March 20, 2016

To Whom It May Concern:

It is a delight to write this recommendation for Theresa Kelly. She is exactly the kind of person I want to see in the
classroom: fiercely intelligent, curious, pragmatic, and committed to providing her students with an excellent
learning experience. Theresa sees the world as a fascinating place that constantly offers opportunities to learn,
and she combines that sense of inquiry with a terrific sense of humor, something that Ive learned is absolutely
essential to successful teaching. I know her best as a student, so Ill focus on the qualities that I observed in the
classroom and explain why I think they predict Theresas success as a teacher.

Theresa took two classes with me at West Chester, Young Adult Literature and a senior seminar in World War II
occupation and internment, and impressed me with her focus and engagement in both. In YA Lit, I observed her in
a large class environment of 30 students. Theresa was always well-prepared and ready to join the days discussion;
she did not hesitate to share her views while remaining respectful of other opinions, and she contributed to
making our classroom a welcoming space for less confident or softer-spoken students to experiment with ideas
about our course texts. Her major project, a thematic study of representations of body image in YA literature, was
well-researched and beautifully written.

Theresa also dove into the poetry that we discussed in class and brought her analytical and aesthetic inquiry to our
study of Marilyn Nelsons A Wreath for Emmett Till. This text, an illustrated crown of sonnets, renders Tills life and
death in formal poetry and companion paintings. It is a difficult book to read, but my students rise to the occasion
every semester. Theresa showed a mastery of both the prosody and the complex content, which is exactly what I
want to see in my students who are headed into the classroom and will teach poetry as part of their curriculum.
Finally, we worked with some literary theory in the class, including articles on post-modernism in The Chocolate
War and critical race theory in Zetta Elliotts Ship Of Souls. Theresa was happily surprised to learn, as she put it,
that academia took an interest in the genre that I loved so much.

In our small seminar, a study of childrens lives under occupation and internment in World War II, Theresa again
proved to be curious and determined to learn as much as she could about the subjects at hand. Her major project
in that course was a study of education in Japanese American internment camps; it grew in part out of a class
discussion in which we were talking about everyday life in the camps and Theresa initially asked, How did people
get marriage licenses? and followed with, How did babies get Social Security numbers? In that discussion, our
class realized that although we were reading accounts of camp life, we were missing crucial information. True to
form, Theresa set out to demystify some of those things, and after preliminary research she chose to write about
how Japanese American children were educated.

West Chester University of Pennsylvania is a member of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education
In that class, we also looked at Aleutian internment, Pacific internment (Allied prisoners of the Japanese), and the
Jewish refugee camp in Oswego, New York. It is common for these topics to be new to my students, and they
often express disbelief and dismay at the way they were taught about World War II previously. Theresa reflected,
My favorite part of that class was learning about all these parts of WWII that I had never known. Of course I knew
about the Holocaust, but [the course] opened up a whole new part of history that had been closed to me.

During the time that Theresa was my student, I also learned of her involvement with our our student-run literary
magazine, Daedalus, and the WCU newspaper, The Quad. In fact, after Theresa covered a visiting speaker who had
spent his childhood in an internment camp, she received an email from a member of the public who was critical of
her coverage (and more broadly critical of any sympathy for the 130,000 Japanese Americans who were interned).
We took the opportunity to discuss that criticism as a class and weigh it against the information that we had
studied both individually and collectively. Finally, I know Theresa through my role as faculty advisor for Sigma Tau
Delta, the national English honor society; I invited her to join the WCU chapter as soon as she was eligible and look
forward to formally inducting her later this month.

In sum, my experiences with Theresa tell me that her norm is engaged, committed, and busy; she successfully
juggled multiple obligations in and out of the classroom during her time at WCU and took on multiple leadership
roles during that time. Her extracurricular involvement attests to her desire to shape her community in positive
ways; her in-class performance demonstrates not only her intelligence, but also the equally important traits of
levelheadedness, humor, practicality, and curiosity. Theresa is the kind of student who, when confronted with a
challenge or problem, immediately asks, How can we solve that? and goes to work. I have no doubt that she will
bring that into her own classroom as a teacher too.

In my opinion, the school district that hires Theresa will be lucky to get her and her students will be incredibly
fortunate to have a teacher who is well-prepared in the content areas, but pushes students to think critically and
ask questions. Finally, Theresa passes the highly subjective Halko Test whenever Im asked to recommend a
BSEd student for a job, I always ask myself, Would I want this person teaching my kids? With Theresa, the
answer is a resounding YES!

Sincerely,

Dr. Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Associate Professor of English

ghalko@wcupa.edu

West Chester University of Pennsylvania is a member of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education