WCIU Alumni Journeys: Session 5

A look back at the TESOL Program with Kitty Barnhouse Purgason

Featured Panelists: Joe McVeigh, John Robertson, Mark Rentz, Sally Eimer, and Kim Macdonald

As we look back through WCIU’s 50-year history and celebrate our Alumni, we want to pay special attention to the importance of the TESOL program in shaping us as a University. We are excited to welcome Kitty Barnhouse Purgason, our former TESOL professor and the widow of Lee Purgason (a former WCIU Board Member), to highlight this special program. She will be moderating a conversation of WCIU TESOL Alumni as she leads us through this session of our Alumni Journey’s Webinar Series.

Kitty will facilitate a conversation with a group of panelists whose work includes starting an ESL program that led to church growth; high-level administration for international education in U.S. universities; consulting for the U.S. State Department; textbook development; accreditation review; teacher training in the U.S. and around the world; and teaching in elementary schools, community colleges, and universities.

Collectively, the panelists have served around the world in places like Mongolia, China, Japan, Vietnam, UAE, Oman, Iraq, Tanzania, Peru, and many more.

How you can stay connected

If you’d like to share your story, hear from other alumni, or explore ways to engage with the network, email our Director of Alumni Engagement, Andrea McAleenan at Andrea.McAleenan@wciu.edu. We’d love to hear from you.

Why this series matters

The Alumni Journeys webinar series meets on the second Friday of each month at 9:00 a.m. (Pacific Time). Each session highlights a different theme—such as caring for creation, health and wellbeing, church planting and missions, empowering vulnerable women, holistic mission, public policy influencers, entrepreneurial innovation, and community development change-makers. It’s a space for alumni to connect with each other and to the wider vision of WCIU.

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Watch past sessions

• session 4 Alumni Conversations with WCIU’s President

• Session 3 Multiplying Movements for Christ

• Session 2 Wholistic Mission At the Heart of Community Transformation

• Session 1 Stewarding God’s Earth and Natural Resources

We encourage every alum to take part—even if you can’t attend live. Engaging with this series helps keep the alumni network alive, strengthens relationships across regions, and helps you draw encouragement from what God is doing in and through fellow grads of WCIU.

Stay tuned for details about Session 6 and the next theme. We look forward to seeing you on the call.