Course Overview and Goals
This case study is a summary of 3 linguistic Field Methods classes designed by Emily Clem and offered in the 2020-2021 academic year. One course was an undergraduate course (LIGN 139: Field Methods) and the other two courses were a graduate course sequence (LIGN 240: Field Methods and LIGN 241: Fieldwork). The undergraduate course is an elective for linguistics majors. The first course in the graduate sequence is required for all linguistics PhD students and the second is an optional continuation for a second quarter. All 3 courses were offered virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These courses, like many field methods courses, have historically focused primarily on teaching students how to collect and analyze data by working directly with a speaker of an understudied language. The goal in designing this iteration of the courses was to provide students with training in fieldwork ethics, decolonial and Indigenous research methodologies, and collaborative approaches to language documentation (see the Field Methods page for more details on this approach). The readings, course meetings, and assignments were all designed to emphasize these aspects of methodological training, while still offering training in issues like elicitation methods, text collection, data processing, and linguistic analysis.
The Mam Language and Community Collaborators
The language of study for the courses was Mam, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala with a large diaspora population in California. The course instructor had been involved in a Mam language education program in Oakland, California and used the network of educators and interpreters she had met through this program to find the language teacher for the course. The language teacher was Angela Ramirez, who speaks the Todos Santos Cuchumatan variety of Mam. The course instructor and language teacher met several times before the start of the course to determine logistical details, such as payment and hours, to secure informed consent, and to discuss the language teacher’s goals for the course. In the first course meeting that she participated in, Ms. Ramirez introduced herself to the students and the students had a chance to introduce themselves to her. She shared about her background and about her experience being a multilingual speaker of Mam in California and she answered student questions about her language, culture, and experience. In addition to course meetings, Ms. Ramirez had weekly meetings with small groups of students (in the case of the undergraduate course) or with individual students (in the case of the graduate course) as well as weekly meetings with the instructor to discuss any issues or adjustments to the class. Additionally, in the graduate course, when Ms. Ramirez had slightly more availability due to the lower enrollment, she led weekly conversation practice meetings with the students and instructor, in which she taught them basic conversational skills in the language, including things like greetings and useful vocabulary.
Before and during the courses, the course instructor also met with Mam language educator and activist, Henry Sales, who runs a Mam language teaching program in collaboration with Silvia Lucrecia Carillo and Tessa Scott. They discussed how materials produced in the classes could best meet the teaching needs that the program teachers had. Additionally, Mr. Sales gave a guest lecture entitled “Indigenous presence and rights” in both the undergraduate and graduate field methods classes in which he discussed the history and culture of the Mam community both in Guatemala and in California and the effects of colonization on the Mam community and their resistance in the face of this oppression. He also introduced the students to the language education work he leads and that their final projects could be used for.
Readings
The textbook used for the course was:
Linguistic fieldwork: A practical guide. Bowern, Claire. 2008. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Selected chapters from this book were assigned to students to read throughout the quarter. The additional readings below were assigned in the undergraduate course, and they appear in the order in which students read them during the course. For the graduate course, students were asked to read a few papers on Mam in addition to the readings below. A significant portion of one class session each week was devoted to the discussion of readings.
Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork: An overview. Rice, Keren. 2006. Journal of Academic Ethics 4:123–155.
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (3rd ed.). Introduction. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. London: Zed Books.
Creating orthographies for endangered languages. Jones, Mari C., and Damien Mooney. 2017. In Jones, Mari C. and Damien Mooney (eds.), Creating orthographies for endangered languages: 1–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reflections on (de)colonialism in language documentation. Leonard, Wesley Y. 2018. In McDonnell, Bradley, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Gary Holton. (eds.) Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15: 55-65. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
The role of text collection and elicitation in linguistic fieldwork. Chelliah, Shobhana L. 2001. In Newman, Paul and Martha Ratliff (eds.), Linguistic fieldwork: 152–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
On the methodology of semantic fieldwork. Matthewson, Lisa. 2004. International Journal of American Linguistics 70:369–415.
Assignments
In addition to assignments that emphasized linguistic analysis, such as a phoneme inventory assignment, one goal of the course was to provide students with practice in creating research products that were of use to language users or learners. To this end, students could choose a final project that involved either the creation of a pedagogical resource or a report on their research topic from the quarter written for a lay audience. These two options are outlined further below.
Final project Option A (pedagogical resource): Students were asked to create a resource that could be used by learners of Mam or members of the Mam community. Some suggested options were illustrated storybooks, audio-visual teaching materials, informational posters, language flashcards, or a series of class exercises for a language class. Students were encouraged to incorporate audio recordings where possible, at the request of the language teaching program instructors who would be using the teaching materials. They were also asked to meet with the course instructor to discuss the project idea before implementing it to ensure that it aligned with the goals of the language teaching program. Undergraduate students were encouraged to collaborate with their elicitation small groups to design the materials. Additionally, each undergraduate student was asked to submit a short reflection piece discussing what they learned about Mam through the process of designing and creating the resource. Graduate students worked independently on the project and submitted a research squib in addition to the pedagogical resource. Students were asked for consent to share these materials with Mam language educators, and were explicitly told that their consent or lack thereof would in no way affect their grade for the course.
Final project Option B (language description): Students were asked to write a short report on the topic that they had researched during the quarter that was designed to be accessible to a speaker of Mam who did not have any formal linguistics training. In addition to describing the phenomenon they had been studying, they were also asked to try to explain how their research questions and findings were of interest in the field of linguistics in a way that could be understood by a non-linguist. Thus, beyond simply summarizing a particular aspect of the grammar, students were encouraged to think about what it meant to engage in “sharing knowledge” (Smith 2021), by making the theories and analyses that they were using accessible to an audience of language users. In addition to this report written for a lay audience, students were also asked to write a research squib framed for an audience of linguists.
Policies
The two policies highlighted below were implemented with accessibility in mind. For more information about why these policies can benefit students and increase equity and inclusion in the classroom, see the Syllabus Design page.
Attendance & Participation
In the undergraduate course, synchronous attendance was only required at sessions where the student was leading elicitation. For these sessions, students could contact the instructor in advance to make alternative arrangements if they could not attend. In lieu of attendance and participation grades for class discussions, students were asked to submit discussion board posts for a specified number of readings during the course and these were graded on completion. Instead of requiring synchronous attendance at all elicitation sessions, students were asked to submit a photo or scan of their elicitation notes each week. These could be completed in synchronous class sessions or by listening to the recording of the class and these were graded on completion. Additionally, students were asked to submit a one paragraph reflection, also graded on completion, discussing their small group’s individual elicitation session each week. This could be completed by listening to the recording of the session if they were unable to attend synchronously. Students generally chose to attend and actively participate in all sessions even though this was not something that they were graded on, and this flexible policy made it easy to accommodate students with illnesses or unexpected scheduling challenges.
Late Work
Almost all work was accepted past the specified deadlines without penalty. The instructor reached out individually to students who did not submit major assignments to work out a plan for completion. The primary limit on late work was for entries to the class transcription database, since other students relied on this data to complete their assignments. Students who did not submit their transcriptions on time were contacted by the instructor and offered an extension. If the student did not wish to take this extension, they were notified that the instructor would complete the transcriptions, after which point the student could no longer submit them. The vast majority of students consistently turned in assignments on time, and the flexibility made it very straightforward to accommodate students with extenuating circumstances or who had fallen behind on the material.