Teaching Experience
Teaching at the University of Hawai'i
At the University of Hawai'i, I teach graduate courses on Language Documentation and Conservation and Gesture.
Current courses:
LING 680 Introduction to Language Documentation
LING 750G Gesture & Language Seminar
Spring 2025 courses:
LING 635 Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics (supported by James Woodward)
LING 710 Techniques in Language Documentation
Past courses:
Spring 2024: LING 420 Morphology
Spring 2024: LING 710 Techniques in Language Documentation
Fall 2024: LING 680 Introduction to Language Documentation
Spring 2017-Summer 2020: LING 102 Introduction to the Study of Language
Teaching at Bennington College
At Bennington College, I taught introductory and advanced linguistics courses on topics related to language documentation and description, linguistic anthropology, and gesture.
Spring 2024: LIN4112 Field Methods
Spring 2024: LIN2109 Anthropological Linguistics and Biocultural Knowledge
Fall 2023: LIN4110 Language Typology: Universals and Patterns in Language
Spring 2023: LIN4109 Language Documentation and Description
Spring 2023: LIN2107 Language Contact and Shift
Fall 2022: LIN4108 Language, Thought and Culture
Fall 2022: LIN2106 Gesture: Utterances as Multimodal acts
Language Documentation Training
Training at the University of Hawai'i
I have directed much of my teaching energy towards language documentation training. Through such training, I aim to raise awareness about language endangerment among native speakers of endangered languages and teach them techniques for documenting their own language. Much of this work has been completed in conjunction with the Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC). As co-director of LDTC for two years, I organized a workshop series each semester which consisted of 8 weekly workshops on topics ranging from general theoretical information, equipment use, and linguistic analysis. I have taught workshops on video documentation techniques, audio documentation, language endangerment and ethics, phonology and orthography, and archiving and metadata.
Training in Indonesia
In 2023, my colleague, Khairunnisa, and I conducted a language documentation training workshop with the Saparua language community in Central Maluku. The workshop took place over five days and included topics such as language endangerment, ethics, video and audio recording, ELAN, ffmpeg, and a 2-day field practicum.
In 2018, I helped lead a workshop in Kupang, Indonesia in conjunction with Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana and Universiteit Leiden. This was a week-long workshop that taught language documentation ethics, techniques, and data processing to participants that spoke over a dozen regional languages. In addition to classroom training, we also led groups on 3-day field practicums to gain hands-on experience documenting endangered languages in the East Nusa Tenggara region.
Training online
As co-director of LDTC, I created a Facebook Live Workshop series for language documentation training in collaboration with the Endangered Languages Project (ELP) in 2019. We have successfully conducted two workshop series with a total of 16 workshops, and the resulting Facebook group is now a language documentation resource for about 2,000 people from all over the world. This is the first time a language documentation training has been conducted in this medium, and we believe it will be a valuable platform to build on for future training.
