Project Summary
As a scholar of Japanese linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis and through my administrative position as Associate Director for Academic Affairs for the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC) at the University of Maryland, College Park, I seek to develop rigorous, practice-based sets of values and assessment criteria that may be applied to student learning outcomes as well as scholarly and creative productivity. Through the conceptual framework of Communities of Practice (CoP) along with micro-credentialing programs such as badging and Portfolium, I will bring together the myriad programs I oversee or support on campus and beyond; these include the Language House Immersion Program, the Language Partner Program, Education Abroad, and BTAA Courseshare. In this way, students may participate in multiple opportunities to engage directly with others of differing backgrounds, and learn about diverse perspectives within and across languages, cultures, communities, ethnicities, races, nations, and religions. These activities can then feed into larger discussions among faculty about criteria and measures for learning outcomes assessments, and lead to the development of new courses that could take advantage of newly available technologies such as simultaneous translation to bring together speakers of multiple languages. I also plan to initiate CoP-based faculty working groups across the SLLC and eventually through the BTAA network to foster interdisciplinary discussions that will assist in establishing innovative, equitable, and just means of evaluating our scholarly contributions to the humanities and beyond.
Biography
Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura is currently an Associate Professor of Japanese and Associate Director for Academic Affairs in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from The Ohio State University in 1997. She specializes in Japanese linguistics, focusing on cross-cultural pragmatics and discourse analysis from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Her work has investigated the role of deixis and indexicality in spoken and written genres of Japanese to illuminate the strategic, situated practices of numerous communities of practice—in particular, customer service environments. Publications include her book, Negotiating Moves: Problem Presentation and Resolution in Japanese Business Discourse (Elsevier, 2003), and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. In addition to teaching courses at UMD in Japanese language and linguistics, Yotsukura served for 21 years as the Director of the undergraduate Japanese program and was formerly the Director of the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) and the Coordinator of the CEAS undergraduate Certificate Program. During the 2020-21 academic year she participated in the ADVANCE Leadership Fellows program, and she very much looks forward to meeting and engaging with the 2022 HuMetricsHSS Fellows.