Rate My Professor Deoksoon Kim

Deoksoon Kim is a Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development. She directs the Transformative Education Lab and serves as Program Director for TESOL in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society. Kim holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on understanding the needs of immigrant students to help them learn English and succeed in school. She examines how instructional technology facilitates language and subject matter learning, along with gender and immigration, formative education, and STEM teaching and learning for socioculturally diverse learners. Her interests include second language reading and literacy acquisition and the integration of technology into teaching and teacher education for language learners.

Beginning her career as a teacher in Korea, Kim founded a school for teaching English to inner-city children in low-income Seoul districts. She later supported pre-service teachers in Florida in serving English language learners more effectively, earning the Florida Outstanding Educator Award from the Florida TESOL Association and the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from the University of South Florida. Kim received the 2016 Best Article Award from the Journal of Second Language Writing for her work on technology in collaborative writing tasks and a best paper award from the American Educational Research Association Online Teaching and Learning SIG for studying online whole-person education, published in AERA Open. Her projects at Boston College include assessing immigrant children’s English learning strategies, partnering with MIT on invention-based science curricula for English learners in Waltham schools, a hydroponic greenhouse initiative with Waltham schools, and City Connects research on interventions for immigrant English learners. Key publications encompass "Formative Education Online: Teaching the Whole Person During the Global COVID-19 Pandemic" (AERA Open, 2021), "Learning Language, Learning Culture: Teaching Language to the Whole Student" (ECNU Review of Education, 2020), "Empowering Diverse Learners: Integrating Writing-to-Learn Strategies in a Middle School Science Classroom" (Education Sciences, 2024), and "Voices from the Industry: How EdTech Leaders Responded to the COVID-19 Pandemic" (ECNU Review of Education, 2024).