Marisa Brook and Daniel Currie Hall are both professors of English and Linguistics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They kindly answered our questions for this LingComm IRL interview, a series edited by Gretchen McCulloch and Leah Velleman highlighting face-to-face, community-driven linguistics communication activities without much of a web presence to help lingcommers learn from each others’ experiences in doing local activities.
What community group(s) or organization(s) did you work with?
Shad Canada, which has run a month-long summer STE(A)M program for high-school students since the early 1980s. Participants are typically 16–17 years old. Each of them spends a month living in residence at one of the host universities, with an intense and eclectic schedule of lectures, workshops, field trips, and recreation.
The Shad program runs in parallel at 25 host campuses (plus an online distance-learning option) for one month every summer. The program is structured in similar ways across universities, but each campus has a local flavour shaped by its people and research specialties.
How did you get started working with Shad?
Marisa: I attended Shad myself when I was 16, at the University of Waterloo. A cousin of mine had attended the year before and reported having had a wonderful time. Because of that, and because I was toying with the idea of going into engineering, I thought I might as well apply. The program was a huge boost to me both intellectually and socially, and meant I was no longer intimidated by the idea of going away to attend university. I spent about twenty years hoping I’d have a good chance to give back by working for Shad someday. My chance arose in 2024, when two things happened at the same time: I took up a faculty position at Saint Mary’s University and Saint Mary’s signed on as a new Shad host campus to begin in June–July 2025. I happily agreed to serve as a Faculty Fellow (a general mentor figure representing the host campus, and a flexible extra staff member). In the meantime, I ran around campus excitedly telling other faculty members that they should come give talks/workshops for Shad about their research areas and/or creative work.
Daniel: Marisa told me about it! (I’d like to think I would have recognized Shad as an excellent opportunity to spread awareness of linguistics in any case, but Marisa’s enthusiasm really drove the point home.)
What sort of lingcomm project did you do with them?
Daniel: I started with an exercise from Maya Honda and Wayne O’Neil’s textbook Thinking Linguistically about how to apply the scientific method to the study of language: see a set of data, identify a pattern, make predictions, test them, and revise your hypothesis as needed. After that, I did some phonetics demonstrations involving aspiration in English: using tissue paper to see that the [p] in spy looks more like the [b] in buy than the [pʰ] in pie, then using Praat to edit recordings we made on the spot (e.g., turning “buy the spread” into “spy the bread”). The handout included instructions for getting started using Praat on one’s own and some suggestions for other things to try doing with it. At the end of the session, I took questions from the students, which were impressively insightful and wide-ranging; they asked all kinds of things about language and linguistics, not just about what we had done in the session itself.
Marisa: I gave a talk on long-term language change: etymology, the comparative method, and how on earth we can know anything about an ancestral language such as Proto-Indo-European when it was never written down. The follow-up handout guided students through exploring PIE etymology with the digital version of the American Heritage Dictionary of Proto-Indo-European Roots, and prompted students to look for cognates and uncover a recurring correspondence between Latin /s/ (preserved from PIE) and Greek /h/ (an innovation).
What are a few specific things you did that the students resonated with?
In the lectures, asking for a volunteer from the group caught the students’ attention quickly. Making time for the students to ask open-ended questions of their own about language was crucial, as the Shad participants were all very intellectually curious and might never have had an earlier opportunity to get direct answers from experts about how languages work. There was enough interest that the questions after each lecture could have gone on for an hour or more. At the end of the program, several students mentioned linguistics as a highlight. A few approached one or both of us to ask excellent additional questions or make requests for further reading, and more than one even asked where they could hypothetically go to study linguistics at the undergraduate level.
Linguistics is a natural addition to STEM-based summer enrichment programs for young people. We encourage everyone based in Canada who has linguistics training to look up where your nearest Shad host campus is for 2026 and consider offering to give a talk or workshop.
What’s something you’d do differently next time?
Double-check that the audiovisual systems in classrooms inside the newest building on campus can play audio through externally-connected laptops. Contrary to expectation, ours could not.
Where can people find more about you or get in touch if they’re working on a similar project?
Daniel: https://incl.pl/dch/
Marisa: https://marisabrook.com/
LingComm IRL is a series bringing attention to under-documented face-to-face lingcomm projects. Do you know of a great IRL lingcomm project that doesn’t have much if any information about it online yet? Let us know! Does your lingcomm project have a website with information about its structure so other people can use it as a model? Let us know so we can link to it from the LingComm Resources page.
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