Penn-Trafford teacher: Time in China will benefit students here

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There’s no doubt in Alison Stephens’ mind that the two years she spent working in China will benefit her teaching career for years to come.

In 2018, he 28-year-old Penn-Trafford teacher moved herself and her husband, David, to Shanghai, where she taught children English as part of a program through the Walt Disney Company.

“It really just helped to develop my art of teaching,” Stephens said. “I work in special education now, so it helped me to reach those students.”

Stephens, of White Oak, is a Penn-Trafford graduate who received an elementary and special education degree from Seton Hill University. After graduating from Seton Hill in 2015, she worked as a preschool teacher for several years while also working for VIPKids, a Chinese company that teaches English to children in China.

According to Stephens, her position with VIPKids “planted the seed in my husband’s mind for us to look into moving to China.”

Stephens said she initially opposed the idea, but after thinking about it for about a day, she decided to make the leap.

After searching for and accepting the position with Disney, Stephens and her husband packed two suitcases and moved into temporary housing provided by the company.

The couple then had a week to find permanent housing, Stephens said.

“It all worked out,” Stephens said. “We got our apartment and we eventually adjusted. It took a lot of effort on our part with having to learn the culture. The language is completely different, we had to learn some Chinese” and they had to adjust to living in a large, international city.

David Stephens took a job in the hospitality industry, where he led English-speaking tours around the country.

While the couple traveled in 2018, they also took the time to adjust to the new country. But in 2019, they visited 11 countries in 10 months.

“We didn’t even stay in Asia,” Stephens said. “We just filled up our passports.”

In addition to working and traveling, Stephens was in a commercial for the Disney program.

The couple decided to return home after two years, looking at their time in Shanghai as a “couple of chapters of our life, but not our entire life,” she said.

Stephens recently was hired as a K-5 learning support teacher at Penn-Trafford’s Sunrise Estates Elementary School. The couple has a 10-month-old baby boy, Theodore.

She looks back on the experience as a combination of two dreams — teaching and working for the Walt Disney Company, something she had hoped to accomplish in retirement.

“As a person, it really gave us a huge perspective of just how the world functions,” Stephens said. “Not only did we get to live in a big city in another country, but we were also surrounded by people living outside of their home countries who came from all over the world.”