Teaching Anthropology

Facing the Consequences: The Case for Transformative Fieldwork in Undergraduate Curriculums

2024-01-13T13:02:25-08:00

In this paper I argue that transformative fieldwork can and should be a pillar of an undergraduate education in anthropology. By transformative fieldwork, I mean long- or medium-term immersive participant observation that challenges the investigator’s beliefs, bodily experience (embodiment), and/or ethics, prompting adaptive responses that, collectively over time, fundamentally alter their experience of the world. My proposal has two parts. First, I advance the “senior thesis” – an in-depth research project undertaken in the final year of undergraduate study – as a viable placeholder for substantive fieldwork in an undergraduate curriculum. Such fieldwork, carried out locally or online, has advantages in accessibility, affordability, and authenticity relative to the conventional undergraduate gateway to fieldwork experience: methodological “field school.” Second, addressing a significant challenge to doing fieldwork on local (culturally familiar) terrain, I argue that such fieldwork can be transformative, and not merely a replication of familiar experiences, if students and their advisors design participant observation projects that carry significant consequences for the student’s beliefs, bodily experience, and/or ethics. I outline strategies for designing such projects, illustrated by examples drawn from my own students’ senior theses. The concluding section addresses three potential reservations about undergraduates undertaking “consequential” research.

Training for teaching medical anthropology in Egypt/the Arab region

2023-12-12T02:30:19-08:00

Medical anthropology is a growing subfield of anthropology, especially as a subject within health education. Medical anthropology knowledge and skills improve the satisfaction of patients and health professionals, better health outcomes for patients, improve communication, avoid conflicts, or make it possible to deal successfully with these etc. The Arab region is an underserved one when it comes to medical anthropology in health education. We carried out the first project that trained teachers for medical anthropology in health education in Egypt / the Arab region in 2020 / 2021. Training with a regional focus is crucial to create a competent local workforce.

The Craft of Teaching. Cultivating Uncertainty and Moving in Playfulness as Pedagogical Strategy

2023-10-05T08:05:46-07:00

I have long tried to move away from teaching as “passing on knowledge” and moved towards practicing teaching as co-creating knowledge. I have come to regard teaching as a joint act of exploration, also taking into account students’ everyday life experiences. In the last academic year, I decided to expand my pedagogy by including playfulness. This required openness and vulnerability on behalf of me as the person developing the course as well as a new kind of engagement and involvement on behalf of my students. In doing so, the courses opened up space for making visible “epistemological journeys” (Arantes, 2021) and “liminal knowledges” (Burgos-Martinez, 2018). In this paper I give insights into some of the chosen approaches – of which a few involved playing with the idiom ‘business before pleasure’ – and reflect on their implications. I suggest that anthropology not only move within playfulness in the realm of research and representation but also on the level of teaching. Ultimately, I also reflect on what learning and teaching playfully and giving space to homo ludens (Huizinga, 1950) can teach us about the broader role of play for anthropology.

‘Before we begin…’: The Role of Introductions in Anthropological Education

2024-03-11T04:57:18-07:00

The classroom – and a first seminar or tutorial in specific – affords a seemingly infinite number of starting points, invitations, orientations, and departures. This report reflects on the introduction as a pedagogical tool of, for, and as ethnography, by building upon the work of Eugenia Zuroski. Zooming in on a graduate course in media ethnography and storytelling, I will sketch how a reconfiguration of introductions can both instill an ethnographic sensibility and foster rapport and solidarity in the classroom. Considering how to start a course can generate a more situated pedagogy for anthropological education.

Learning to Think Like an Anthropologist? Toward Understanding Student Acquisition of Anthropological Perspectives in Online vs. Face-to-Face Anthropology of Education Courses

2023-09-25T17:56:54-07:00

In recent years, online approaches to teaching anthropology have become popular in higher education. In this exploratory account, we consider how student understanding of anthropological ideas differed in online vs. face-to-face modalities of an anthropology of education course. Through content analysis of student essays and discussion posts over 8 semesters of the course as it was delivered in both formats, we considered patterns in students’ conceptual responses to anthropological ideas. Our analysis revealed differences in student conceptual engagement, with greater acquisition and understanding of anthropological perspectives in the face-to-face course than in the online course. Drawing from recent work in the anthropology of learning that emphasizes interactional and social dimensions of learning, we suggest that a possible explanation for these differences lies in features of the interaction environment in each course. Our study points to ways in which the fine-grained study of online course environments through analysis of student writing may offer significant insights into improving teaching of anthropology in such contexts more generally.

Towards Teaching a Humanistic Anatomy: Confronting Racism in Human Anatomy Courses

2023-09-19T08:23:25-07:00

Historically, the study of human anatomy has had a very complex relationship with race and racism in the United States. Today, BIPOC students are disproportionately excluded from the health sciences, in part because anatomy courses play the role of “gatekeepers” for the health professions. Anatomy instructors–including biological anthropologists teaching anatomy-may passively support white supremacy in science and medicine by ignoring anatomy’s problematic history and by teaching in outdated, exclusionary ways, rather than using anatomy courses as opportunities to provide insight into structural racism and support the success of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC). The objectives of this work were to 1) uncover how latent racism in anatomy and anatomy education may be contributing to marginalized students’ exclusion from health care careers, and 2) offer recommendations which will promote the success of BIPOC health sciences students and produce antiracist healthcare practitioners of all identities. Historical, anthropological, and critical pedagogical analysis of anatomy education was conducted. Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018) was used as a theoretical framework for dissecting the ways in which the traditional pedagogy of anatomy may be particularly exclusionary for BIPOC students in the US. Pedagogical recommendations and recent case studies were collected from the academic literature. Anatomy instructors and medical schools are encouraged to develop a new, humanistic way of teaching anatomy, which requires extensive changes to the anatomy curriculum. Five categories of reform are recommended: improving pedagogical training for anatomy instructors, reconsidering course organization and modalities, emphasizing variation, implementing culturally-responsive teaching and improving culture, and including history in the anatomy curriculum.

The Slow Reading Ethnography Experiment

2023-09-19T05:57:22-07:00

While much has been published in anthropological discourse and teaching forums about the skills, practices and positionality of ethnographic writing, very little attention has been paid to the practices and experiences of ethnographic reading. Our project set out to investigate the potential for ‘slow reading’ within anthropological pedagogy. We invited anthropology undergraduates to select a book and engage in a period of slow reading over the vacation, before reporting back on their experiences through a focus group discussion. Students found that their ideals for slow reading were hard to realise, and we learned about the importance of appropriate spaces, times, and communities in practices of reading ethnography.

Teaching and Learning Urban Anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina

2023-08-29T11:53:49-07:00

In the summer of 2019, two professors led seven students from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in a high impact immersive learning course in urban anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They spent a week each in three different cities: the multiethnic, cosmopolitan capital of Sarajevo, the industrial and predominantly Muslim city of Zenica, and Mostar, an ethnically divided city that is also a tourist destination and home to the country’s largest corporations. Professors wanted students to understand that there are multiple ways of experiencing and representing urban cultures. They led classes on multimodal ethnographic methods and stressed the importance of place in ethnography. Students were also encouraged to apply their personal and academic background and interests to each of the cities. In this paper, they outline the course, provide reflections, and make the case that establishing a uniform structure for teaching multimodal anthropological methods while allowing for flexibility and student interests in assignments will result in better learning outcomes. Finally, we explain how the course leaned into the practice of “teaching uncertainty” as featured in Current Anthropology (2017) and encouraged students to see the ways in which uncertainty shaped the lives of Bosnians but also students’ own lives and cities.

Applied / Engaged / Activist / (ultimately) Kuleana Anthropology in the Classroom and Beyond – An Interview with Professor Christine Yano

2023-08-02T10:00:47-07:00

Christine Yano has recently retired as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. She has conducted research on Japan and Japanese Americans with a focus on popular culture. At the University of Hawaii, she taught a course called ‘Applied/ Engaged/Activist (ultimately) Kuleana Anthropology’. This is predicated upon the idea that we need not choose between scholarship on the one hand, and community engagement on the other, and it encourages consideration for how anthropologists can nurture lasting relationships with those whom they work with. In this interview, the concept of ‘Kuleana’ driven anthropology is introduced and Christine unpacks the realities of publishing with students, decolonizing the curriculum, sparking student interest, and building trust in the classroom.

The TikTok of Teaching: The Pedagogical Possibilities of Collaborative Digital Ethnography

2023-07-14T07:12:12-07:00

Working collaboratively with students, lecturers, and others, to conduct digital ethnography enriches the ethnographies produced, expands pedagogical possibilities, and allows us to rethink how we teach and do research in anthropology. This Special Issue is an output of such a collaborative attempt. In this Editorial we introduce the TikTok Ethnography Collective and the collaborative mode of research and learning we established in September 2020. The articles we have collated demonstrate that collaborative ethnographic methods are the ideal tool for researching algorithmically shaped digital spaces. But more than this, by sharing our collective experience, we make the case for incorporating collaborative methods into anthropological teaching and learning in order to disrupt traditional, hierarchical models of education and research. We propose that inclusion of students in the research process is imperative for facilitating a safe, creative sandbox environment that allows staff and students to explore and formulate theories and reflections somewhat liberated from the expectations around who should and should not be the expert. We invite readers to join us in considering the broader implications of embracing collaborative research and teaching methods.