Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Anthropology in the classroom.

Learning About Consent

The Spring semester starts today here in Taiwan, and this semester I will once again be teaching a course on production methods in visual ethnography. One of my requirements each semester, the one which most bothers my students, is that their final work be posted to the internet. This is a problem for them because it is much harder to get consent from your subjects for a student project used for class than it is for a project which will be posted to the internet for anyone to see. But for me, that is the first, and perhaps most important lesson my students will learn from the class.

We spend a lot of time talking about ethnography as a product, and even about the ethical issues involved in “shared anthropology,” but it is almost impossible to teach someone how to gain the trust of their research subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all approach because the obstacles to gaining such consent will vary from project to project. While I can’t offer pre-packaged solutions, I can advise students how to handle such obstacles without giving up. Patience and persistence are skills which many students have yet to learn. There are also techniques they can use in the filmmaking process to work around limitations placed on them by their subjects. There is a tremendous wealth of ethnographic knowledge to be gained from working through these obstacles.

One of my students this semester wants to work with a local hearing impaired community. We were both surprised to learn that the members of this community lack the necessary Chinese literacy to be able to read and understand a consent form. Continue reading →

Evaluating textbooks for large intro courses

My university has doubled the size of our introduction to cultural anthropology (1 field, not 4 field) course and so I’m changing the way I normally teach it and using a big-ol’ text book for like, the first time ever. I have a whole gaggle of sample textbooks to evaluate. I’m not particularly happy about this since I have Issues with anthropology textbooks — namely I don’t think any of them are particularly good. But setting this aside, does anyone have advice on how to evaluate textbooks for adoption? Please note this is not a request for recommendations for texts (I suspect I’ll get those anyway) but rather questions about the process people use when deciding which textbooks to teach.

Any recommendations?

Are we killing our students?

The title of this post is not a joke. There is increasingly good evidence that sitting too much is very bad for your health. Take a moment to read these two posts:

The take home point being that “sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little” and while both are bad, we can greatly improve our health by not sitting so much when we work. I myself switched to a standing desk some time ago (for writing – I still sit with my iPad when I’m reading), and former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani has a good post about her own switch to a standing desk.

But what got me thinking about students was this line from Travis Saunders’s Scientific American post:

a recent study reports that roughly 70% of class time, including physical education class, is completely sedentary (while slightly better than class time, children were also sedentary for the majority of lunch and recess).

Since I became a teacher I spend most of my class time standing, but sometimes I have to sit while students do their presentations and I feel sorry for my students because the chairs my school bought for the classrooms are torture devices. I do give my students frequent breaks (at least one every hour), but if you add up all the classes they take they are spending a good portion of their day just sitting. A lot of teachers reshape their classroom, moving chairs into a circle to make it more democratic, but how many teachers require their students to stand during class?

In many Taiwanese classrooms (and I imagine elsewhere as well), being forced to stand during class is considered a type of punishment. But it seems to me that the collective health of our students (and even faculty at conferences and meetings) could be greatly improved if we weren’t so quick to pull up a seat. I don’t know how we might go about instituting such changes (how would students take notes if they don’t have standing desks?), but it seems worthwhile experimenting with alternative classrooms where students can sit or stand as they please, even switching between the two during class.

Pesky process books

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey: its a truism of sorts — or maybe a cliché?  But some authors, particularly those who work in pedagogy, take this line rather too literally.  Some of my favorite books are also the ones that drive me nuts because they make you experience what they are talking about rather than just telling you what they’ve found out.

A good example of this is Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon’s work on teaching through discussion groups. I love these books and have learned a lot from them despite the fact that they are focused on primary and secondary education. Discussion is the holy grail of college teaching and yet many college teachers don’t know how to make it happen, why exactly its so important, or what specifically it consists in. The SH-G answers all these questions. Check out the first chapter of her most recent book.

The thing is, H-G is a card-carrying Deweyian and as a result she doesn’t think you can learn how to have a discussion by just reading a set of instructions about how to have a discussion, or to quickly scan a few short suggestions. Instead, you have to go through the process of watching (well, reading) someone learn how to hold great discussion classes.

This insistence that you can only learn by going through the process is mirrored in another of my favorite books, Robert Boice’s How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure. I think this is the best and — frankly — most amazing book about writing that I have ever read. In the book Boice, a psychotherapist (but not the weird scary kind) and professor of rhetoric (iirc) leads you through one of his writing workshops as if you were a participant. Like H-G, he makes you go through the process of slowly working through the workshop and your own issues in order to help you journey to comfort and fluency as a writer.

Actually, Boice is slightly cynical about the idea that readers will focus on the journey and not the destination. Apparently the first step many authors in his workshop take is to demand that he simply hypnotize them and remove their writer’s block that way. And then… he does! They run around for a week convinced they no longer have writer’s block but not actually writing anything and then finally return to the fold, convinced that they have to take the long way around.

Similarly, Boice provides the readers a numbered list of Official Insights about how to be a good writer, but it is clear that these are best viewed as signposts along the way, not ‘results’ or ‘conclusions’ about how to write lots comfortably. Read in isolation from the larger journey of the text, they are helpful and insightful but… not the same thing as the real journey.

I completely agree with the idea that the best books engage you in a process or journey, and the reading and learning are about going through that process. However, I also spend a lot of time wishing the world was the kind of place where you could just read bulleted lists of conclusions and be done with it — things would be so much easier and faster!

The relevance gap

I recently stumbled across a newly-published article entitled The Making of an Epic (American) Hero Fighting For Justice: Commodification, Consumption, and Intertextuality in the Floyd Landis Defense Campaign. My first thought was: interesting even though off topic. Hey — maybe its even teachable? But in fact my intuitions about how to connect actual events in life to teaching usually go astray — and I think I might have discovered (another) reason:

The time it takes for academics to study, write, and publish something about a current event is about the same amount of time it takes to enroll a cohort of students too young to remember the event.

Thirtysomethings like me blanche with terror at the realization that our students no longer remember not just the coldwar, but grunge. Even 9/11 is a from a time in their childhood when major events are hazy memories rather than adult realities. For someone who was 8 when we invaded Iraq, how much pulling power can a class really have when the Big Draw is “we’re going to get to the bottom of this WMD claim once and for all”. Even events that occurred four or five years ago — i.e. at just about the speed anthropologists can really write about them — are back in the middle-school range of traditional students.

Call it the relevance gap.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Errol Morris has an intriguing series of posts on the Dunning-Kruger Effect on his NY Times blog. The central question “How do we know what we don’t know?” is something central to both Anthropology as a discipline (How do we know what we don’t know about another culture?) as well as teaching (How do we help students come to realize what it is that they don’t know?). For these reasons I found this exchange between Morris and Dunning quite interesting:

DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.

ERROL MORRIS: But wait a second. You’re supposed to benefit from feedback. But the people that you’ve picked are dunderheads. And you lack the ability to discriminate between dunderheads and non-dunderheads, between good advice and bad advice, between that which makes sense and that which makes no sense. So the community does you no damn good!

DAVID DUNNING: You know, I think that is an issue. Those among us who are in the 40th percentile, they’re not the best, but they’re not doing too badly. But people at the bottom, you’re going to have to be open-minded and you’re going to have some special hurdles, internal hurdles you have to get over. If people give you conflicting advice, congratulations, you don’t know how to choose. Yes, it is a tricky part of the problem.

I think this is a central problem for teachers trying to get through to the bottom 40% of a class. Often it seems that these students simply don’t do the work. But I think it isn’t so simple. I believe they don’t see the purpose of doing the work. While they understand that there is some information in the assignments that they are missing, they don’t see this information as adding up to new skills, new ways of thinking about the world which might be of benefit to them. For instance, in a class on documentary film, I had one student who was still, after a whole semester of learning about various approaches to discussing films (structure, form, narrative style, etc.) was unable to compare two films. He kept comparing the events portrayed in the films, but didn’t understand what I wanted when I asked him to focus on the films themselves rather than the events they portrayed. In some important way I failed to convince this student that there was anything of value to learn in my class.

As anthropologists we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We are often in the bottom 40% (or worse) in terms of our understanding of the culture we are trying to study (unless you happen to be working in your own culture). And while we differ from the student in the above example in that we know there is something we don’t know and are very motivated to learn it, we still “don’t get” a lot of what our informants try to tell us. I’ve long felt that there is a certain hubris to anthropological research, in the idea that you can spend ten to eighteen months somewhere and then attempt to speak authoritatively about it. The only thing saving us are our collaborators. As Dunning says: “it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting.” But also on our ability to listen to that feedback, which I think is much harder than we would like to believe.

Teaching Anthropology “In The Field”

This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in Hualien, Taiwan.

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And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

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Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation. Continue reading →

Getting from topics to problems

Anthropologist are drawn to topics: peoples, places, things. It’s part of the idiographic focus of our discipline that Boas noticed over a century ago, a fascination with the particular which has also been denounced as exoticizing or orientalizing: we just really really care about Ecuador. It really matters to when the new Methodist church was build in the village square of the place where we did fieldwork. We are the discipline which Leslie White mocked for publishing articles with title likes “An Unusual Prayer Stick From Acoma Pueblo”. Maybe it is because anthropology has always welcomed people who are interested in exploring their own subject positions as women or of color or indigenous, or as indigenous women of color, the Bea Medecines and Katherine Dunhams and Zora Neal Hurstons of our discipline’s past. Maybe it is because the the white guys in our discipline got attracted to it after getting out of the Peace Corp, or being teachers abroad, or otherwise getting hooked up with one particular community. At any rate, we tend to think in topics.

What we are supposed to do is to think in terms of problems: what is the relationship between individual agency and cultural norms? How does the environment affect culture? In what situations does ethnic conflict become violent? We are supposed to think like this because many people whose opinions we care about believe that scientific inquiry should be carried out in this more nomothetic, or generalizing, mindset: lab scientists, for one, whose experiments on rat livers are more driven by the problem ‘how does the body make proteins’ than the topic of ‘rat livers: so fascinating’. Political scientists and sociologist, the members of disciplines adjacent to ours, are also often motivated by this generalizing urge: what similarities can we discern between the Russian, French, and Chinese (Communist) revolutions? What is the relationship between race and quality of treatment in the medical system?

Our tendency to end our topics with periods rather than question marks has more practical outcomes as well. As teachers, we struggle to get out students to understand why the details of Nuer kinship ought to interest them. AAlthough we yearn to be ‘public’ or ‘applied’ when asked ‘what role does religion play in development’ our answer is often ‘They build the Methodist church in the town square in 1952! I fond pictures in the archives!’. Most importantly, the people who fund our dissertation research are, for the most part, interested in its theoretical relevance (‘intellectual merit’ as the NSF puts it) than in the area we study.

How, then, can graduate students learn to turn their topics into problems? How can professors make their ethnography interesting to those uninterested in their topic?

The obvious answer is to make your work ‘theoretically relevant’. In anthropology, this means making the topic you study the perfect place to explore a Big Question in the literature. Topic: Samoa. Problem: how do people use gender roles? Topic: Eighteenth-century Hawai’i. Problem: what is the relationship between structure and agency? Like that.

The problem with this method, of course, is that when you are fascinated by topics rather than problems you 1) don’t know what the Big Questions are because you’ve been busy digging out old photos of churches in the archives instead of reading Cultural Anthropology and 2) you can’t ‘read theory’ because you find it totally boring and not about your topic.

Let me suggest a way out of this problem.

First generalize your topic. What is that thing that you find so fascinating about your topic, and can you find it in other topics? If what really amazes you that they could build this huge gold mine out in the middle of nowhere Amazonia, then perhaps your problem is ‘resource frontiers’. You might even get interested in copper mines in Mongolia because you’re all like ‘hey that’s JUST LIKE what’s happening in the Amazon’. When they built the Methodist church in your town becomes ‘Methodist missions to Latin America’ or perhaps ‘the worldwide spread of Methodism’ or perhaps even something as general as ‘missionization’ or ‘the anthropology of Christianity’.Do you see what’s happened? You now have a generalized and comparative topic rather than one tied to a particular time and place. You have found ethnographic analogies to your field site.

Second find the differences between the particular cases covered by your generalized, comparative topics. In Amazonia they fought the coming of the mine tooth and nail, while in Mongolia they had a large, primarily mutton, barbeque to welcome the mine executives. Hmmm. It looked similar on the surface but now you see some differences.

Third put a question mark on it. The simplest way to do this is what accounts for those differences: Why is mining welcomed in the Amazon but not in Mongolia? Maybe its because the mining operations were different — one had a large environmental impact and the other did not. Maybe it is because rural Mongolians are desperate for cash and people in Amazonia want to stick to subsistence farming (both of these examples are totally made up by the way — sorry all Mongolianists out there).

Fourth, remove proper nouns. Now that you have added the question mark, remove all proper nouns. Go from “Why is mining welcomed in Mongolia but not in the Amazon?” to “Why are resource extraction projects welcomed in some communities but not others?” Or even “what is the relationship between global capital and local communities in the post-9/11 world?”. A fifth optional step, which you can only use for the next 18 months or so, is to add the word ‘assemblage’ to your project title. Congratulations: you have a problem which is ‘intellectually meritorious’.

So: develop comparative scope, look for differences, put a question mark on noted differences, and remove proper nouns. This procedure doesn’t get you in touch with Big Topics (that’s the subject of another blog post) not does it help make one less cynical about ‘theory’, but hopefully it will help topicheads see that even the most abstract theoretical discussions articulate with their own interests if you just follow the intellectual thread that connects them for long enough.

The ‘next-time’ syllabus

After five years of full-time teaching I feel like I am finally beginning to get a handle on… well, teaching! I remember my mentor as an undergraduate, who had been teaching the same classes at the same school for thirty years, telling me once that she felt that some her syllabi were finally coming together — and this over spans of time almost twice as long as my lifetime. She could even remember particularly ‘good’ years when the class and the material clicked. Since then I’ve always wondered at the ability of college professors to imagine a class as something with a scope as long as your biography itself — something refined and honed over a lifetime. Now that I have had a chance to take a whack or three at some of the courses that are near and dear to my heart I begin to understand what they meant: one of the satisfying things about teaching is that you never stop learning how to do it. Or at least that’s been my experience so far.

As a junior professor I find myself rewriting my syllabi pretty much the moment I begin teaching my courses. I try new readings, do old readings in different orders, juxtapose readings, and modify assignments from previous years. Pretty much immediately I see new connections and begin thinking about the next iteration of the course. The question then becomes: how to track and organize these thoughts? What mechanisms do we have to record thoughts on class planning and make sure those records get accessed the next time we plan a class.

I am sure that there are many people with Ph.D.s in curriculum development who know far more about this than I do (if you have any insights, please leave a comment), but one trick that I’ve found is what I’ve come to call the ‘for-next-time syllabus’. On the first day of class I take the final version of the syllabus and make a duplicate copy in the folder for my class. I then add the words ‘for next time’ to the title. Then, after every class, I open up the next-time syllabus and add thoughts on how the class went, what people needed but didn’t get out of the reading, and what I might teach next time. Then the next time I teach the course, I use the next-time syllabus rather than the previous one I used.

I thought I’d pass this along as a (potentially) useful trick for graduate students and new professors, since it is often the case that new professors don’t receive extensive training in pedagogy, much less course planning. It’s not a very fancy trick, but often when you start teaching (read: adjuncting) you don’t have time for fancy course planning. Fixing future thoughts on teaching in a syllabus means they’re less likely to be forgotten then if they are locked up in some physical pieces or paper or some journal program or blog where things scroll out of existence (and of course a year after you teach the course even the most vivid memories of lessons learned have faded away). And, most importantly, confronting a formatted document can help provide a framework for your thoughts and help organize them — on this day I need to do that. At any rate it’s worked well for me — what tricks do other teachers use to help develop their classes?

Using Formal Debates in the Classroom

I was wondering if any of our readers have any experience using formal debates in the classroom? I had this crazy idea that I’d have the students in my graduate cultural theory seminar conduct a formal debate in character as the various scholars we are are reading (e.g. Marx, Weber, Durkheim). It seems like it might be a fun experiment, and would help me accomplish one of my goals for the class, which is to get students to try to deal with the texts in their own terms, rather than relying on contemporary critiques. However, I was never on a debating team in school and have very little experience with the rules and practices of formal debates – not to mention using such debates as a teaching tool. Nor have my students. So I was wondering if anyone out there might have some suggestions?

Another motivation for doing this is that I hate survey courses. I love teaching theory, but I prefer to do it around a coherent set of questions motivated by a research topic, or by undertaking a semester-long close-reading of a single scholar’s work. However, the syllabus for this class is set by committee and it isn’t easy to make more than superficial changes in the content (i.e. substituting one book for another on a similar topic, or changing the order of the readings). That means that it the class tends to lurch around from week to week as we jump from one scholar to the next. My thought was that a series of debates like this (one at midterm, and another at finals) might help bring together some of the disparate readings into a more focused discussion. That’s the hope anyway. We’ll see how it turns out in practice!

UPDATE: I should add that one reason for using “formal” debating, with rules, as opposed to other forms of debate/discussion, is that, in my experience, Taiwanese students are extremely reluctant to argue strongly in public for views which differ from those from their peers. This may be true of all students, but in my experience it is much more pronounced here in Taiwan than it was among my students in the US. (Although that may just be because of my own ignorance as to the social norms regarding how such discussions should be conducted.) It is my hope that giving them both roles (a specific scholar we have studied), as well as rules will facilitate a more lively discussion than we might have otherwise.

Never tell them how it was supposed to taste

Now that the first frenzied week of school is over here at my university, I’m enjoying a Friday afternoon in which I can  focus on fitting out my twink druid with heirloom gear rather than worrying what percentage of the total points available in the class will be assigned to attendance and participation. While my normal MO is to make sure that what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom (the classroom is like Vegas that way) so that my students don’t feel like I am going to ‘out’ them online, I do feel like I want to share a brief piece of advice to students — undergraduates and graduate students alike — about something that occasionally happens with students (although I’m not referring to any particular student here I promise promise):

Never tell them how it was supposed to taste.

I remember reading this advice in a cookbook some years ago. Only you know how the recipe was supposed to turn out, and only you are disappointed by how the dish you cooked currently tastes. Everyone else thinks it tastes just fine.

I bring this up for students who find they sometimes want to apologize for being late for class, for not doing the reading, for the quality of the midterm they turn in. Do not apologize — just turn it in, come to class next time, etc. etc. If you are really disappointed with the quality of the work you did, then why did you do that quality work in the first place? Why didn’t you get it sorted out? If there was something beyond your control that happened — your computer crashed — then I suggest just explaining this briefly to your professor and moving on.

If you feel really consumed by guilt by the fact that you smoked out, ate two large pizzas, and watched Iron Man three times in a row instead of writing your paper then, frankly, you probably should feel guilty. In this case what you cooked really does taste bad… but telling me that you know that isn’t going to change how it tastes. Guilt is you telling yourself that you know what the right thing to do is. Take the energy unleashed by that guilt and use it to shoot yourself at great velocity along a more productive and optimal trajectory. Do not let your hate and anger consume you, for that is the way of the Sith.

Sometimes — again, not yet this semester, but sometimes — I get students who explain to me about how sorry they are that they didn’t do X, Y, and Z correctly. Sometimes at length. I think that students who do this think they are doing emotional work to make me feel better. But in fact — and this is sometimes hard to explain — having to act all accepting and reassuring to students is in fact emotional work I have to do to make them feel better. Making me feel better is actually a selfish thing to do because it gratifies your need that I feel better, if you see what I am saying. In fact when students turn in papers late, or turn in poor work, the last think I want to do is perform acceptingness to make them feel better. Making me pretend to feel better about how good people’s intentions are is actually adding insult to injury. If you really want Love And Acceptance From Professor 1) do good work. On time 2) when you do bad work late, then remember: the moment you turn it in is the moment you begin to get to atone for your sins, turn a corner, start again, and begin doing good work. On time.

I don’t know — perhaps I am alone in this. Perhaps other professors feel differently about how best to manage turning in late/substandard work. I’d be interested in hearing what people have to say. Perhaps some people appreciate understanding that their students are penitent?

Ethnic Studies Under Attack in Arizona High Schools

November 21: Mayflower.

Image via Wikipedia

Legislation that will end ethnic studies programs in Arizona high schools looks set to be signed into law by the state’s governor. Promoted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, the law will deprive public schools that do not eliminate ethnic studies courses of 10% of their state funding.

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses). Continue reading →

Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be

Cornell University Press just published Fieldwork is Not What it used to Be edited by James Faubion and George Marcus. If I might be so bold (since I have an essay in the volume), this is a fascinating little book. It’s full of essays by students from Rice University’s anthropology program, all of whom entered in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It’s really rare to see a publication like this these days, not least because of the difficulties of getting anything at all published in an edited volume. Though it might seem either indulgent or aggrandizing (“The Rice School of…”), this is actually a snapshot of the state of socio-cultural anthropology today. All of the issues raised both by the Writing Culture critiques of the 1980s and the critiques of those critiques are present in these essays. It’s rare that a book gives one a peek into recent graduate work in this way.

I think the book will make a great pro-seminar object for a couple of reasons. One is that it has a mix of valuable stuff: the core of the book is a set of diverse essays derived from dissertations, which can be compared and contrasted by graduate students entering the field (Kris Peterson, Jae Chung, Jennifer Hamilton, Deepa Reddy, Nahal Naficy, Lisa Breglia); reflections on pedagogy in anthropology (in the articles by me, Kim Fortun and George Marcus); and an erudite and no-holds barred attempt at theorizing the nature of ethnographic fieldwork as a topology of connectivity (Faubion’s article). The other, I hope, is that it should be read as a spirited defense of the method (ethnographic fieldwork) and the core concept of culture–one that shows in several ways how new objects and new problems are created and explored through this research methodology.

A couple words about the book and website: Cornell University Press was willing to go halfway towards open access. I won’t hide the fact that I was disappointed that they wouldn’t make the volume fully open access, but I do think they deserve credit for willing to take the first step. It helps that I agreed to create a website for the book, since they didn’t really know how to do that… and I hope anyone here interested in using the book in class will let me know, and I would be happy to try to help use the website to facilitate discussion (e.g. if students want to post reactions, I consider that fair game, and would happily add them to the site).

Et tu Mark Taylor?

Some days all I have time for is “the most emailed” section of the NY Times. Today, #1 is an op-ed by Mark C. Taylor, distinguished professor and chair of Religion at Columbia, formerly of Williams college, and author of many fascinating books ranging from deeply penetrating to faddishly impenetrable. I personally like some of Taylor’s work, but this op-ed sucks. It proposes to abolish the university as we know it, and it reads like a plank out of the dying republican party’s tattered playbook. I’m no defender of the university, and certainly not of the current publishing and reward structure, but this op ed won’t help me. It’s more like dynamite stashed somewhere for the adolescent delight of administrators who think that blowing up the institutions we’ve spent centuries building is the best way to build new ones.

Among its unfortunately pedantic suggestions are: get rid of tenure (okay, but do you really want academics chasing after bonuses like Wall Street does?), abolish departments (sounds good, let’s abolish what little pedagogy we have as well), use distance education instead of teaching people directly (oh, come on, have we not been through this before?), and give grad students training for other careers besides research and teaching (fries with that?).

Look, I really want to agree with Taylor. I just took a very good job in exactly the kind of entity Taylor is suggesting we develop to replace departments and transform academia (The Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA), and I think it is the bees’ knees. I absolutely agree that Continue reading →

Chambliss link roundup

Following up a citation in that Andy Abbott book I read a piece that I guess is an old chestnut for others but was new to me — Daniel Chambliss’s article “The Mundanity of Excellence”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/202063, which examines how championship swimmers become championship swimmers. The answer: they do dozens of little things right each and every day, and enjoy doing it. Chambliss’s article reminds me Sennett’s discussion of craftwork and the rhythm of practice and increasing fascination that he says it engenders.

The obvious thing to do is read the Chambliss article and then figure out how to become mundanely excellent in your own way — ethnographic sociology as self-help literature. When it comes to teaching, you could do this either by “thinking about the mundanity of excellence in teaching”:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6BxLIN_7EoYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA422&dq=mundanity+of+excellence&ots=ztby3HHKPE&sig=GVsiljyylP4TiLw6KxzdDSiDS1w or else “teaching the article to students to teach them how to become mundanely excellent”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/1319298. I am definitely trying this second exercise the next time I teach introduction to anthropology.

Finally, Chambliss has a paper on “how to hire departmental faculty”:http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/hiring%20departmental%20faculty%20oct06.pdf. For various strange reasons my department did four job searches in my first two years on the job, and as a result I have thought long and hard about this part of the job since it sort of marked my initiation into the professoriate. I must say that while I haven’t exactly done a literature review on the topic, this is the best thing I have read how to hire new faculty, ever. Down to earth, frank, wise, well-written. Might even be a good read for job candidates.