Teaching

Organized Courses taught

Undergraduate:

• First-year Russian (served as program coordinator 1979-1986)
• Second- and third-year Russian
• Russian for Translation, first and second years
• Structure of Russian (upper division)
• First-year Polish (upper division, semi-intensive)
• ‘The Polish Experience’ (Polish history and culture, upper division)
• Survey of Russian culture
• Shostakovich: The man and his music
• Junior Seminar: Prehistoric migrations (Plan II Honors Program)

Graduate:

• Russian Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Pragmatics
• Comparative Slavic Linguistics
• Historical Commentary to Modern Russian
• Old Church Slavonic
• Structure of Russian
• Syntax I (Department of Linguistics)
• English Syntax (Department of Linguistics)

Curriculum development and innovation

Taught a new Plan II Junior Seminar (TC 357) on the topic of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of prehistoric migrations: the movement of Indo-European peoples and cultures from their homeland in western Asia to extend from Ireland to Bengal.

Developed extensive World Wide Web support for graduate courses (LIN 380L: Syntax I and LIN391: English Syntax), including lecture summaries, supplementary notes, homework and examination answers, and ancillary material of interest; routinely utilized e-mail as a means of communication with students outside of class permitting them to submit homework assignments and ask questions at their convenience, and receive a written reply that same day (typically within hours); detailed answers were then distributed to the entire class.

Invited and handled arrangements for visiting professors in the department:

• Dr. Anna Yatsenko, Gertsen State Pedagogical Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia), Visiting Lecturer of Russian (2002-03)
• Dr. Otto Urban, Visiting Lecturer of Czech culture (Spring 2003)
• Prof. Boris Norman, Minsk University, Visiting Professor of Slavic Linguistics (Spring 1999).
• Wojciech Karpinski, NCRS, Paris, Polish critic and Writer-in-Residence

Integrated homework assignments based on searching Polish-related sites on the World Wide Web in interdisciplinary course on Polish history and culture, The Polish Experience (Fall 1995).

Introduced Polish Studies into the departmental curriculum.

• Initiated Polish language instruction at the University on a regular, bi-annual basis.
• Designed and taught an interdisciplinary upper division course in Polish history and culture.
• Organized various extra-curricular activities and took responsibility for acquiring teaching and research materials in the area; have invited numerous Polish cultural figures to campus, including the poets Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski, the critic Wojciech Karpinski, and the historian Norman Davies.
• Assembled documentary videotapes to be used in homework assignments and prepared a collection of Polish Historical Songs and Melodies, with texts, recordings, and commentary.
• Administer and evaluate credit-by-examination tests for Polish.
• Developed a site on the World Wide Web page promoting Polish studies at UT Austin. Developed a site for the undergraduate course The Polish Experience (Fall 1997), to post images (especially architectural objects) and audio clips (historical songs and classical music), to permit the student to review material presented in class. [This site has been dismantled to a considerable extent.]
• Spoke (by invitation) before the annual board meeting (January 1986) and annual convention (November 1986) of the Polish American Congress of Texas.
• Raised funds from various sources to support the departmental program in Polish studies.

Designed a Proseminar in Slavic Studies course for first-semester graduate students in the program: Fall 1996, Fall 2002

Planned, organized, and supervised (with David J. Eaton, Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs) an interdiscplinary study/research program in Cracow, Poland: Summer 1986 semester.

• Eighteen students were recruited nation-wide to participate in this unique nine-week program, for which they received credit for 2-3 courses. All arrangements were negotiated directly by us with two universities in Cracow (Jagiellonian University and the Technical University of Cracow).

Prepared cycles of review lectures on Russian grammar for high school Russian teachers, as part of a summer interdisciplinary In-Service institute: 1 week in 1985, 2 weeks in 1987.

Designed, wrote, tested, and implemented a Computer-Assisted Instruction program.

The program, based on the Apple microcomputer, was designed for vocabulary work in Russian language classes. Introduced for student use in the Spring of 1982, it was unique at the time in utilizing speech synthesis to pronounce Russian words. Conversion of the program to an IBM PC was supported by the Title VI grant to the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, UT Austin.