I had the pleasure of teaching a class on one of my favorite topics, the neuroanatomy of speech lexical processing for 6 years in a row during my time at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). This course was part of the Master’s program in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language.

I loved teaching this class! It was an intensive student-centered course that immersed students in research topics focused on the neural basis of spoken language processes.

The course required students to read papers, make presentations, write papers, and have many class discussions. An overall class goal was to work together to piece the parts of the puzzle that fit language processes onto the brain while also capturing some of the nuances of ongoing debates about mapping these processes and identifying open questions. A sample syllabus is provided here.

My favorite part of teaching this class was also the most challenging part. The students came from different academic and cultural backgrounds. I worked hard to craft the course in such a way that would make the main concepts accessible to everyone. I tried to improve the ways I captured the importance of methodological details and how they contribute to the interpretation of the results without losing student engagement.