Courtney Crawford

Hi! My name is Courtney Crawford and I am an American-Canadian dual citizen who will be traveling to Italy on a Working Holiday visa for one year starting January 2024. I'm currently taking a Level 3 TEFL certification course through The TEFL Academy and graduated with a BA in Psychology and Political Science from Middlebury College in 2023.

I am looking for part-time, paid teaching/tutoring English jobs after some visa and other complications occurred with a program I was supposed to participate in. I had also applied to and was selected as a semi-finalist for Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. I currently work as a college application advisor at a small consulting firm and was a peer writing tutor and Italian tutor in college -- I love tutoring academically and am excited by the prospect of working for an English tutoring service, as a language au pair in a home stay, or just freelance English tutoring! I speak and write Italian with medium to high proficiency and want to sharpen both skills while in Italy!

I have experience giving swim lessons to children aged 5-12 years old and coaching on a team and participated in an AmeriCorps position working with children aged 6-18 years old living in federally-funded housing. 

At Middlebury, I was a research assistant (RA) for three professors. I researched, compiled and organized data for my Political Science professor's book on the evolution of the White House staff and prepared PowerPoint slides related to American current political events in 2020-2021. As a Psychology RA, I brainstormed ideas for the initial stages of research on the impact of study abroad (and general abroad experiences) on individuals' sense of self, identity and growth. This involved cleaning data in SPSS. Lastly, I helped run a sustainability study aiming to understand the intersection of freshman students' motivation to act sustainably given varying degrees of sustainability in the community's social norms.

I love to read and write and swam competitively in high school (and still do for exercise). I grew up near the ocean, so love open water swimming as well. In Vermont, I began to hike and learned to ski and both quickly became passions of mine! I have Italian relatives on my mother's side who live in Siracusa and I took a semester off during college to live with them, so have some experience already casually teaching English to them. I enjoy spending time in the outdoors and doing art and would love to do both while in Italy. 

iAspire Consulting (Remote)

Essay Editor  (Fall 2021 – Present)

• Edit college applications (including common app and supplements) for grammatical errors and provide substantial feedback to increase clarity, cohesiveness, and elegance; Advise first-generation and international students on the college application process; Conduct individual creative writing improvement sessions

Italian Language Tutor (Middlebury, VT)

Freelance  (February 2023 – March 2023)

• Organized tutoring sessions to introduce two first-time Italian language learners to basic Italian vocabulary and pronunciation (focused on travel-related vocabulary); Exposed tutees to potential cultural differences

Middlebury College Psychology Department (Middlebury, VT)

Research Assistant (Fall 2022 – Winter 2023)

• Read and organized notes on academic journal articles related to ego development and study abroad experiences; Created outline of variables that could be measured in a potential upcoming experimental design 
• Cleaned SPSS data collected from a solitude research project conducted by Prof. Thomas
• Updated Prof. Thomas’s professional website using WordPress

AmeriCorps – The DREAM Program (Vermont) 

Evaluations Coordinator  (Summer 2022)

• Recruited DREAM participants and comparison youth from across Vermont and collected data for a quasi-experimental design study investigating the effect of the DREAM Program on child development
• Conducted surveys with children living in federally funded housing in an equitable and empathic manner              

Middlebury College Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research (Middlebury, VT)   

Peer Writing and Italian Tutor (Fall 2020 – Fall 2022)

• Worked with individual students in College Writing classes at Middlebury College in-person and over zoom to improve their writing in terms of structure, coherence, and voice, rather than merely as an editor
• Organized group tutoring sessions; Conducted brainstorming writing activities with a collaboration focus
• Helped write a 4-page Statement on Anti-Racist and Social Justice Work in the Middlebury Writing Center
• Tutored first-year Italian language students, focusing on grammar and pronunciation

Middlebury College Political Science Department (Middlebury, VT)

Research Assistant  (Summer 2020 – Summer 2021)

• Searched for biographical information for presidential aides (including, but not limited to, time in the White House and previous occupations) and coded information into Google Spreadsheets
• Revised an occupation coding system to better suit the research being conducted
• Read and summarized research articles on bias in policing, political polarization, and the 2020 presidential election into PowerPoint slides to be presented weekly through Zoom for Middlebury’s Politics Luncheons
• Revamped Political Science lecture slides with updated graphs, charts, and summaries 

The Middlebury Campus Newspaper 

Local Section Contributing Writer & Online Editor  (Fall 2018 – Spring 2020)

• Uploaded articles weekly to the Local section online, including summarizing articles, adding attachments, pull quotes and URLs using Adobe InDesign; Communicated with Local Section Editors about specifics for weekly publications 
• Wrote approximately one article per month for the Local section as a contributing writer

Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT)

Bachelor of Arts, Psychology Major and Political Science Minor (February 2023)

GPA: 3.85; College Scholar (highest academic honor)

Relevant Course Work: Italian Culture: Fascism-Present, Studio Indipendente: Natalia Ginzburg, Il cinema d’autore: 1945-2020, Contemplative Education, American Politics, International Politics, Education Seminar, Social Psychology, Emotions, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies