Guest Episodes
Family Gave Me the Language. Life Shaped the Rest. | Ep. 39 with Mai I.
Family gave us the language. Life shaped everything else. In this episode of WeCultivate: The Pod, Michelle sits down with her longtime friend Mai for a deeply personal conversation on heritage language, identity, belonging, and growing up between cultures as Asian American women. Together, they exp...
AI Is Moving Fast. Education Isn’t. | Ep. 35 with Karl P. The Action Hero Teacher
What happens when education systems built for another era are forced to face the speed of AI? In this episode of WeCultivate: The Pod , Michelle speaks with educator, author, and consultant Karl C. Pupé about classroom learning in the AI age, why so many education systems still lag behind the world ...
Multilingual Kids. International Families. Intertwining Cultures. Everyday Life. (Jovana T) | Ep. 33
What does multilingual family life actually look like? In this episode, Michelle speaks with Jovana, host of the @realmomstalking podcast and Serbian mother living in Germany with her Cuban husband, about raising three children across four languages: Serbian, Spanish, German, and English. Their conv...
Between Two Cows – A Personal Conversation with the Unpaid Intern (Yann T.) | Ep. 31
What happens when we slow down and talk about language without shortcuts ? In this episode, Michelle is joined by Yann (yes, WeCultivate’s unpaid intern!) for a personal conversation recorded early in their journey of working together. They reflect on Yann’s experience growing up in France, learning...
Language Learning – More Compassion, Less Shame (Jonathan H.) | Ep. 30
In this episode, Michelle is joined by Jonathan H., an English teacher with over 25 years of experience teaching across countries, systems, and learning contexts. Their conversation explores how shame often enters language learning early through schooling and exams, and how it continues to shape adu...
Holiday Episode 2025 – Community Stories on Family, Language, and Culture | Ep. 29
Holiday Episode 2025 brings together community stories on family, language, and culture from across the WeCultivate community. Nine voices share reflections on navigating complex family dynamics shaped by culture, migration, language, and lived experience — offering honesty, nuance, and perspective ...
It’s Not the Language. It’s the Assumptions. (Martha S.) | Ep. 28
What if the hardest part of learning a language isn’t the grammar or practice, but the assumptions people make about you before you even speak? In this episode, Martha and I talk about how judgments around accent, identity, and personality shape the language journey far more than most of us realize....
At Home, An Outsider (Sonia M.) | Ep. 27
What does it mean to call a place home when that same place refuses to see you as one of its own? In this deeply personal conversation, Sonia — a Black Italian creative who grew up in Italy and spent years abroad — joins Michelle to unpack how identity and belonging collide when culture, language, a...
Deep South Korean: Owning Voice, Facing History (April W.) | Ep. 25
In this episode of WeCultivate: The Pod , Michelle sits down with April , a Korean transracial adoptee and creator of Deep South Korean . Together, they explore what it means to own your voice —accent, story, and all—while unpacking the layered realities of growing up Asian in rural West Virginia. T...
Beyond Borders – What Language and Travel Teach Us About Real Connection (Robin C.) | Ep. 23
When we move across borders, we don’t just collect stamps... we collect new ways of seeing. In this episode, our guest Robin C. joins Michelle to share what growing up across Italy, Germany, and later moving to Canada taught her about empathy and adaptability, Together, they reflect on how language ...