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Andrew GarrettAssociate Professor, Linguistics |
Andrew Garrett, who came to Berkeley in 1995, “epitomizes the teacher-scholar,” says Professor Sharon Inkelas, Chair of Linguistics. His current research is in two areas: historical linguistics and the structure of Yurok, an endangered indigenous language of Northern California. He teaches a wide range of courses from the graduate course in field methods to the large Linguistics 100, Introduction to Linguistic Science. Of special note is his work, combining research and teaching outside the classroom, with the Yurok Tribe: during a leave year, he drove the 600 mile round trip twice a month to present grammar lessons to Yurok teachers. The Committee praised Garrett’s exceptional ability to synthesize information, his great scholarly mind, his enthusiasm, and the high standards he sets for his students. A former student, now a professor, writes, “I still pattern much of what I do in the classroom after what I observed when taking his classes, knowing all the while that whatever success I may have achieved in my teaching career so far, it is still just a pale reflection of its etymological source.”
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I teach our upper-division introduction to linguistics every year. On the first day of class I tell students I have three goals. The same goals inform all my undergraduate teaching.
My first goal is to convey as vividly as possible the diversity of the world's 6,500 languages: not all languages are spoken by millions of people (most are spoken by thousands), not all societies are monolingual (most have been multilingual), and languages are structured in radically different ways. Exposing students to language diversity, and showing how language is embedded in sociocultural context and cognition, serves what I see as the broadest purpose of undergraduate linguistics education—opening a window on human diversity and its fragility.
My second goal is to convey the raw pleasure of analysis, of reducing something as elaborate as a complex grammar or as heterogeneous as language diversity to simpler patterns and common themes. I do believe that the analytic skills we teach long outlast a student's life in linguistics, and obviously lessons you enjoy outlive their dull cousins, but for me personally the goal is more visceral; it is to see students find the satisfaction of assembling the pieces of a linguistic puzzle.
My third goal is in a way the least important: the actual content of the course. Students will mostly forget the details in time, and we all know that the skills students keep for later are not what they ostensibly study. But by teaching broad courses, I have formed my own sense of my field. Such teaching persuades me that it is a myth that "teaching" and "research" are different enterprises. The differences are a matter of scale. At least for me, the object is to fit the pieces of language together: a "research" project may involve a set of small corner pieces nobody has studied before, but "teaching" just means arranging bigger parts of the puzzle.
More recently I realized something similar about the boundary between"service" and “teaching.” Two years ago I taught a series of Yurok grammar classes for the Yurok Tribe. The audience included a wide range of people: professional language teachers, some community members with little formal education, a few elderly fluent speakers, and younger people learning the language. I have never learned as much from teaching, because I have never taught where I was so unable to hide my ignorance. If you omit a language's stress pattern from your lecture, linguistics students may not mind, but in a room with fluent speakers of a language I do not speak well, there is no avoiding the facts, no hiding behind academic authority. Those classes forced me to figure out things I had not thought I needed to know about Yurok, and taught me about honest teaching. They also gave me the pleasure of knowing that what I know can sometimes be desperately important to people I am "teaching". Linguists aren't used to that, and we'd probably be better off if it happened more often.