[Somean] Guidelines email for department

[Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn]

Hello So Mean and Pragmatics group members,

Thank you so much for your insight and participation in this past semester’s experiment in discussion group guidelines. As we discussed the other week, I have written up an email to send to the department as a whole, reporting on our experience. The draft is below, and I invite any comments or edits you have, to ensure that the message is reflective of the experiences of all the group members, particularly in Pragmatics, since I missed some of those meetings towards the end of the semester. If you can send me those by the end of the week, I’ll make sure they’re addressed before the email goes out to the department. (Ashwini, if you can also confirm whether you are, in fact, “happy to discuss our experiences further” as I have claimed, that would be great!)

Thanks,

Kathryn



Hello department members,

At the behest of the department diversity committee, the So Mean and Pragmatics discussion groups conducted an experiment in establishing and using group guidelines this past spring semester. We found the experiment to be a great success and we’d like to invite other discussion groups to consider adopting “ground rules” themselves. The rules that So Mean came up with (Pragmatics were very similar) are listed here: https://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/research/groups/somean/groundrules.html

In each group, we spent some of the first meeting of the semester brainstorming practices that we thought would support the intellectual culture we wanted in the group. Some of these were rules that were already in practice implicitly, others were new ideas. The discussion was then synthesized into a set of written rules and emailed to the group list for edits. Due to the overlap between the groups, we also ended up borrowing ideas across the two groups.

Both groups reported that they found the experiment useful and would like to see similar systems in other discussion groups. The biggest impact was on graduate student participation in discussion. The combination of encouraging faculty to try to step back and encouraging everyone (especially the more talkative members) to be more comfortable embracing silence meant that discussions had a wider set of voices. Students suggested that similar ideas, adapted appropriately, might be useful in department colloquia Q&A, to encourage student participation there as well.

If anyone, particularly other discussion group facilitators, have any questions or want to talk more about this, Ashwini and I would be happy to discuss our experiences. I’ll send out a reminder in the fall as well.

Thanks,

Kathryn

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Ohio State University
campbell-kibler.1 at osu.edu
she/her

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