Nicola G.
Holistic ESL tutor who creates a warm environment to experiment with language!
About Me
I'm from San Francisco, California (American accent) but live in Cascais, Portugal. I've been teaching English for 10 years, online and in person, in various countries like Korea, China, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Germany, and the United States. I've been to 93 countries and have volunteered my way around the world. I love talking about travel and outdoor adventures as I love nature and hiking. I also love to talk about spirituality, astrology and the like as well as many other subjects.I have experience teaching A1-C2. My teaching style is rooted in the idea that learning never needed four walls. I bring curiosity, play, and real-world connection into every lesson, making English feel alive and practical. Through conversation, creativity, and cultural exploration, I encourage students to see language as a bridge to new experiences, not just a subject. Classes are flexible, interactive, and infused with fun because when students enjoy the process, confidence and fluency grow naturally.
About My Lessons
As a visual and kinesthetic learner myself, my pedagogy of teaching is that we need to move our bodies to embody learning. Learning is about play and how to use games and our imagination to discover, critically think, problem solve, imagine, and be creative. To learn how you learn the best, is invaluable to promoting the concept to children of becoming a lifelong learner. To be able to do this, we need to try out different ways to learn and remember in order to find out what works best for us. Learning is all about the individual, and one of life’s biggest mystery games. Once we find out how we like to learn, we can learn anything. Traditional pedagogies subscribe to the one size fits all learning practice, but I find that outdated and how everyone else learned, is never how I learned. By curiosity, play, inquiry, and questioning, we can learn so much by what we read and what we are assigned for homework. If we can make that process engaging, it can be something that we are proud of what we learned of and that we want to learn more! Learning needs to be fun, that is where the real magic takes place!
Resume & Certificates
PhD in Gender Studies - Sociology
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
MA in Intersectional Gender Studies
Linkoping University
MSc in International and Comparative Education
Stockholm University
TESOL
International Open Academy
TEFL
Premier TEFL
BA in Art with Honors
University of California, Berkeley