Semester Abroad

Meet Your SMCCCD Faculty Teaching Abroad in Florence:

Professor Maureen Wiley |  wileym@smccd.edu  | (650) 306 - 3416

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in history, Maureen Wiley bought a one-way plane ticket to Spain and spent 3 months backpacking around 15 countries, spending Christmas in Ireland with her second cousins and eventually settling in Berlin, Germany. Maureen spent the next year studying German and making friends that she still keeps in touch with. After deciding that she wanted to work in education, Maureen spent a year living in Galicia, Spain, teaching English as an Auxiliar de Conversación, a program for native English speakers through the Spanish Ministry of Education. She spent that year learning Spanish, eating octopus, and honing her teaching skills.

After returning to California, Maureen worked as an English tutor and later adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College. She was hired as a full-time instructor in the English Department at Cañada College in 2017, and since then, she has traveled almost every summer and winter break throughout Mexico, Canada, Greece, Norway, Sweden, and most recently, Japan. Maureen is a passionate language learner who speaks Spanish, German, French, and a little Italian, which she is hoping will become molto italiano by the end of the spring semester in Florence. She holds two master’s degrees: one in education and one in English and creative writing. Outside of teaching and traveling, Maureen is an avid reader who writes historical fiction novels, and she hosts a weekly online meetup group for aspiring novelists. She hopes to read a lot of Italian fiction (possibly in Italian!) while in Florence. 

Maureen has taught composition, literature, and film studies for over a decade. She is delighted to spend the spring semester in Florence and to share her passion for travel and languages with the students who will be joining this fantastic opportunity. Maureen hopes to encourage the students to expand their horizons not only in terms of language and culture, but also in their sense of self-trust and resourcefulness, two qualities that she has honed from many years of travel and living abroad. She and her students will visit sites that are featured in the texts they read and go to places associated with the writers and filmmakers they study.  They will also blog, to describe, process, and share the life-changing experience that is studying abroad. Finally, Maureen’s courses are ZTC (Zero Textbook Cost), so students don’t have to pay for or transport textbooks.