Maria Antónia Fernandes

Dear sir or madam,

My name is Maria Antónia and I am an english and portuguese teacher. For me, teaching is a vocation, a way of raising self-awareness a sense of critical thought and giving social and cultural insight to the students. I really believe that education is the base of any civilized country and culture and I'm very happy to have an active role in achieving such goals.
In terms of education and training I've studied in the University of Minho, in Portugal. I studied literature, pedagogy, psychology, culture all subjects related to english and portuguese and education in general. During that time I've worked in pedagogical projects where the focus was to create a learning/teaching process based in autonomy, responsability, motivation and self-awareness in the classroom. The main goal was to encourage the student to have a creative role in the learning process in order to be constructive, and also bearing in mind openness, positive reinforcement, self-esteem and cultural particularities of my student's groups. By using these kinds of techniques I've discovered that my students were much more engaged in the learning process, more independent, they were able to assume responsabilities, tolerate frustration and attempt new tasks and challenges.
Developing these resources I've done a project in a public school using the students as the center of the learning/teaching process using tools like the multi-level teaching, functioning as a monitor while they created their exercises according to all the different levels, knowledge, main difficulties, different types of learning backgrounds, etc and the result was that by finding out that they were the center of the classroom, they were much more motivated, engaged and self-aware of their abilities. This experience helped them to learn at their own pace, how to work well in a group, how to use self-access materials (exercises for them to use independently) and how to help others to learn by being a kind of tutor. I also believe in active learning where students have to solve problems, answer and formulate questions, discuss, debate, as well as learn how to work in a team and organise a project all these principles help them to acquire critical thinking and rise the level of confidence in their knowledge and skills. I am also able to teach spanish for foreigners as I recently obtained the DELE diploma through Cervantes Institute with the level C2 (native level).

Besides this I've also studied theater, body language, and I'm also devoted to music, arts and crafts and now my recent passion is gestalt psychology (which I'm studying also) so all of these areas work as a useful tool to be used in my classes giving a much more practical sense to the english language and helping students to learn with pleasure and to develop their sense of creativity. Last year I've also worked as a monitor where I was able to use all of these tools using english as a way of expressing art.

I've already worked with all ages and levels( from elementary to advanced, preparing students for the FCE official Cambridge exams), in public and private schools, companies and private lessons too. I've also done some occupational commercial english courses for adults. I've taught english, german, portuguese and spanish for foreigners. For me teaching is a way of expressing my inner-self and as a teacher I see myself as being expressive, communicative, responsable, humble, dedicated and creative.

Thanks for your attention,
Looking forward to hearing from you
yours faithfully

Maria Antónia