An Interview with Mickey Kelley

Mickey Kelley is a second-year graduate student at Radford University. She is studying English with a focus in Education and is currently a part of the Graduate Teaching Fellowship program. As part of the program, Mickey teaches two sections of CORE 101 this semester and will teach CORE 102 for two sections next semester. We recently had a chance to sit down with Mickey and learn a little bit about her background and her teaching style.

Mickey was an “Army brat” growing up, so she lived all over the United States. More recently, Mikey lived in Roanoke before coming to Radford and has lived here for the past few years while she studies at Radford University. Mickey has a very interesting story about her drive to come to Radford: “I’m a first-generation college student. Neither of my parents went to college. They both immigrated to the United States actually so neither of them were born here so I’m also a first-generation American as well.” In her free time, Mickey does a lot of outdoor activities and also has creative interests like baking and painting.

Mickey originally went to community college and received her Associate’s degree in biochemistry before coming to Radford to study the same. She says it was during QUEST that she made the choice to pursue English, and she says she is very happy with that decision: “It was a very big and unique and quick and rapid decision change, but I wouldn’t change it at all. I found my niche here.”

Mickey says that her biggest goal in the classroom is to foster an environment that facilitates learning for each student with the skills they already have. “I try to engage my students and make them comfortable with me as the instructor and also themselves as the student. I acknowledge what they say, and I try to keep an open mind about what they bring. Everyone brings something unique and different to the table so we’re going to work with everyone’s skills. I also like to build upon what they already come in with.” Mickey also mentioned that she uses a lot of non-traditional texts in the classroom from graphic novels, to movie quotes, to even memes upon occasion.

Mickey finished the interview with one more interesting fact about herself that she wanted students to know by saying, “I love The Office, it’s my favorite TV show!”