Monday, Dec 19, 2022
Shan Meisner awarded 2022 Graduate Merit Award from Executive Women of New Jersey
by Rachel Stengel '14, '20
Shan Meisner is the recipient of a 2022 Graduate Merit Award from Executive Women of New Jersey. The award includes a $2,500 scholarship to support non-traditional female students pursuing graduate degrees.
Meisner is enrolled in Rider’s Master of Arts in Teaching program and is specializing in English as a second language (ESL) for kindergarten through 12th grade. She is currently a student teacher at Amsterdam Elementary School in Hillsborough, New Jersey. Set to graduate this month, the award was a pleasant surprise to end her academic career.
“I was in the throes of student teaching and forgot that I even applied,” she says. “I was thrilled when I heard. It is such a bolstering feeling to get that support in the sense that people are happy to invest in you. It’s especially heartwarming that it’s from an organization dedicated to supporting women.”
Holding a Master of Education in College Student Affairs, Meisner spent the last six years as a career coach at institutions of higher education. She especially enjoyed working with first-generation and international students, many of whom did not primarily speak English at home. During the pandemic, Meisner desired a way to connect her love of education with her passion for languages and culture. She says she career coached herself to find a better fit for her interests. After an assuring call with Dr. Kathleen Pierce, professor in the Department of Graduate Education, Leadership, and Counseling, and her first class in the program with Dr. Maria Villalobos-Buehner, she was breathing a sigh of relief.
“Immediately, I felt like I was in the right place with people who really care about multicultural students,” she says. “Every class validated my decision and I thought, ‘This is exactly what I want to be doing.’”
Meisner’s passion for teaching English as a second language was also rewarded in May when she received a $2,500 Dr. Jessie Reppy Memorial Scholarship from the professional association New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages/New Jersey Bilingual Educators.
It is such a bolstering feeling to get that support in the sense that people are happy to invest in you."
“Shan has a strong interest in social justice as well as putting that interest into action by helping people at the margins of our culture like children and adults whose first language is other than English,” says Pierce. “I can’t wait to see Shan working with English language learners.”
Meisner was exposed to language and different cultures from a young age. Her father is of German heritage and her mother is from the Philippines. Though her mother spoke Tagalog at home, she did not teach her children the language because of the misconceptions about bilingualism.
“The thinking is that if students are bilingual they may be confused and fall behind in school, which is not true at all,” she says. “My mom didn’t know that so I grew up really just speaking English with Filipino culture being a part of my life.”
Meisner became fascinated with languages when she enrolled in German in high school and took a trip to the country. A seemingly inconsequential act of ordering a soda at a local McDonalds in Munich became a seminal moment for her.
“You would have thought it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened in my life,” she says. “I loved using language in a real-life context.”
She went on to earn her bachelor’s in German with a minor in Asian studies and continued to dabble in other languages. Recently, she’s been learning American Sign Language and brushing up on Japanese.
Meisner is currently pursuing a full-time teaching position in ESL. She has thoroughly enjoyed student teaching and helping English learners expand their understanding of the language.
“A lot of the time, it’s about finding exactly where the students are at with the language, using language that’s in their comfort zone and a smidge outside of it so they don’t feel scared to speak, but they are challenged enough to learn,” she says.