The Columbus Linguistics in High School experience: Fits and starts as a prelude to success

Abstract

We report here on our efforts to incorporate linguistics into the high school curriculum in a large midwestern metropolitan area through a university-based initiative — Linguistics in High School (LxHS) — spearheaded by the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. We offer a brief history of the project, and explain our strategy of targeting non-public schools and the practical nature of the reasoning behind this decision. We chronicle the ups and downs of our efforts, ultimately reporting on our success with implementing a linguistics course and a linguistics club at a small local STEM-oriented high school. This partnership between the school and the Linguistics Department has allowed, among other things, for on-site visits by the students to phonetics and sociolinguistics labs. By presenting our challenges, strategies, failures, and successes, we hope that others may be encouraged to evaluate how they can make a difference in their locale and with the resources they have.