Bilingual Texas A&M Student Pursues Career Teaching English

COLLEGE STATION, Jan. 19, 2010 – While all children dream of what they want to be when they grow up, Nancy Barrera always knew she would teach. Raised in the border town of Roma, Texas, Barrera, who was the only member of her family educated in the United States, grew up speaking both Spanish and English. So it was her mother’s yearning to learn the English language that led the junior English major at Texas A&M University to discover her love of teaching.

“Every day when I would come home from school, I would teach my mother what I had learned in English class,” Barrera said with pride. “I would pretend that I was the teacher, and at the end of my lecture it would bring joy to my heart that my mother had learned something new because of me.”

After years of the informal English lessons, it finally paid off. Barrera’s support led her mother to the University of Texas Pan American, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education this past spring.

“Recognizing that I could be influential in someone else’s life by helping them achieve higher education is what motivates me to become a teacher,” Barrera said. “Making a difference in students’ lives as they achieve greatness influences my aspiration to become an educator of young minds.

Barrera hopes to teach high school English in order to share her love of language. She is enrolled in the Secondary Post-Baccalaureate Certification Program, which is designed for students who wish to teach at the high school level. She also holds the Natalou T. and Kenneth P. Pipes ’52 Endowed Scholarship, which supports a junior or senior English major earning teacher certification. Providing her with not only financial support, the Pipes scholarship reinforces Barrera’s dream by allowing her to be involved on and off campus while taking classes full time.

Barrera devotes much of her time to extracurricular activities that are near and dear to her heart.

As a reporter for the lifestyle section of ‘The Battalion,’ Texas A&M’s student newspaper, Barrera says she enjoys being assigned articles on topics ranging from rain boot style to the Memorial Student Center’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month.

“Working for ‘The Battalion’ has helped with my communication skills and has greatly increased my confidence levels,” said Barrera. “This will help my teaching in creating a comfortable atmosphere for the students to communicate with each other and me.”

Barrera is also a member of Aggie School Volunteers, a student organization that works with local schools to bring in volunteers who mentor and tutor children in the Brazos Valley.

“Volunteering not only gives me a sense of the teaching environment that I will get into in the near future, but it gives me experience that I can’t really get elsewhere,” said Barrera.

Rosalynn Carter once said, “You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.”

As for following through with her dream of becoming a teacher, Barrera hopes to bring her Mexican culture into the classroom to teach students about transnationalism and diversity.

“Due to my Mexican heritage, I will be able to bring transnationalism and diversity to my classroom,” said Barrera. “I hope my classroom will be accepting of divergent ethnicities and will recognize differences among dissimilar backgrounds.”