Teaching team: Dr. Vass Verkhodanova

Course title: Speech Sounds

The course Speech Sounds is integral in the Masters of Voice technology. The scope of the course involves the interface between phonetics/phonology and speech technology. One major challenge is the diverse profiles of students, some coming from the social sciences, others from computing sciences, and still others from different fields.

Lecturer Vass Verkhodanova masterfully balances this complex issue through highly innovative and hands-on approaches like learning in mixed groups, intense feedback/feedforward protocols, and willingness to adjust lessons or parts of lessons on the fly (while still achieving learning outcomes). This makes it difficult to summarize her achievements since for Vass there is no single “recipe” for success, but rather, it is about her mindset as a teacher. Specifically, a mindset which combines scientific rigour, a passion for the topic, and, above all, a commitment to learning. Vass realizes that achieving learning outcomes is not a matter of ticking boxes in a syllabus, but of inspiring students to acquire deep, nuanced understandings of complex phenomena, while recognizing that those understandings may come in different shades depending on the background of the student. In essence, this comes down to respect for intellectual diversity and responsiveness to student needs.