Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Anthropology in the classroom.

What Makes Something Ethnographic?

How do you know when you are reading an ethnography? What makes a book or article ethnographic? This past semester I taught a new undergraduate course titled Reading Ethnography in which the students and I asked these questions as a means of appraising the specificity and content of ethnographic knowledge. Our first challenge was to articulate what the term “ethnographic” meant. What are those qualities that make a piece of scholarship ethnographic rather than simply descriptive or anthropological?

Etymologically, the ethnographic comes from ethnography. Following from its Greek origins, ethnography is the writing of people, of society, of culture: ethnos means “folk/the people” and grapho is “to write.” In noun form, ethnography is no longer tethered just to writing. Instead, it is often used to refer to a type of research; it is not only non-anthropologists who use the term this way. We do it too. We talk about “doing ethnography,” using it as a shorthand for fieldwork, saying ethnography when we mean ethnographic research. Continue reading

A Khan Academy for Anthropology?

So I was down South where I met up with DJ Hatfield over breakfast and we got to talking… I’ve long been thinking about how the plethora of open academic courses and lectures online is making it so that teachers can act more like coaches—assisting students in self-paced exploration rather than acting as a funnel for all the information consumed in the classroom. DJ, in turn, has been thinking about how to break up his own lectures into smaller pre-recorded chunks so that he can act more like a discussion leader—interrogating his own lectures alongside students rather than simply regurgitating content down their beaks. Together we combined these ideas into a proposal for an online database of byte-sized anthropology lectures on various topics in anthropology—a Khan Academy for anthropology if you will.

Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

How fast to an Anthropology Ph.D.?

It seems universities everywhere are looking to cut down the amount of time it takes to earn a graduate degree. A story in Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest effort:

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

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Assume and Conclude

In the thick of grading papers here and I’m busy. Treading water busy and not drowning busy, still there’s a lot to do. My Intro students have just turned in their last short essay so I’ve got about 90 of those. Then there’s quizzes to grade and a final exam to write – followed by more grading – but it will be a relief to get this essay off my plate so I can be done with taking assume for conclude.

This is one of my pet peeves and it drives me batty. Another one is when students (let’s face it, it’s always young women) turn in long-hand exercises written in color ink other than black or blue. Red, pink, gold, silver, purple, glitter and don’t get me started on the one’s that dot their I’s with hearts.

I’ve spent my young career as an adjunct bouncing between a small liberal arts college and a large urban university. While my liberal arts students are uniformly stronger writers than my urban university students (who show a greater range of ability from quite talented to less than competent) both groups do this. Maybe its generational?

In the assignment students record their garbage for five days. I shuffle the lists, which are kept anonymous, and return them. Then they must write an essay in which they interpret their classmates’ garbage as if they were archaeologists.

If the trash data turns up tampons and make-up they will invariably write, “I assume this person is female.” Or if there are beer cans and liquor bottles, “I assume this person is 21.”

No, no, no! You assume that the person is not lying about their trash. You assume that those objects are present because the list-maker, through their own willful actions, put it in the rubbish bin and it didn’t just accidentally fall in. Or someone broke into their place and threw things in the trash. You are actually concluding based on your knowledge and experience that the presence of tampons and make-up indicate that this is a woman’s trash. You are concluding something about this person’s leisure time based on the presence of rolling papers and cigars.

I’ve noticed similar patterns with infer and deduce, which are often taken to be synonymous, and I have had some success in teaching students to tell the difference. Next semester I’ll include some notes on the difference between assume and conclude too.

What are your grading pet peeves?

How to Learn a Language (Learning an Endangered Language Part 6)

[This is the 5th installment in an ongoing series.]

I am not this guy:

Or this guy:

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.

I suspect some people are wired differently, like this RadioLab episode about a ragtime musician who can play four concerts in his head at the same time and keep track of what any instrument in each of the four orchestras is playing at any given time.

This is a post about language learning for the rest of us. But first, a little throat clearing. While I have read a few books summarizing contemporary research on language learning, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. That means I make some scientific claims without backing them up. Caveat emptor. Continue reading

Grading Papers

For the last three weeks I’ve been grading papers and other assignments nonstop. The way I figure it, one more week and I should be caught up! Some anthropologists identify primarily as researchers while for others their activism comes first. I think of myself primarily as a teacher, but there’s still no way around it: I hate grading.

There are two things to hate about grading: it’s tedious and it’s unfair. On top of this one might even question whether its an effective way of evaluating student performance in the first place.

On this last note I seem to be in the minority. In high school I was a bright student who didn’t have to try very hard to get by even when my equally bright peers were ultra-competitive. As a result I graduated outside the top 20% of my class. While my peers were headed off to MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and West Point I earned a free ride to a school without grades, New College.

At New College I fell in love with learning and discovered anthropology. In small classes I was nurtured to be an independent and self-motivated student. Everything was graded pass/fail with written evaluations. Fortunately not having a GPA didn’t keep me out of grad school. At UNC my graduate courses were all graded as High Pass, Pass, or Fail. It fit my personality but also worked to my disadvantage. I lost out on a Ford Fellowship when a reviewer noted that my transcript had so many courses marked Pass, and since there were also some High Passes a regular Pass must be equivalent to a B. Therefore I was a B student.

To a certain degree I have had to unlearn this culture of gradeless scholarship in order to teach traditional college students. My students still perceive me as unconventional, but I’ve toned that way down in the years since I first began. If there is one lesson I’ve learned from leading a gradeless life it is this: the vast majority students want to be graded. They crave it. They are satisfied only when you rank them in a coherent order and, for the most part, they aren’t interested in whatever “thoughtful” comments you might make about their essays. Continue reading

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I recently applied for “academic promotion” from Assistant to Associate Professor. I’m still awaiting the results, but I wanted to share part of that process with you: the ubiquitous “statement of teaching philosophy.” As this is something many people also struggle with in job applications, I thought I’d talk a little about the genre and share my own statement in full. Sharing my statement takes a little guts, as I really struggled to write an honest statement as opposed to the kind of jargon and cliché ridden statements I’ve seen when sitting on the other side of a job search committee, or when looking for sample documents on the web. (Rex sent me this page on writing such documents and the “Rubric for Statements of Teaching Philosophy” included there is one of the few genuinely helpful documents I found.)

Why is this statement so hard to write? Well, for one thing, I think it makes us painfully aware of the gap between our teaching ideals and our actual classroom practices. We can talk all we want about various teaching philosophies, but much of what most teachers do in the classroom is essentially the same. Even Mike Wesch, who wrote here about his theory of anti-teaching, has more recently written about “why good classes fail“:

In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

I appreciate Wesch’s thoughts on this, and I strongly recommend reading the whole piece. (And look forward to his forthcoming book on teaching.) There is also an article about his re-think in the Chronicle. I mention it because it gives me comfort in the more modest approach I’ve taken in my own statement of teaching philosophy. I talk, for instance, about making my goals explicit. This may not seem like much, but in practice I’ve found that it is very difficult to do well and also very helpful to students when done properly. It isn’t the kind of thing that gets one written up in the Chronicle, but it is something I’ve thought long and hard about. It isn’t just about writing a good syllabus, but about spending time in class teaching one’s expectations and the reasons behind them. (In my case we actually created a whole new course to accomplish this goal.)

I hope my document is useful for others working on articulating their own teaching philosophy. I also think it highlights some of the unique challenges I face teaching here in Taiwan and might be interesting even for those not planning on writing such a statement anytime soon.

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Using Social Media to Teach Theory to Undergraduate Students

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan.

“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

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How to Get a Job as an Anthropologist

Stop being an anthropologist.

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue.

I just went through the whole job-hunting process before signing a contract on Monday to become a Lecturer in media and cultural studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. I was able to apply for a silly amount of jobs, get a bunch of interviews and campus visit requests, and have some choices and grounds on which to do some humble negotiating. I think my trick was post-disciplinary research and (a considerable amount of) cross-disciplinary publishing. I could apply to communications, media studies, anthropology, information studies, STS, sociology, television studies, American studies, and internet studies. If I were desperate I could apply for archaeology and film production positions. Postdoctoral positions, particularly those financed by the Mellon, are all about interdisciplinarity as are jobs looking for digital humanities scholars.

So I’d encourage my fellow freshly minted ABDs and PhDs to begin seeing their research and their teaching across at least 4-5 large disciplines. Be able to realistically apply to 4-5 departments. One can put this together variously by publishing in different journals, collaborating with colleagues from different fields, or simply working the boundaries of one’s discipline in necessarily interdisciplinary ways. (All I can say is that I hope this is not my internalization of the precarity of neoliberal governmentality in the education sector.)

And there is something said for responding (in non-trendy and timeless ways!) to emergent patterns in industry, politics, and social movements. The departments recognize that what is in the news is what the students want to study. In my case this amounted to a recursive loop from the hype surrounding new media –Arab Spring, Anonymous, Wikileaks, SOPA, PIPA, and Occupy– to departments requesting applicants with expertise in social media and political movements. Oddly enough, if the academic job thing doesn’t work out this type of preparation in the now prepares oneself better for a post-academic profession. In academia the joy of investigating emergent practices is that there is no syllabus. You get to design your own. And in the classroom you are not pulling teeth, the issues are on students’ minds. It is relevant.

I may sound heretical to some of you by suggesting that post-anthropological disciplinary affiliations are necessary. But one gains much less than one loses by fundamentally aligning oneself with the orthodoxy of a specific discipline. One one hand, the qualitative and critical social sciences are converging. Critical theory and ethnographic or textual methods run across all the disciplines above. On the other hand, replicating the discourses specific to a discipline is important for the survival of that discipline and I am glad some people are monogamously “physical anthropologists” or whatnot. But my argument is that this practice of disciplinary orthodoxy is dangerously myopic for a discipline and puts the job hunter in a situation with few options. I preferred to bring scholarship from other disciplines to anthropology, and though it proved difficult to buck anthropological tradition by studying contemporary technoculture in America, it provided me a wider repertoire of skills that apparently translate into numerous disciplines and a blessed job offer.

Good luck! Tell us how it goes for you.

 

Governor of Florida: We don’t need no anthropologists

News from the “why don’t you all just get a real job” front.  Who cares about anthropology?  Who thinks that anthropology matters in the 21st century?  Well, it’s definitely NOT Florida Governor Rick Scott.  Yesterday, Governor Scott made his opinions about anthropology loud and clear during a radio interview:

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

Daniel Lende provides a good recap of the situation and some of the reactions with this mega-linked, all inclusive postJason Antrosio has also weighed in on the matter–his post also includes a link to the AAA response, which is here.  Jason sees this as an opportunity to rally anthropologists:

Not only does this give anthropology an opportunity to emphasize our scientific side, it could also be a rallying point for social science and humanities disciplines that were equally dismissed. It seems worth mentioning that while Scott dismisses everyone except math-science-engineering, it is at a time when other countries are seeking the lifelong thinking and creativity developed in a Liberal Arts education.

In another piece, John Hawks discusses some of the possible avenues for responding to this debacle.  How can or should anthropologists make their case?  He writes:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

One of Scott’s underlying arguments is that anthropology doesn’t produce JOBS, and this is an argument that seems to get a lot of mileage by certain folks who aren’t exactly fans of social science (Tom Coburn, anyone?).  I am going to leave off with a few questions for all you Savage Minds out there: What do you think about this tactic of using jobs as the sole calculus for measuring the value of a discipline?  Should anthropologists be completely focused on producing jobs, or are there other elements that matter in a valuable and worthwhile education?  What about the value of teaching students how to think critically and holistically about the world around them?  Why say you, readers?

Illustrated Man, #7 – Shane, the Lone Ethnographer

In this installment of Illustrated Man we’re joined by anthropologist and comic book aficionado, Sally Campbell Galman, assistant professor of child and family studies at the U Mass School of Education. Dr. Galman is author and illustrator of Shane, the Lone Ethnographer, an introductory text that uses comics as a vehicle for teaching field methodology.

MT: Tell me something of your love for comics. What is the personal history of your tastes and interests?

SG: As a girl growing up in Japan and Hawaii surrounded by early Anime culture and the comics scene on base I was phenomenally uninterested in comix/comics and the associated culture. I think a large part of this was that back then (1980s) it was a heavy, heavy masculinist scene that alienated a lot of girls and boys, and maybe I was responding to that. The genre is defined much, MUCH more widely now and I think that’s a lot more welcoming for girls and women as well as subaltern men and people of color, to name a few.

I really wasn’t interested in that as much as I was in drawing — drawing was what I spent my days and nights doing and developing. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not classically trained in ANY respect, but I do remember there was this little Ed Emberly book about learning to draw animals from basic shapes that rocked my 5 year old world.

It’s probably a little pedestrian for the dyed-in-the-wool comics fan but the two artists who turned me on to the possibilities of the graphic novel and the panel or strip-format comic were Gary Larson and Art Spiegelman. The former was so quirky — it gave me the idea that there could be more than just superheroes or Prince Valiant or Cathy. The latter taught me about diversity of style and subject matter. The Maus series changed my world from an artistic and political point of view, considering I first came across it in 6th grade. Again, things are much different now, and as an adult (with the internet!) I have a much better range of stuff to read.

MT: Why did you think it would be a good thing to bring comics and anthropology together? Is there something that comics can do for anthropology?
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Illustrated Man, #5 – Journey to Cahokia and Jingle Dancer

Can anthropology be for children? Should anthropology be for children? In this installment of Illustrated Man we turn our attention to two picture books from the juvenile stacks of my local public library.

Books for children can, on occasion, offer a clarity into underlying issues that belies their apparent simplicity. In the introduction to the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seizes on this:

Whatever the vicissitudes and deformations of Lacan in cultural studies, one should focus on what happens with children in their early age, following the wise Jesuit motto, “Give me a child till he is seven, and afterward you can do with him whatever you want.” So I am tempted to claim that there is hope for us Lacanians as long as American children are massively exposed to Shel Silverstein’s two classic books, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O; one is almost embarrassed by the direct way these two books render in naked form the basic matrix of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive.

I too have felt the profound touch of picture books like Leo Lionni’s treatise on epistemology and the non-translatability of experience, Fish is Fish, or Jon Muth’s tranquil and enlightening, Zen Shorts. Kids’ books are big business and tenure track positions are getting harder to find. Maybe there are some anthropologists out there who want to get in on this genre?

With the AAA’s push for a more “public anthropology” we might consider too the role our discipline can play in K-12 education. I’m not talking about the anthropology of education or an anthropology of children like the work being done by the good people at the CAE, which is in itself fascinating and, of course, vitally important given the politicization of ed discourse in the public sphere. But, imagine instead an anthropology for children. Maybe there’s a CAE person reading this now who can add to our discussion, are there anthropologists out there right now writing to children?

There are a number of kids’ books that brush up against anthropology or that invite one to interject an anthropological spin on things. At my house we have a slew of these “people around the world” type books (all of them gifts), including ones on bread, shoes, houses, and families. The DK Eyewitness series offers beautiful picture books on archaeology, mythology, Indians, classical ancient societies – Egypt, Greece, Rome, the biggies – even evolution and early humans (or as my kids call them “Monkey People”). The archaeologists already got Indiana Jones and Laura Croft. With cool how-to books like this one they need someone to move into Bill Nye territory.

Granted works like the DK series are commercial productions for the kiddie book market. They’ve no doubt got academics serving as consultants or fact checkers, but most of the creative work is done by graphic designers and copy writers who know how to make books that kids want and that parents will buy. That’s why I find the two works I’d like to discuss today so interesting. They are artistic works of scholarship and experience, creatively rendered and engaging to young people. For any anthros wanting to write for children, here are some role models
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Dead Wrong Scholars or Future Collaborators?

We’ve all been there. You’ve read a book or article closely aligned to your own research. In your opinion your peer has made one or two mistakes, one factual, malum in se, or dead wrong, and another, malum prohibitum, or theoretically suspect. What to do?

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? Continue reading

Crazy-Ass Ethnography

Here is a question for the SM community that I’ll turn into a bit of an ‘open thread’: I’m teaching a large intro course in the fall complete (as regular readers may remember) with a textbook and a few intro ethnographies. Most of the ethnographies I’ll be teaching deal with pretty standard stuff — Hawai’i, college life, etc. I feel like the course may be missing an ‘exotic’ or ‘weird’ ethnography which… is what I’m supposed to be doing, right? So: can anyone recommend a short, easy ethnography that is on some totally crazy-ass subject that will blow students’ minds? Please note that out here in Hawai’i at lot of people are Asian so The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down and other ethnographies of that ilk will strike students as being ‘close to home’ and not ‘exotic’. Maybe something from Africa or Latin America, which are not really on the radar over here?

p.s. I’m officially burned out on The Sambia and don’t have the strength to battle through In Search of Respect. So no recs for those, please.