NWAV48

A workshop for inclusion in sociocultural linguistics
The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the highest ranked and highest resourced Minority Serving Institution in the world. Considering the designation as both an honor and a call to action, the UCSB Linguistics Department is making significant changes to its faculty and student recruitment, its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and its research and outreach focus. Join faculty and graduate students from UCSB Linguistics for an interactive workshop designed to help you promote intersectional inclusion in your home department and at your home institution.

We will focus on methods and models used to engage people in linguistics from secondary school through emeritus status, and we will also share challenges that we’ve met along the way with a focus on both interdepartmental and institutional concerns. Our discussion will center around three programs that UCSB Linguistics has developed in recent years: School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics, and the Sneak Peek student recruitment event.

Founded in 2010, SKILLS is an interdisciplinary outreach program that brings together UCSB faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in Linguistics, Education, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, Sociology and other fields to collaborate with local high school students and teachers. In the program, graduate students design and teach dual-enrollment sociocultural linguistics courses, introducing topics such as language, race, and power; and prepare first-generation, college-bound students for university-level coursework. Undergraduate students earn credits as classroom mentors as they support teaching, connect with students, and share college advice. High school students receive college credit and conduct independent research projects, which they present at the end of the semester at UCSB, in a lively research fair. SKILLS connects UCSB to the community through mentorship, research, outreach, and instruction, modeling community-engaged participatory research.

The UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program is a multi-year program funded by the UC-HBCU Initiative and NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) that brings together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at UCSB, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and other colleges and universities around the U.S. Through summer research experiences at UC campuses and competitive funding for successful participants, the UC-HBCU Initiative aims to grow the relationship between UCs and HBCUs as a pathway to increase the number of Black graduate students at UCs. The summer program at UCSB teaches introductory linguistics courses, examines the role of language in social mobility through interviews and data analysis, and provides networking and mentorship opportunities to students; it aims to increase the diversity of students engaged in the linguistic sciences by involving undergraduates from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and students at institutions that do not offer linguistics as a major. Research findings from the program benefit students as well as the institutions they attend by providing information about the nature of the language and culture of Black college students, which has direct implications for teaching and mentoring.

Sneak Peek is a graduate recruitment event hosted by the Department of Linguistics for students from communities underrepresented in higher education. Participants are brought to UCSB, funded by the Department and the university’s Graduate Division, for a day of meetings, workshops, and social gatherings. Sneak Peek, which is held in late May, is designed to prepare applicants for the Fall admissions cycle with an in-depth workshop on preparing a successful graduate application, individual meetings with faculty and graduate students with shared research interests and/or community membership, a showcase of research by current graduate students, and a closed-door panel consisting of current graduate students from underrepresented communities. In the six years Sneak Peek has been running, Sneak Peek has become a successful avenue for recruiting highly competitive applicants to our graduate program.

We invite workshop participants to send us questions ahead of time as well as suggestions for topics and goals that you would particularly wish to address including but not limited to: faculty recruitment, student recruitment, curricular reform, addressing discrimination in your department, and addressing pushback against inclusion attempts.