Students' Assumptions and Professors' Presumptions: Creating a Learning Community for the Whole Student

This paper postulates that having students engage in albeit limited and flawed research is a more effective way of changing attitudes than lecture or discussion. A common goal of the introductory linguistics course is to instill healthy language attitudes, but there is little extant research on the pedagogy of linguistics indicating how this may be accomplished. This case study presents an experimental design that allows students to develop empathy for speakers of stigmatized dialects and serves simultaneously to introduce students to the scientific method and to reinforce the idea of linguistics as a science. It offers ideas that instructors in any discipline dealing with multiculturalism may be able to adapt.