Rate My Professor Maria Volynsky

Maria Volynsky, EdD, is a Teaching Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, where she also holds the positions of ESL Coordinator and Associate Director of the First-Year Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. She earned her Ed.D. in TESOL from Temple University in Philadelphia in May 2012 and her M.A. in English and Spanish and teaching thereof from Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University in Russia in June 1998. Volynsky joined Drexel University in 2012 as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the First-Year Writing Program, Department of English and Philosophy, advancing to Associate Teaching Professor in 2018. Her prior academic appointments include Assistant Professor in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia (online, 2012-2018), Lecturer in Education at Chestnut Hill College and Pennsylvania State University Abington (2011-2012), Teaching Assistant at Temple University (2010-2011), Lecturer at Chestnut Hill College (2006-2010), Instructor at Bucks County Community College (2006-2008), Russian language instructor at Grinnell College (2005-2006), and Lecturer at Kazan State University in Russia (1998-2005), where she taught English, Spanish, Russian, and teacher training courses.

Volynsky's research and teaching interests include TESOL, linguistic diversity, multilingualism, online teaching, social emotional learning, language acquisition, and assessment. She co-authored the peer-reviewed article "Motion Encoding in Russian and English: Moving Beyond Talmy’s Typology" with Aneta Pavlenko, published in The Modern Language Journal (Volume 99, Issue 1, pages 32-48, 2015). Additional publications from her earlier career, published under Elova, M., address developing critical thinking through reading (2005), skills of presentation in foreign language teaching (2004), time effect in pedagogy (2004), and intercultural aspects in teaching foreign languages for tourism (2003). She has delivered presentations at conferences including TESOL (2012), AAAL (2012), Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition (2011), and TALGS (2011) on topics such as L1 use in L2 classrooms, motion events in Russian-English bilinguals, and bidirectional transfer. At Drexel, she teaches English Composition courses for multilingual writers (ENGL 111, 112, 113) and native speakers (ENGL 101, 102, 103), both online and in-person. Administratively, she served as Co-Chair of the Writing Program (2016-2017) and has participated in panels on online teaching best practices and open educational resources. In 2026, she was selected as a Fulbright semi-finalist.