3:15 - 3:45

Terrell Morgan -- "Incorporating Community: A View from Spanish Linguistics"

Abstract:

        As stated in OSU's Academic Plan, the purpose of the university is "to advance the well-being of the people of Ohio and the global community through the creation and dissemination of knowledge." Indeed, there seems to be considerable interest in highlighting the university's contributions and in maintaining positive working relationships with its many and varied constituencies. Although much of this attention comes from administrators, a large number of faculty and student researchers depend crucially on "the community" to carry out their work. This has been the case with my own research in the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of Ohio and beyond.

It seems serendipitous when teaching and research opportunities spring organically from one's direct involvement with local communities, and so is it that both service learning and community-based research have been a boon to the Spanish program at OSU. In this presentation, I focus on the challenges we face as we strive to make university and community (broadly defined) mutually relevant. While community contributions to linguistic research (as human subjects, for example) are huge and relatively straightforward, I consider some of the ways in which the university is in a position to reciprocate, and how the key to building and maintaining relationships may well be a multi-pronged approach that integrates the areas of teaching, research, and service at many levels. In passing, I describe some of the promising research topics that we found when we went to the intersection of university and community.

About Terrell Morgan:

My research focuses on Spanish phonology (study of the sound system) and Hispanic dialectology (language variation throughout the Spanish-speaking world), and I am currently most concerned with documenting linguistic diversity and finding new ways to get students, teachers, and fellow researchers in touch with the intimate details of Spanish sound structure. I have taught and done fieldwork in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay, as well as in Hispanic communities across Ohio and in other parts of the U.S. Field research dovetails especially well with the Summer Seminars Abroad for Spanish Teachers, held annually and in nine different countries since 1991, and with "Spanish in Ohio," an immersion course designed to provide field experiences for Spanish majors at OSU. Our newest initiative to combine research, service, and teaching is the Ohio Hispanic Heritage Project, for which seed grant funds have been provided in order that researchers from a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines might converge on issues of special importance to heritage language communities in the state.