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Cc: <knbrown@tamu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:59:07 -0400 ------------------ Dear Kimberly, Congratulations on your new position! I'd like to make two suggestions a little off the beaten path, and perhaps more focused on potential approaches to individual courses: 1) Make use of Wikipedia. Actually this is more of a suggestion for particular courses, but perhaps the program could encourage it and develop methods for profs. There was a discussion on H-Africa / HWA about how to use this in African studies classes and if you search the archives the number of messages are not too many to browse. Basically the idea would be for students to do some of their course production in the form of research and writing/upgrading articles on aspects of Africa. 2) Since this is the Year of Languages, and Africa as a whole is noted as having one third of the world's languages, what about an approach to history of Africa and the diaspora through the lens of language? I.e., from the point of view of what was being said about and done with African languages (and other languages in respect to them). Language groups, lingua francas, languages of rulers of various polities, multilingual patterns, pidgins & creoles, colonial impact, language policies from colonization to the present, roles of missionaries, what became of African languages among victims of the slave trade and their descendants up to current discussions of Ebonics, current issues with African languages and education, development, and information technology. Mostly we look at the other forces and language is or is not mentioned by the way in the mix of what happened (a number of histories of Africa that I've browsed through have only passing mention if even that). I was wondering if anyone had tried inverting this emphasis to see how it would look - for programs with the relevant departments, one imagines it could be a combined history & linguistics offering. Don Osborn
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