Susannah Bien-Gund, MSEd, MA TESOL

Susannah Bien-Gund is the Adult ESL Instructor at HIAS Pennsylvania, where she teaches beginner and advanced classes to emerging multilingual adult English language learners. She joined the HIAS PA team in June of 2023 bringing over 15 years of experience as a teacher, teacher educator, and facilitator. Susannah has worked with educators and learners of languages in diverse contexts throughout the world including elementary school students of French and Arabic in New York; K-12 learners of English in Morocco; multilingual undergraduates at Haverford College; prospective teachers in China; Libyan teacher trainers at a training-of-trainers camp in Tunisia; and more. For four years, Susannah managed the adult education program at the Arab American Association of New York and she is delighted to be back in the world of adult literacy education and immigrant and refugee rights and justice work through HIAS PA.

Susannah holds a MA TESOL from the City University of New York Hunter College, a MSEd from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Linguistics and Languages (Arabic and French) from Swarthmore College and continues to engage with theory by teaching master’s degree students at the UPenn Graduate School of Education. She is also grateful to learn new words, ideas, and insights every day from her students, partner, and two small children, and believes deeply in the wisdom of the late great adult educator Septima Clark that “continued learning is the basis for being richly alive.” Susannah looks forward to learning together and dreaming and scheming about our shared work towards a more just and loving world for all of us.