Dr. Lisa Jurkowitz, Dr. Kara McBride, Dr. Tahnee Bucher
Panelists: Dr. Lisa Jurkowitz (Pima Community College), Dr. Kara McBride (World Learning), Dr. Tahnee Bucher (Michigan Language Assessment)
Moderator: Angus Leydic, 3rd-year SLAT PhD student
Panelist bios
Dr. Lisa Jurkowitz was raised in Arizona but lived in France for several of her school-age years. The experience of studying abroad and traveling throughout Europe with her family sparked her early interest in languages and cultures. At university, she pursued Bachelors and Masters degrees in French Literature & Pedagogy, with a minor in Spanish. Subsequently, she earned her PhD in SLAT from the University of Arizona. Since 2000, she has taught English as a Second Language as a full-time faculty member at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. Throughout her tenure, she has served in various leadership positions and is currently serving as the ESL Department Head.
Dr. Kara McBride serves as Senior Technical Education Specialist at World Learning and Assistant Professor at SIT Graduate Institute. She focuses on teacher training and curricular reform across a range of programs in Central Asia, the Middle East, and globally. She served as World Learning’s technical specialist for a USAID-funded education project in Lebanon, which works to improve reading and writing instruction for grades 1-6, across three languages, and the integration of social and emotional learning into all aspects of schoolchildren’s education. Kara has led the design of online teacher training courses that have been completed by more than 35,000 teachers from over 120 countries, including Integrating Critical Thinking into the Exploration of Culture in an EFL Setting and Content-Based Instruction, both of which form part of the US Department of State’s Online Professional English Network (OPEN). Before coming to World Learning, Kara was an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Saint Louis University, where she served first as director of the basic Spanish Language Program and, later, as Director of the Spanish Masters program. Kara graduated from SLAT in 2007.
Dr. Tahnee Bucher (Ph.D. SLAT, University of Arizona; M.A. TESOL, West Virginia University) specializes in classroom language assessment and language proficiency testing. With extensive experience in the field, she has held diverse roles, including ESL/EFL instructor, teacher trainer, test consultant, assessment coordinator, and assessment developer. Currently, she serves as the Assessment Innovation and Alignment Manager at Michigan Language Assessment. In this role, she bridges research and action to ensure exams remain fit for purpose, while also evaluating, recommending, and implementing content and process changes to support validity and scalability.
