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The GUR program actually can do
what liberal education is supposed to do
which is teach people to think in different ways
and to approach questions from different angles.
One of the interesting things about
participating in the Faculty GUR
has been to learn the ways in which other
disciplines speak of problems that we talk
about in our own discipline.
So for example, in history I’m teaching
an American Revolution course and
one of the things that historians write a lot
about is the uses of political language
and political rhetoric.
And when I saw and participated in Professor
Kendra Douglas’s Faculty GUR,
her mini-course, I quickly realized that
in sociolinguistics that there is a whole theory
of the ways in which languages change.
And I thought, “Well, I write about political
language and political thought in
the revolutionary era and there’s a lot
of changes going on in the ways in which
language is used and what can I borrow
from these, from Professor Kendra Douglas’s ways
of thinking about it that might help me think
about the relation between language and
society more critically?”
I found Kendra’s introduction from the field
of linguistics, of the idea of code-switching,
very interesting and very useful.
On a number of levels I bring up language
all the time in my classes because
I’m introducing Asian subject matter
so I’m introducing terms in Sanskrit and
Chinese and Japanese.
So language does come up and certainly
I have already recommended that everyone
should take Kendra’s introductory linguistics course.
But in terms of my own lecturing, in
my own introduction of ideas, this idea of
code-switching, of using different languages
within the same sentence, is very useful
in explaining visual language and
how artists use different codes within
perhaps one composition.
I’m teaching a class in economic geology,
which is the study of ore minerals and oil
and coal and all the things you can actually
make money doing as a geologist.
And looking at the different the economic, the
fundamentals of macro- and micro-economics
that we saw from Vinit’s class, really applies,
and in fact I’ve been drawing a bunch of these
supply-and-demand curves and talking about
the optimum price.
The one thing that it will really help me out
with is, is in terms of examples.
So when I’m listening, of course, to other
people present things, you know I’m trained
as an economists, and so I’m trying to make
these connections of ‘well how does that
relate to what I know’ and ‘how does that
relate to the way I see things’ through
sort of an economics lens.
So you know, it helps in the sense that,
you know, my field is very, very abstract and
lots of things I do talk about are pretty abstract
and so to try and sometimes make it resonate
with people you’ve got to, you’ve got to
provide examples and of course, you know,
one person’s example, it works perfectly for
them because, you know, it just strikes a chord
with them but for other people it doesn’t.
Another outcome of the Faculty GUR
is that because we are attended each other’s
mini-courses, after we present our colleagues
suddenly see something that they’re reading
and think about how it applies to what they
just heard, in my presentation for example.
So that is an interesting outcome as well,
that suddenly Vinit in economics sees the
relationship to linguistics.