone on the board, you may email witesolboard@gmail.com and your message will be forwarded on.
Past President
Kari Johnson has been teaching in the School District of Fort Atkinson as an elementary ML teacher since 2006. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UW-Whitewater. Kari holds teaching licenses for Elementary/Middle Education and English as a Second Language. In addition to maintaining the WITESOL website and social media sites, Kari also helps with the annual Writing and Art Contest and is the membership secretary.
President
Heather A. Linville, Ph.D., is Professor of TESOL at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Heather prepares future teachers to work equitably and effectively with multilingual learners in all teaching contexts. Heather has several publications, including the forthcoming co-authored book (with Polina Vinogradova) Digital Storytelling as Translanguaging: A Practical Guide for Language Educators (Routledge, 2024). Her research interests include advocacy, critical language awareness, and social justice for ELs. She has traveled and worked in Chile, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and Panama.
President Elect
Natalija Krsteva is a Bilingual Resource Teacher at the Verona Area High School. She works primarily with students who have recently arrived in the United States. Previously, she worked as a tutor for international students at UW-Whitewater. Natalija earned her bachelor’s degree from UW-Whitewater and holds teaching licenses in English Ed., ESL, and Spanish Ed. Natalija is passionate about working with EL students since she also learned English as a second language. In addition to English, she also speaks Macedonian and Spanish. Her goal is to provide equitable educational opportunities for multilingual students and improve the quality of the ESL and Bilingual/Bicultural Education programs.
Treasurer
Marcia Mihdawi is a 20 year teaching veteran who has taught in several states and overseas. Her experience is primarily in grades K-8, but she also taught in the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The theme in her career is that her life experience, as a daughter of refugees, positions her uniquely to understand students of ALL backgrounds, cultures, and circumstances. She is firmly committed to a pedagogy and curricula that affirm diversity, equity, and inclusion. Mrs. Mihdawi works as a Middle School EL Specialist and would like to contribute to the WITESOL professional community.
Secretary
Kaycee Rogers is the CLASS Program Coordinator, working in the Licensing, Evaluation, and Support Center at CESA 2. She has 15+ years of experience as a language teacher and teacher educator. She has taught in a bilingual school in Colombia, a Spanish Immersion school in Minnesota, as a K-8 ESL teacher in Menomonie, WI, and as a Middle School ESL teacher in Eau Claire. She has been a teacher educator at Augsburg University, UW Madison, and now works with teachers adding ESL licensure all over Wisconsin. She is also a doctoral student studying how we support rural ML teachers who are on their own as the only ML teacher in their school or district.
Members-at-Large
Maria Hickman has a MEDCI specializing in TESOL and has been teaching English Learners since 2009. Her experience includes teaching ESL to adults in partnership with MATC as well as owning an ESL tutoring company in Argentina. Currently, she is the ESL Program Coordinator and EL Teacher Specialist at Zablocki Community School in Milwaukee. Ms. Hickman works with a large newcomer and refugee population and has created successful community partnerships and a welcoming system that addresses the needs of this particular group.
Matt McParker, EdD, is an Associate Professor and the Elementary-Middle Education (EME) Director at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. Before coming to Wisconsin, he served as an AmeriCorps member in a school where approximately 1/3 of the students lived in migrant camps, taught for 13 years at a middle school with about 35 different languages spoken among 900 students, and led a cohort of teachers (most of whom were born outside the US) in dual- and world language classrooms earning teaching licenses and Master’s degrees while working. His major professional focus is to improve the educational experiences for students who have historically been marginalized.
Chelsea Olsen Hurkmans is a passionate educator of multilingual learners with nine years of teaching experience in higher education, community-based programs for refugees and immigrants, and most recently in K-12. She was also a Virtual Educator with the U.S. Department of State in Bogotá, Colombia. Currently, she teaches middle and high school MLs with Wisconsin Virtual Academy. She holds an M.Ed. in TESOL from Mizzou and B.A. in English and French from Michigan State University. She is dedicated to serving diverse learners and to amplify the voices of multilingual and multicultural students in the pursuit of creating an educational landscape that values multilingualism and the rich experiences/perspectives/heritage our students bring into the classroom.
Katie Worple is the Coordinator of the Multilingual Program at the School District of Belleville and works with multilingual students at the elementary school. She graduated with her Bachelor’s Degree from University of Wisconsin Stevens Point in 2015, where she worked as a student employee in the ESL Department for three years. More recently, Katie earned her Master’s Degree in Education from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She completed a professional project about translanguaging and is very interested in continuing to learn more and implement more translanguaging strategies in her instruction.