Partnering with Students to Increase Engagement and Inclusion in an Undergraduate Phonetics & Acoustics Course

Abstract

An introductory phonetics course provides foundational content for future clinical practice and may serve as a student’s first experience within the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders. The Students as Partners framework (Cook-Sather et al., 2014) offers a model for valuing student assets and experiences in co-creating learning materials to enhance active learning and deepen understanding. Incorporating positive affective feelings around learning complex material, integrating technology, and building a mutually respectful learning community can foster inclusive practices. In this manuscript, the authors share how redesigning an introductory Phonetics and Acoustics course at a large, urban, commuter, public university led to increased student engagement, increased practice, increased collaboration, and increased generalization. This was achieved through personalized content and activities, warm-up activities that fostered success and integration, and co-created active learning activities, such as phonetic memes, spectrogram cards, phonetic pun activities, and sociolinguistic discussions of personal experiences. Thematic analysis of course evaluation data for the redesigned course revealed themes related to: student-instructor partnerships; practice opportunities and clinical application; and sense of belonging within the learning community.