Stacey Vanden Bosch

Affiliation

addalingua

Biography

addalingua co.founder, Stacey Vanden Bosch holds a Master’s Degree in Romance Linguistics with a focus on Second Language Acquisition from the University of Washington and a certificate in Dual Language and Immersion Education from the University of Minnesota. Besides studying, traveling, or volunteering in Spain, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Costa Rica, she has held teaching positions as adjunct faculty, delivering Spanish or world language methods courses at Seattle Pacific University, University of Washington, Hope College, and Aquinas College. She has also taught Spanish in several elementary schools, conducted English as a Second Language classes for adults, developed and taught middle school FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary Schools), and organized the first immersion preschool on the West Michigan Lakeshore. Immediately prior to founding add.a.lingua, she transitioned the Lakeshore immersion preschool into a private school, organizing community education events, identifying and training teachers, developing rigorous program guidelines, and ultimately growing the program from sixty to nearly four hundred students. Stacey met Lilah, her co.founder, at a Tom Petty concert in 2006. Besides their similar taste in music, they shared a professional vision for dual language and immersion education. By developing a standards-based program that placed as much value on Spanish as on English, they hoped to inspire global empathy as more and more students had the opportunity to “do school in two languages.”