Conference on Scholarly Teaching and SoTL in Linguistics

This project aims to serve the national interest by building capacity for scholarly teaching in the undergraduate linguistics curriculum. The conference on Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Linguistics will be the first of its kind. Participants will gain a better understanding of evidence-based instructional practices and collaboratively identify ways in which linguistics can help improve undergraduate STEM instruction more broadly. Faculty teaching linguistics at an undergraduate level along with graduate students interested in undergraduate teaching will be invited to the conference. Three overarching questions will guide the conference: (1) What are the strategic steps that can be followed as a discipline to elevate the use of evidence-based teaching approaches and the status of SoTL work as scholarly work within linguistics? (2) How can teachers of linguistics advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in their classrooms and in the discipline? (3) How can linguistic theory and the teaching of linguistics inform the teaching of other sciences?This project aims to serve the national interest by building capacity for scholarly teaching in the undergraduate linguistics curriculum. The two-day conference will advance the understanding of the state of teaching in linguistics and will support the creation and dissemination of new SoTL scholarship. Pivotal to this goal is the inclusion of instructors from different subdisciplines and different institutional contexts. The conference has the potential to advance linguistic pedagogy and the discipline of linguistics by allowing scholars to create and disseminate new SoTL scholarship and gain a better understanding of the state of undergraduate teaching in linguistics. With JEDI-centered conversations and working sessions, this conference intends to explore gatekeeping and barriers that may currently exist in linguistics instruction and the ways that different contexts shape the linguistics curriculum. The project's impact will be evaluated through a series of participant surveys prior to, during, and following the conference. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.