Hi everyone! I am Laura Spinu, an assistant professor in my fourth year at KBCC. My department is Communications & Performing Arts, but my own specialization somewhat departs from either of these tracks. I am a phonetician teaching speech courses, mostly to our Speech Pathology majors. Phoneticians engage in the science of speech sounds, analyzing them from various angles: articulatory (i.e. how our bodies produce speech), auditory/perceptual (how our bodies perceive speech and how our brains decode and interpret it), and – my favorite! – acoustic (the physical properties of speech sounds as they travel through a medium, typically air). There are countless ways to be creative in the delivery of this information and to inspire students as creators and disseminators of knowledge. Many years ago, I bought a book by the title “Who is Fourier? A mathematical adventure” – just browsing through it I had found it was doing a really great job of conveying very complex information in simple, palatable ways, and I wanted to give it a try in my teaching. When I got home, I wanted to look up the author and to my surprise I realized it had been written by an entire group of students – the Transnational College of LEX. Their joint efforts had resulted in the best, clearest, most exciting textbook ever. It now makes perfect sense to me that one of the most effective ways to teach a complex concept is by collaborating with students who recently acquired it, asking how THEY would explain it to their peers. Our first reading and our first meeting have made it clear that this is indeed the ‘spirit’ of this fellowship, and I am very excited to embark on this adventure with all of you!