My Teaching Philosophy Statement is as follows: 

As an undergraduate student, I struggled to find the true passion in my field that I have now. It wasn’t until I was given an opportunity to research, present, and discuss a research topic completely of my own choosing (morphophonological reduplication in Kaqchikel). I discovered that I was able to actively engage with, think critically about, and effectively discuss course material. Unfortunately, that eureka moment came quite late in my undergraduate career, and only came about because it was a graduate level course. Nevertheless, it did come, and now I feel firmly that self-directed research is one way to engage students, not only in the course material, but in the greater field within which the course sits, or even in scholarly work in general. Ever since that moment I have begun to think not only about my own relationship with knowledge discovery and sharing, but also about how others best find their own relationship with it via teaching and learning.

I believe that teaching must be engaging. The primary way I can engage my students is through my passion for the material. Once students see my passion is both the mundane and esoteric features of language, they can see that it can be a worthwhile endeavour to engage with any aspect of a topic of study or research. Teaching linguistics also allows for a wide range of examples to be used in linguistic analysis that can touch on news topics or areas of student interest. Through remote learning, with video call discussion sections, I’ve found that pets, and specifically my cats, are a great in-road to increasing student engagement. Not only do they provide context for linguistic examples, they allow for connections to develop among teachers and learners.

In addition to intriguing examples and bringing my personality into the classroom, technology gives students more opportunities to engage. My PowerPoint slideshows, all of which I make available on the course website, use font and colour to draw attention to the most important concepts, while at the midpoint of the lecture I assess where the class is at in its understanding of the day’s material via instant polling, Top Hat, and Kahoot. These interactive technologies allow me to gauge what concepts the students are finding most important, and whether I need to double back to shift focus or not.

The most student engagement, however, derives from their selection of topics for their own research and use throughout the term on homework assignments designed to engage the students with the course content and their selected topics. These assignments may suffice for a mid-level course, but in upper level courses this constant re-engagement with a selected topic could develop into term paper to further advance their scholarly skills.

I believe that learning is best done via critically thinking about the material. To do this, I begin each lesson or course section with an open-ended question related to the lesson topic. Often this will require students to think about real world examples of linguistic phenomena that the students may have come across without even realizing. There is always knowledge to be interacted with all around us. Often that knowledge is realized through language, thus opening many opportunities to think about it even within a strictly linguistic analysis.

In reading-based courses, students are asked to prepare discussion questions of any type that they might use for in-class discussion on those readings, as well as for my own evaluation of the kinds of information that the students find important when they read. This would allow me to guide the discussion to help them critically explore those questions which may in turn critique the readings, while improving their own writing.

Critical thinking can also occur in introductory, lecture-based courses. In these courses, topics or analyses can often be limited or constrained to a very specific point of view or preference. In linguistic analysis this can appear as particular preferences for transcription of vowels or binary configurations in how we describe semantic features. It’s easy to simply teach these as just how the book does it, but they can also serve as a door to critically think about what assumptions go into these decisions. In these cases, we can show how this knowledge is usually presented, while at the same time questioning whether there are different ways to think about that knowledge.

I believe that discussion of the course material and topics allows learners to most optimally engages with the material. To this end, I always open myself to students via email to discuss anything related to the course and its lessons, but also topics related to the field of linguistics and language more broadly. This offer of discussion extends well beyond my time as their instructor or teaching assistant, so that I am forever available throughout the students’ growth as linguists.

This emphasis on discussion also encompasses the classroom where I devote at least a third of class time to group discussion of the material, depending upon the topic: For more concept-heavy introductory courses this would take the form of a class session devoted to discussion of the previous week’s lessons as well as questions and answers to clarify those lessons. For upper-level seminar-type courses, at least a third of each session is devoted to discussion of specific readings relevant to the course and lesson topic. This reinforces that the reality of the field is not so clear-cut, and merits discussion to discover a balance of thoughts and views, again reinforcing critical thinking skills.

Important discussion that arose out of this dedication to including opportunities for students to critically engage with and then discuss topics and examples I shared occurred during my first opportunity to instruct a course, an Introduction to Linguistics course in the spring of 2020. The course is almost entirely devoted to analysis of linguistic structure, but in the midst of racial strife and wider discussion about treatment of Black and Indigenous lives, I felt it important to mention the destructive effects of linguistic prescriptivism and discrimination early in the semester. Later I included example sentences that referred to systemic injustice. These examples primed discussion not just about the structure of the sentence, but also of other structures of injustice in the world, as well as those particular to the field of linguistics and language science.

As a teacher, my goal is not to have my students learn and know the course materials. No, it is more than that. My goal is to have them critically think about a wide range of issues both within and outside of linguistics. This makes them not only better linguists, but better people, able to engage with the world to better understand it and to improve it. So far my teaching experience has been limited to early courses in linguistics with few or no prerequisites. Nevertheless, by committing myself to these beliefs, I hope to inspire eureka moments in students much earlier in their careers than upper level, research-intensive courses.

Mi declaración de filosofía es la siguiente: 

Cuando era une estudiante de grado, me esforcé encontrar la pasión verdadera que tengo ahora. No fue hasta que fue dade una oportunidad de investigar, presentar y discutir un tema de investigación que eligí yo (reduplicación morfofonológica en Kaqchikel). Discubrí que podía dedicarme activamente a, pensar en y discutir efectivamente el material del curso. Lamentablemente, ese momento de eureka me llegó tarde en mis estudios de grado, y solo me llegó porque ese curso fue un curso de nivel graduado. Aun así, sí me llegó, y yo creo firmemente que la investigación autodirigida es una manera para involucrar a les estudiantes no solo en el material del curso sino también en el mayor campo en que existe el curso, o hasta en trabajo culto en general. Desde entonces he empezado a pensar no solo en mi relación con el descubrimiento y el intercambio de conocimiento sino también en como otres encuentran su propia relación con él a través de enseñanza y aprendizaje.

Traducción en curso…