As an instructor, I strive to ensure that students know and understand the positions from which they speak, hear, analyze, and understand language. I understand and acknowledge that all material, including linguistics, come at the intersection of multiple different diverse and unique identities. I show students how people use language in productive ways, and the influence of culture, politics, history, and social systems have on linguistic change. My teaching philosophy utilizes culturally responsive teaching, active learning, collaborative discussion, inquiry-based instruction, and hands-on practice as I encourage my students to critically engage with central course topics and question their complexity and intersectionality. My experience as an instructor has taught me adaptability and feedback I receive informs my teaching philosophy thoughtfully as I balance real-time adjustment and consistency.
What makes us human? What are core and fundamental aspects of the human experience? What exactly is a 'citizen'? and what makes a good citizen? These are some of the questions that this course explores. Human Being and Citizen explores the needs, goals, and problems draw us as social beings together into communities. In this course we investigate matters of emotion, justice, mortality, morality, law, leadership, friendship, and community. We think about the modes of human interaction and community interaction from contractual relationships to friendships and kinship ties as well as the emotions attached to them (love, anger, shame, grief, and faith).
In the Autumn course, we explore the ways that texts (Ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, and Abhramaic) conceive and discuss ideas about language, mortality, brotherhood, emotion, law (divine and human), justice, and mixedness. We examine the ways that these conceptualizations and practices figure in various texts and bring together and tear apart families, armies and other forms of social units as we explore what forms the foundations of these social groups. At the end of the quarter, we consider these matters in connection with a foundational text in the American Civil Rights movement: Martin Luther King’s A Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We do so under conditions of geological and political uncertainty that will no doubt inform our engagement. Let’s all do so with principles of charity, rigor, and kindness. This course is designed to be a discussion course, so come prepared to share your thoughts and ideas. Everyone has a unique perspective and view of the world and there are no wrong readings of the texts.
What makes us human? What are core and fundamental aspects of the human experience? What exactly is a 'citizen'? and what makes a good citizen? These are some of the questions that this course explores. Human Being and Citizen explores the needs, goals, and problems draw us as social beings together into communities. In this course we investigate matters of emotion, justice, mortality, morality, law, leadership, friendship, and community. We think about the modes of human interaction and community interaction from contractual relationships to friendships and kinship ties as well as the emotions attached to them (love, anger, shame, grief, and faith).
This course provides students with an in-depth introduction to the linguistic subfields of phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of sound and/or the physical properties of the worlds languages (in the case of sign languages) covering how they are produced and perceived. Phonology can be described as sounds in context and investigates how sounds and phonetic units are categorized, organized, contrasted and change in larger structures of language
We will begin this course with an introduction to articulatory phonetics, understanding how to describe, identify, and produce different speech sounds using their articulatory and acoustic properties. We will move into an examination of the different phonetic units such as consonants, vowels, stress, prosody and more both in English and other languages. From there we will move to investigating how those phonetic units are categorized, structured, and affected by their linguistic contexts in different languages. Throughout this quarter we will work with real data from a diverse sample of the worlds’ languages exploring how phonetic and phonological concepts work in practice and exposing you to multiple different languages.
What happens when people who speak different languages live in the same area? How do languages change as a result of their environment and social structure? How do social situations lead to language change and multilingualism? This course will engage with the literature on contact linguistics and multilingualism providing theoretical backgrounds and foundations for analyzing real-world situations. This course will apply the theoretical understandings to several instances of contact linguistics and a variety of complex social situations via case studies. We will briefly cover topics and process such as: bi/multilingualism, translanguaging, dialect leveling, mixed-Languages, pidgins & creoles, and language shift, all through a lens that addresses the complex situations they exist in with respect to cultural contact and colonialism. This brief overview of each of these processes will give students a basis for understanding and recognizing them in real-world contexts as well as providing them with the tools to ask critical questions about the situations and results.