Workshop: Project-Based Learning at the African Linguistics School

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Inaugurated in 2009, the African Linguistics School (ALS) is a two-week institute held biennially. The next ALS will be held in July 2016, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Most of those in attendance at the school are graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in linguistics at African universities. The attendees also include graduate students from American universities. The aim of the ALS is to provide students with the latest work in core areas of linguistics. The school's students, selected through a highly competitive application process, pay no fees; the ALS covers tuition, room and board, and, for students coming from within Africa, transportation to and from the school. Faculty members, drawn from North America, Africa, and Europe, teach pro bono. The school promotes higher education through the training of outstanding graduate students who return to their institutions with knowledge that they then impart to their own colleagues and students; A number of the students go on to study at leading American graduate programs in linguistics. The ALS promotes intellectual cooperation that may lead to research collaborations among students, postdocs, and faculty, among participants from the US and different countries in Africa. The specific goals of the current grant are to introduce project-based teaching into the ALS curriculum and to increase the diversity of the students in terms of country of origin. The format for ALS courses has been lectures, which have the advantage of providing students with a guided and highly concentrated description of the subject matter. However, especially in an intense two-week institute, there come to be limits as to how much students as audience can absorb. To address this at the next ALS, time will be reserved for projects that involve students working in teams to carry out linguistic research. The projects will focus on hands-on activities, such as eliciting data, applying standard definitions to data, and formulating and testing hypotheses.