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Teaching
Catholic University of Chile: 2016 to present
I've been teaching at the Catholic University of Chile since the beginning of 2016. This semester I'm teaching Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in the Spanish Language and Literature major, as well as Sociophonetics in the Linguistics M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics programs.
Universidad de La Frontera: 2011-2015
Between 2011 and 2015, I taught the following courses at the Universidad de La Frontera in Temuco, Chile:
- Phonetics and Phonology (Speech and Language Therapy major)
- Phonetics and Phonology (Spanish Education major)
- Sociolinguistics (Speech and Language Therapy major)
- Language Variation (Spanish Education major)
- History of the Spanish Language (Spanish Education major)
Advanced Phonetics and Linguistic Fieldwork
Teaching an intensive course in Advanced Phonetics and Linguistic Fieldwork at the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro in Bariloche, Argentina (September 2013).
Praat Workshops
I teach workshops on how to use various tools and techniques which make it possible to do better research and field work. One of the most popular of these tools is Praat.
The workshops are aimed at linguists and linguistics students, though I'm often pleasantly surprised to find speech therapists in attendance, too.
In addition to basic Praat skills and using TextGrids to get the most out of recordings, I also teach scripting and the advanced use of some particularly useful Praat scripts.
One of these is MaSCoT, the Massive Speech Corpus Tool, which I developed in order to mine the hundreds of gigabytes of recordings I've made while putting together the Sociolinguistic Corpus of Spoken Chilean Spanish (Coscach) .
Assuming you've applied the lessons learned in the TextGrid workshop, MaSCoT makes it possible to do things like extract all voiceless velar fricatives that occur before front vowels (they do rather interesting things in Chilean Spanish) and save them to individual WAV files for further analysis. This turns an ordinary field recording into a modern speech corpus, with all the benefits that brings with it.
You can find the materials for some of these workshops here.
Static Palatography Workshops
I recently taught a workshop on static palatography to speech therapy students at a university in Concepción, Chile. Although this technique is normally used in articulatory phonetics, it has great --though as far as I know, completely untapped-- potential in working with speech pathologies and disorders.
Applying the marking solution.
Viewing the stain left by the tongue on the palate (this picture was taken by a student with a still camera; the palatographs were taken by a video camera from a different angle).
The final product - a most lovely palatograph! (Not the same phone as in the previous picture, obviously).
Critical Discourse Analysis (Disguised as Literature)
One of the most amazing teaching experiences I've ever had was in a course called Latin American Literature. This was actually a "front" for critical discourse analysis, which I think is one of the best paths to critical thinking around, as became evident here.
I'd taught the same group of students in previous courses, and by the time this one rolled around they'd decided they'd had enough -- enough of sitting around, of being passive, and of being students in these matters. They wanted to do something about some of the issues we'd been dealing with.
So we reorganized things, started meeting after class hours, on weekends and over holidays, and... put a textbook together. This ended up being the Antología de Literatura Crítica.
But that was just part one of their plan. Part two was to use the textbook to teach what they'd learned in all kinds of non-traditional places, including neighborhood youth centers, a government program for impoverished homemakers, and a prison.
This was one of those cases where the teacher was far surpassed by the students.