Ei! My name is Antônio Jorge Medeiros Batista Silva (yes—four last names!) and I'm a '25 from Governador Valadares, Brazil. My journey to Dartmouth has crossed two continents, three countries, and over 10 schools—and I'm a strong believer that everyone's path to the Big Green was unique in a way. At Dartmouth, I study Linguistics, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and Spanish. I am passionate about social justice, language-learning, and the oxford comma!
This class is an introduction to the Spanish minor and major courses and, although I did not expect to particularly like it, it not only turned out to be my favourite but it made me start considering a degree in the department!
In this class, we analysed different productions of Latinx American theatre. Prof. Analola Santana was probably the best person I met this year at Dartmouth. Being her student was a very important experience as I try to navigate my potential majors and minors.
In this class, I was able to carve time out of my busy Dartmouth schedule to study and learn my Indigenous language: Krenak. With the help of Prof. Gokke, all students were encouraged to develop a final project that spoke to their community's needs for language learning and revitalisation. It was an extremely important class for me, not only academically, but also for my personal healing process.
I had the honour of spending my sophomore fall in Madrid, taking part in the Spanish FSP. There, Prof. Martín was not only a great professor, responsible for my favourite lecture of the program, but also an incredible company throughout our classes and in-country trips. Great way to wrap up my Spanish minor, honestly!
This was my second class in the NAIS department, and thus it took me one step closer to wrapping up my major. Nonetheless, it was Prof. Powell's genuine charisma and caring personality that made it my favourite of the term!
This course was definitely life changing! Prof. Pochedley, a visiting post-doc of the Potawatomi nation did a great job at keeping the students engaged while teaching us to see the land we inhabit as a source of knowledge and spirituality. In a majority Indigenous classroom, we got to develop individual projects related to our traditional homelands, learning to navigate the world through Native world lenses.
Prof. Gómez is one of those profs I've always wanted to take a class with. His work with the Horror genre in Modern Spanish literatures amazes me, and it was an honour to guide in-class discussions and develop my own research on the themes of science, testimony, and fear.
LING54 is an umbrella course: the actual content of the course may vary each year, but it is the common letter-number code to refer to the course taught abroad by your accompanying Dartmouth Linguistics professor. In this year's Linguistics Foreign Study Program (FSP), LING54 was a 'Language Documentation' class, wonderfully taught by Prof. David Peterson.
Before this class, I had no idea what visual and cultural studies actually encompassed. Every chat with Prof. Broner opened my eyes to a different analysis or method for interpreting literature, and for that, I feel truly lucky! We got to discuss films made by Indigenous women from all over Latin America, exposing the class to distinct ways of interacting with and stewarding the environment.
Hello all! I am so happy to finally be back to campus—to my friends, my Greek house, but more especially: my People Places Pines blog! As I often say, this is as much of my personal journal as it is my attempt to provide accurate and useful advice to prospective applicants. I tend to pour my whole heart into these posts, because they end up being the better stored and edited versions of all my memories since the Fall of my first year here.
Now, if you were wondering where I was, it was the Linguistics Department's Foreign Study Program (or FSP, as we call them here at Dartmouth). This is something I've wanted to do since before getting into Dartmouth, as our Linguistics program touts itself for carrying diverse language documentation projects, including this one with the Māori language, which students are welcome to join as part of their time abroad.
In Rarotonga, we were invited to take part in an outdoors cooking experience, traditional Kuki Airani umukai!
This was definitely a unique program, even in comparison to other Dartmouth programs abroad (if you're curious, check my previous posts about studying in Madrid here). For example, we were actually hosted by two different institutions in two different countries. During our first six weeks, we were based at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. There, we took three courses: Language Documentation (LING 54) with Prof. Peterson, and other two offered by local professors, one on Māori language (LING 08) and one in Māori society (ANTH 52). For the final three weeks, we flew out to Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, where our LING 54 group would meet with local language specialists at the University of the South Pacific. Now, I can't help but think this is probably the most remote location a Dartmouth program can get you – and I was so hyped to be taking full advantage of this opportunity!
Maraes are the ancestral Māori meeting houses, and we had the honour of being welcomed into a couple of them throughout our trip!
In LING 54, we were able to get our hands dirty with language documentation! From coming up with a research topic for grammatical investigation to developing and employing an appropriate elicitation protocol, analysing the raw data, and using computational tools to process it – we learnt how to do it all. As a Brazilian linguist, close to my own Indigenous heritage, I care a lot about language revitalisation issues, and this opportunity exposed me to the appropriate methods and practices of it.
Unlike some other universities, many of the STEM lecture classes at Dartmouth require concurrent enrollment in a laboratory section. What is it like navigating that time as a student?
