EDITORIAL
David Mills and Dimitrina Spencer, Editors
What do teaching and anthropological research share in common? Both call for a sensitivity to meaning-making, learning, relationships, power, and emotions. Both cultivate the skills of observation and reflection. And at their best, both inculcate a critical awareness of the reciprocity and interdependence that shape pedagogical relationships as well as anthropological ones.
Do we need a journal dedicated to teaching in anthropology? Despite spending much of their professional lives teaching, few anthropologists take the time to write about their own pedagogic insights and practices. This journal acknowledges the parallels between teaching and anthropology, seeks to promote research and reflection on pedagogy, and advocates a form of teaching informed by an ethnographic sensibility.
As academics, we are called to account for our teaching and research in divergent ways, as if they occupy different professional continents. Yet, separating our disciplinary and pedagogic identities is impossible in practice. Life in universities is about being simultaneously a scholar, a teacher and an administrator. The demands, inspiration, joys and frustrations of researching, writing and teaching constantly overlap. If this is the case, it makes sense to write about how scholars experience and put research and teaching into dialogue.
In launching this journal, our aims are to promote debates about pedagogy, to highlight the forms of reciprocity that exist in the teaching relationship, and to show how these are in turn defined by the wider social, political or economic forces shaping schools and universities.
We begin with some questions. What can we learn from ethnographies of education about power within and beyond our own classrooms? What would it mean to adopt an ethnographic sensibility in our teaching? And what forms of ethical and moral practice would this sensibility nurture? Each of you will have different responses and we welcome your thoughts. To start this exchange, we propose three pedagogic principles.
The first principle is methodological: to see teaching as a form of participant observation. Teaching observations and understanding students’ meaning-making are an important part of teacher-training. We suggest that the ethnographic metaphor of ‘participant-observation’ is an apt one to describe the lived engagement between students and teachers, reminding us how teaching is also a process of learning. Even in the middle of a lesson or a lecture, we find ourselves stepping back and reflecting on the dynamics unfolding around us. How better to understand the meanings that our students are crafting about the knowledge we seek to share, about themselves and about us?
The second principle is already one that guides anthropological practice: cultivating a sensitivity to connections. The best ethnographies of education, from Learning to Labour (Willis 1979), to Making the Grade (Becker et al. 1968) to Wannabe U (Tuchman 2009) highlight the range of forces and networks that shape classroom interactions. They remind us of the importance of looking beyond the classroom in order to understand what is going on inside. Willis forces us to pay attention to gendered bodies, history and power, to tacit knowledges and the hidden curriculum in classroom interactions. Becker reminds us of the myriad social obligations and relationships that mediate student learning. Tuchman makes us think about how quickly university learning is changing. An ethnographic sensitivity to connections reminds us of the diversity of lives, experiences and identities shaped and refashioned within the classroom, a fractal of the wider world.
Our third principle is equally anthropological – to see teaching as a form of gift-giving. Despite the commodity logic shaping contemporary universities, few want to see classroom encounters reduced to the buying and selling of knowledge. Gift-giving involves ongoing relationships of reciprocity and indebtedness. Marcel Mauss (1925) taught us about the moral obligations inherent in social relatedness. One does not need to be talented at ethnographic research to be a good teacher, but an ethnographic sensibility reminds us that teaching is a practice of reciprocity and indebtedness. Gift-giving opens up expectations and possibilities as it creates asymmetries. Simone Galea (2006: 86) notes how ‘the act of teaching is seen as founded on inequalities of experiences and knowledge between the teacher and the student’. For teaching to be an act of hope, pedagogy has to be more than one-sided cultural transmission and reproduction. Teachers may hope to be given something different back within the teaching relationship – new horizons and inspiration, and personal as well as professional growth. In a gift relationship, the focus is less on products than on relationships, less on the quantitative than on the qualitative, less on rights than on an ethic of care.
We hope Teaching Anthropology will begin to explore these challenges and rewards. We look forward to your contributions.
Becker, H., Geer, B. and Hughs, E. C. (1968), Making the Grade: the Academic Side of College Life, New York: Wiley.
Galea, S. (2006), ‘Iris Marion Young's Imaginations of Gift-Giving: Some Implications for the Teacher and the Student’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1): 83-91.
Mauss, M. (1990 [1925]), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London: Routledge.
Tuchmann, G. (2009), Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Willis, P. (1977), Learning to Labour: Why Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Farnborough: Saxon House.