Highest Aspirations

This episode is part of a series profiling our Ellevation Take the Pledge Scholarship winners. Each year, we award five $2,000 scholarships to deserving English learners so they can pursue a higher education. One of this year’s winners is Isabella De Souza, a graduating senior from Milford, Massachusetts. Isabella will be studying nursing and Spanish at the University of Massachusetts Lowell this fall. She is passionate about being multilingual, an asset which she hopes to use to help her community through a career in medicine. During our conversation, Isabella talks about what it was like to learn English in school after growing up in a household that only spoke Portuguese, why some English learners like her gravitate to STEM courses, what an asset-based approach to teaching looks like from the student perspective, how she navigated being a senior during the pandemic, and more. Isabella’s responses to our questions serve to remind us that we should always look to our students when designing learning experien