Colleen Soares has taught at HPU since 1989 in the Center for English Language Programs and in the English department. She has a Ph.D. in education, with a specialty in teaching English language learners, a Bachelor of Science in sociology, a Black Studies certificate and a Masters in education. She also taught in American Samoa and in the Indochinese Tutoring Program in Portland, Oregon. In American Samoa, she taught high school English, Spanish, speech and drama (for which she developed the curriculum), creative writing, and reading. Also in Samoa, she served as the Chair of an Accreditation Committee, working with Samoan teachers, community members and students to produce the Accreditation report for the Department of Education.
She was Chair of the EFP Faculty Assembly, and also chair of the EFP Program Review (PR). Working with colleagues, she conducted one of the learning assessment projects for the PR, and also coordinated, organized and compiled the Program Review, completed in 2002. As well as teaching, she has been a Cooperating Teacher for many TESL and MATESL student teachers at Hawaii Pacific University and the University of Hawaii.
Over the years, she has presented her own HPU classroom research at numerous local and international conferences, including the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and the international TESOL Convention. She has also published her research in various journals, as well as a chapter in Understanding Social Problems, Praeger, N.Y. As a member of a teacher research group with the Hawaii Writing Project, coordinated by Dr. Joy Marsella, she co-authored articles in the Journal of Classroom Inquiry, and presented at the Hawai`i Educational Research Association.
Apart from these professional pursuits, she has also been a blue-water sailor for years, sailing over 20,000 miles in the South Pacific, Hawaii, the Columbia River, the Chesapeake Bay, the eastern seaboard, the Bahamas, and more recently, Tasmania, Australia. She also helped deliver boats to the Tahiti and Hawaii, taught herself celestial navigation, and earned a United States Coast Guard Captain's license. During travels and work in the South Pacific (French Polynesia, The Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji), she studied the difficulties countries experience as they move into a global economy. Her interests are in the empowerment of discriminated people, and in learning and cognition in language acquisition. She has studied Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Samoan, Hawaiian, and Swahili. Additional pleasures are to hike, sail, scuba dive, read, and write.
