About Roots & Talks
Our story
A tablet, a computer, two rooms: let me start at the very beginning and tell you how Roots & Talks came to be.
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Two lessons that came early
I spent my childhood in the lively streets of Hatay, a city where many cultures live side by side. My curiosity about language and culture took root there, very early. Life also taught me two hard lessons while I was young. My father fell into a coma after a traffic accident. My mother fought cancer. The first lesson was how fragile life is; the second, how much it matters to stay connected to our roots.
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Lessons that forgot the child
Years later, I became a mother and passed that second lesson on to my daughters, raising them close to our family and our roots. They spoke their mother tongue with ease, but when they started learning a foreign language, they struggled. The problem wasn’t them; the methods simply didn’t put the child at the center. As a mother and a preschool teacher, I couldn’t ignore that. I began exploring how language learning could be shaped around the child. Play, curiosity and enjoyment became the starting point.
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The teacher in the next room
I couldn’t find the right native English-speaking teacher for one of my daughters, so I became her teacher myself. I turned on the tablet for her and the computer for me, then went into the other room and connected from there. Same house, two separate screens: that was how I kept the mother in me apart from the teacher. My daughter started learning, and loving it. Then I asked myself, “If it works for my child, why shouldn’t it help other children too?” I combined my two fields, early childhood education and teaching Turkish, earned a master’s degree in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, and developed my own methods. Under the name “Dünya” (Turkish for “world”), I taught thousands of lessons, a guest on screen in the homes of hundreds of children all over the world, and helped them fall in love with Turkish. But I was only one person.
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Children twelve hours couldn’t hold
My lessons spread by word of mouth. Most of the families who reached out lived abroad and wanted Turkish to have a natural place in their children’s lives. I treated every student with the same care I gave my own daughters. I was teaching up to twelve hours a day, and still, not every child fit into those hours. Roots & Talks began in 2021 so that teachers working with this child-centred approach could reach more families. I developed a seven-stage interview and training process for our teachers. Today, they use play, conversation and age-appropriate activities to teach Turkish to children growing up abroad.
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When my childhood city shook
On February 6, 2023, I was in Hatay, the city where I grew up, when the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck. I survived. The two lessons I had learned young went much deeper this time: to cherish the people we love, and to hold tight to our roots. Since that day, both my own purpose and what Roots & Talks stands for have grown stronger. Alongside Turkish, our lessons make room for traditional games, music, dances, cities, cuisine, and the works of famous thinkers and artists, because for us, language is more than a lesson: it’s a door to a child’s own identity and roots.
I am Gamze, also known as Teacher Dünya.
I carry language and culture, and I protect identities and roots. Roots & Talks is one chapter of this story, written so that every child can find their own voice.
Where do you see yourself in this story?
Take the first step for your child
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