Teaching Anthropology

Plagiarism, rote memorizing and other "bad" habits in the Greek University and beyond.

Alexandra Bakalaki — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 01:30:42 -0800

Drawing on my experience as professor of Anthropology in Greece, this paper focuses on student practices like rote learning and plagiarism academics commonly consider inimical to meaningful learning, intellectual empowerment and the cultivation of critical independent thinking. In this paper I refrain from viewing such practices from the standard academic perspective according to which they must be eradicated, and try to appreciate them from the perspective of the students who engage in them. I suggest that they serve as means through which students navigate in and cope with the university environment, but they also provide a point of view from which the university appears as a setting within which the “bad habits” academics so despise are sensible and helpful.

‘Ultimate Introvert’ to the ‘Touchy-Chummy’: Using Simulations to Teach Interviewing Skills

Timi Lynne Barone, Samantha K Ammons — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 01:14:21 -0800

In-depth interviews represent one of the most commons forms of qualitative data used in social science research, especially in ethnography. Yet preparing students to conduct good in-depth interviews is an area of relative neglect in social science literature, despite the potential marketability of this skill for anthropology and sociology students. Practice in communities may be impractical and/or problematic because of wariness due to historical legacies, as well as current political and economic uncertainty. However, relying on peer-interactions for “mock” interviews is problematic because of students’ collective inexperience. Without sufficient preparation, mistakes can be costly for all. In this paper, we advocate for the use of a simulated interview participant (SIP) to better prepare students as interviewers. We provide 12 SIPs and guidance for implementing them in classrooms. Through SIPs, instructors or other actors expose students to common interviewer pitfalls and better prepare them for research in diverse communities.

Undergraduate Student Led Research: An Applied Anthropology Course as a Community-Based Research Firm

Jason Miller — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Increasingly, undergraduate students desire hands-on learning experiences to prepare them for life after graduation. Research experience at the undergraduate level unlocks a key skill set students need and desire in terms of its anthropological value and also the value of transferable, critical thinking skills. This article explores the creation and continued development of my Applied Anthropology course which relies heavily on community-engaged research and community-engaged pedagogy. The course is structured as if participants are an independent, community-based research “firm” that has been contracted by a local community agency to undertake research on their behalf. Students manage every aspect of the project including developing data collection tools, seeking Institutional Review Board ethics approval, collecting and analyzing data, and ultimately preparing a technical report, policy recommendations, and presentation for the client. In addition, I will discuss the benefits to both students and community partners (including practical research experience and, in some cases, already implemented policy suggestions) as well as some of the challenges to this approach including time, capacity, and commitment. I conclude by reflecting on my role as mentor during this process and provide suggestions for those who would like to create a similar research experience for their own students.

Navigating interdisciplinarity: negotiating discipline, embodiment, and materiality on a field methods training course

Rebecca Rotter, Laura Jeffery, Luke Heslop — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 02:28:22 -0800

This article elucidates some of the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching, drawing on our participant observation as both instructors of anthropological methods and honorary students of marine ecology and geomorphology methods on a research training field course. We argue that interdisciplinary methods training offers educators opportunities for self-reflexivity, recognition of the taken-for-granted aspects of our knowledge, and improved communication of the value of our work to others. However, we also show how decisions about course structure can reinforce disciplinary boundaries, limiting inter-epistemic knowledge production; how one epistemological approach may overshadow others, hindering interdisciplinary learning; and how methods training involves tacit and embodied knowledge and mastery of material methods, requiring repetition and experimentation. We offer insights into how we as educators can improve our communication of the value of anthropology and its methods. First, instructors in any discipline should develop an awareness of how their tacit knowledge affects the pedagogical process. Second, instead of enskilling instructors to teach a variety of methods, it may be more beneficial for instructors to teach their own areas of expertise, in dialogue and collaboration with other disciplines. Third, interdisciplinary courses must be carefully planned to allow equal participation of different disciplines, so that anthropology is understood on its own terms and embedded in the course from the outset.