YUCATAN: Advanced Self-Directed Cultural Immersion

It’s through language that we construct our identities in everyday, professional, and academic contexts. We use language to make sense of our experiences and our ever-changing identities, whether these are national, social, local and/or global identities. Languages, cultures, and identities are intimately connected, but not all languages or people are treated as equal. So-called standard varieties of language are dominant in the media, entertainment, official documents, and education. In contrast, speakers of perceived non-standard varieties have been excluded and marginalized in different ways. Language can be used to exercise power over others on the basis of perceived linguistic divergence. While language and discourse are embedded in social issues, they remain invisible and are often absent from discussions about social issues. Using identity as the entry point to understand human experiences, this class examines how identity intersects with linguistic diversity, cultural practices, the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, and asymmetrical power relations in everyday, professional, and educational settings. How do ideas about language maintain and perpetuate stereotypes and social hierarchies? Where do language standards come from? Do only foreigners have accents? We will use readings from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, migration studies, rhetoric and composition and other related areas to examine these questions and many more. The projects for the course will explore various aspects of identity and its connection to linguistic diversity and social issues through readings, interviews, and spoken/written narratives, which will be used to produce a podcast. Through genre and rhetorical analysis activities, we will explore different genres and podcasts to develop an understanding of writing and how people construct identities through discursive choices and multimodal elements. These activities will develop your understanding of connections between genre conventions and rhetorical situations and support your overall development of writing, in particular metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities. In addition to these skills, you will learn technical skills to produce an audio piece to tell your and other people’s (counter)stories to challenge dominant narratives about language, linguistic diversity, and identities. The audio production skills you will learn include recording, importing, mixing, editing, mastering, and exporting sound. You will be assessed based on participation in small and whole group activities, reading responses, literacy narratives, reflections, engagement with course materials, peer-review workshops, participation during a series of audio-production exercises, preparation for and completion of recordings, and the production of a short podcast episode incorporating all of the skills learned throughout the term. Please note that the course content is similar to College Seminar: “Soda, Pop, or Coke?”: Linguistic Diversity and Research for Change: Writing, Language, Social (In)justice, thus, this course is recommended for those who haven’t taken the previous courses as the content is similar.

The European Union is a fascinating, ongoing experiment in international cooperation. Currently twenty-eight countries have joined together in a supra-national political and economic union, creating a political entity unique to a world of sovereign individual nation-states. This course focuses on understanding this complex and evolving union through study of its main political institutions: the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. We will look at the workings of and functional relationships between these institutions through readings, meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs involved in European-level politics, and visits to each of the institutions during two weeks in Brussels. We will also spend some time in the course looking at the broader political and cultural context in which the institutions operate, through examination of several important current topics in European politics. Topics could include: refugees and migrants in Europe, the reauthorization of the Common Agricultural Policy, Brexit, the rise of right-wing movements across countries in the EU. Students will be evaluated based on participation in class discussions, a reflective journal kept during their time in Brussels, and a presentation and final essay on a current EU-relevant political issue of their choosing.

This course is offered through collaboration with CAVILAM as part of the COA program in Vichy, France. Students take 20 hours a week of language classes and workshops taught by immersion methods and advanced audio-visual techniques. Students live with host families in homestays and take part in a variety of cultural activities. They are carefully tested and placed at levels appropriate to their ability and are expected to advance in all four language skills - reading, writing, speaking and listening - as gauged by the European Erasmus scale of competency.

The goal of this course to help each student design and implement an effective learning program for the study of a language of her choice at whatever level of learning she is currently at. A very wide variety of general strategies, resources and practical advice for independent language learning are reviewed in weekly class sessions along with progress and reflection reports from each student that can help guide and motivate independent work. The core common text for this work will be Betty Lou Leaver, Madeline Ehrman and Boris Shekhtman’s "Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition". The primary focus of the class is on the development and implementation of each student’s individually designed plan for learning a language of their choice. Materials for this will be identified by each student as part of their work on their chosen language. Progress in these plans are discussed in one on one weekly meetings with the teacher. Plans may include the use of software, peer tutors, Skype, videos, standard texts, flash cards, specialized technical material, music, visual art, field trips, and a wide variety of other materials as appropriate. Evaluation will be based on the clarity, coherence and effectiveness of the student’s developed plan and the discipline with which they actually pursue it and revise it appropriately as the term progresses. Students will be asked to meet with the instructor prior to the start of the term to discuss their motivation, aims, possible resources and possible plans for language learning after the course is over.

This course explores the basic questions concerning the origins, nature, history, functions and philosophical significances of human languages. Comparisons to other species and to machine languages will also be examined. Readings will include classics texts by Chomsky and others as well selected materials from diverse disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, psychology, ethology, aesthetics, history of languages, and philosophy. Class sessions will include a mix of discussion, lecture, and visiting speakers. Each student will undertake a term-long project examining some topic of interest and examine it from the point of view of the different disciplines and theories covered in the course. Project topics might include, for example: the development of identity, the articulation of gender, forms of representation, the expression of emotion, concepts of rationality, relations between meaning and truth, and communication in an age of artificial intelligences. The goals of the course are: 1) to familiarize students with the range of phenomena associated with language and the principal questions they raise and the theories used to interpret them and 2) to develop skills in researching interdisciplinary questions. Assignments will include two problem sets, a series of weekly homework exercises, and the term project which must be presented both orally and in a major paper due at the end of the term. Evaluation will be based on the extent to which in-class participation and work on the assignments demonstrates substantive progress on the two goals of the course. There are no specific prerequisites, but students will be expected to be able to contribute insights, information and questions from previous work in relevant disciplines and/or studies of languages, undertake challenging readings, and pursue a major independent project.

What is language? What is the relationship between language and thought? Between language and experience? What is meaning? These are some of the central questions of the philosophy of language. They are fundamental not only to large portions to modern philosophy, but also linguistics, computer science and other fields. This course will explore some of the key theories and criticisms that philosophers have developed in answer to these questions about our life with words.

In this course, we will take a historical approach and work our way to the present, exploring classic theories of meaning and language from the early modern period and early analytic philosophers, such as Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others. Then we will examine criticisms that philosophers have raised over the years, both from texts in the analytic tradition as well as other positions from, for example, ordinary language philosophy, continental approaches. Students will acquire an understanding of those central problems in the philosophy of language; they will also develop philosophical skills in analysing texts, articulating arguments, and presenting complex philosophical material through writing and oral presentations. Introductory/Intermediate.