Today is the first day of teaching for me at my new university and as I am plunged back into the world I find myself reading articles on the Intatweb about how to give effective lectures ten minutes before I start lecturing (as if this will somehow help!) So I revisited “On The Discussion Class”:http://teaching.uchicago.edu/tutorial/renfield.shtml by James Redfield, which is actually about the joys of lecturing. This is one of my favorite essays on teaching of all time. It works for me mostly because I am a product of the University of Chicago and Hyde Park, although not nearly to the same degree that Redfield is (he is Robert’s son). But I also love the deeply learned, eloquent, and very humble tone of it, and the deep sensitivity and amount of thought that gets packed into what is, after all, a very short piece.
Tag Archives: Pedagogy
Living and Teaching in the Information Economy
I received a strange piece of advice recently. As… well, as nearly everyone knows, I’ve been struggling to finish my dissertation for a couple of years. Between personal crises, departmental woes, and a struggle to make a livable income, I just haven’t been able (or, to be honest, as willing as I’d like) to put the time in I need to finish the damned thing. So I’m talking to a colleague back east, a well-respected anthropologist who is, nonetheless, not attached to any academic institution, and he asks me if teaching is what I really want to do.
“Yes, it is,” I reply. “I love teaching.”
“Well then,” he says, “maybe you should give some serious thought not finishing your dissertation, to not finishing your PhD.”
(Not actual quotes, of course – just roughly what was said.)
His logic was this: Continue reading
30 Days of Cinétrance
One of the hardest things to do when teaching visual anthropology is to get students to understand the constructed nature of reality. Although still difficult, this is easier to do when talking about written texts. Students are inclined to believe what they see with their own eyes. One reason for this might be the fact that students are regularly asked to produce written texts, but rarely asked to manipulate images. Reality TV is not the phenomenon here in Taiwan that it is in the US, but one strategy I often use is to discuss the efforts of reality TV writers to unionize. As one union official put it:
“The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is,” Mr. Petrie said in a statement. “The secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop.”
Such scripting doesn’t entail writing dialog so much as fitting existing dialog into a standard three-act narrative arc. Or even creating situations designed to ensure that the narrative moves in a certain direction.
Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences. Specifically, experiments in social psychology. Interestingly, while it would now be considered a gross breach of professional ethics to engage in the kind of social experimentation we see regularly on reality TV, it is somehow OK if we do it for the camera. (In much the same way that paying someone to engage in sexual acts is illegal if done privately, but perfectly legal if done for film or TV.)
Continue reading
Teaching Cheating
While I have two posts chock-a-block full of stunning insights and thoughtful interventions into modern theory (not to mention the controversy — oh, the controversy!) simmering on my mental back burner, until they reach maturity I thought I’d pass on Alex Halavais’ instructive epistle to students everywhere, How to Cheat Good (via BoingBoing), a list of 8 rules students looking to cheat successfully really ought to follow. I’ve had students break a good number of these rules, much to their dismay and my entertainment, and I agree with Halavais that if students would just get smarter about how they cheat, the world would be a better place: they’d pass, our egos would be stroked (’cause we’d think we taught something), and the college community would turn into a decent semblance of a functioning society rather than something out of John Adair’s picture of the post-War pueblos.*
I hate it when I catch a student cheating. I mean, I kinda relish it, but I hate it, too, becuase it means I have to be a dick. I resent cheaters for making me have to be a dick. That said, I am not one to shirk my responsibilities: when being a dick is called for, a dick I shall be. And when the dick-being-ness is all over, I’ve got a solid little nugget of amusement to cradle to my metaphorical chest, to nourish me and help me grow as a teacher.
I’ve had some great cheater-catching moments. Continue reading
Target Audience
In my Anthropology of Alternative Economies course I assigned Bill Maurer’s book Mutual Life, Limited. I found it puzzling in ways that I find a lot of contemporary anthropological writing puzzling, which is why I am blogging about it here. Now, this probably reads as the set-up for a long rant about “postmodernism” that will end in my shaking my tatty black umbrella in the general direction of all perfidious young uns, set to an encomium of sympathetic yowls from the horde of cats circling my ankles. But that is not really what I intend here, and it’s none of your business how I spend my weekends anyway. Continue reading
An Exercise in Recognising Cultural Assumptions
Rex’s “recent post”:/2006/05/02/seminal-juxtapositions/ has led to an interesting discussion in the comments section about the ways in which teachers and professors expose students to cultural practices that deeply threaten their assumptions about morality, propriety and the nature of life itself. The Sambian practice of male initiation through insemination via fellatio is used as an example of something that best be kept for when students have been exposed to practices that are less threatening to the average North American (dare I say Western?) or North American-raised (ibid) student so that there is a gradual exposure to cultural variation in worldview and practices. In other words, it is suggested that it would be wise to move slowly from things that are “different” but that do not break taboos to things that challenge hardcore, unquestioned assumptions about values and morality so that we don’t A) scare them off completely and B) reinforce racist stereotypes.
I think this is an extremely interesting and valuable discussion to have and would like to share how I deal, at least partially, with this issue in my intro courses. When I started teaching, I had a hard time getting students to recognise their own ethnocentrism. They understood the concept intellectually, but would usually think that they were immune to it because they had gone to high school in Montreal with people from all over the world, or because they “just aren’t like that”. I felt that I had to find a way to get them to recognise that they were not immune to the effects of enculturation and all the assumptions that come along with growing up in a particular cultural framework.
Seminal juxtapositions
It’s always seemed to me that one of the skills in teaching comes from choosing articles that, when read together, pose a certain problem that students can wrap their heads around and can generate discussion. I just got done teaching “Gil Herdt’s”:http://hmsx.sfsu.edu/faculty/herdt/cv.htm newly-updated The Sambia to students and as usual the papers on the topic of homosexual initiation (boys must ingest semen to become men and undergo puberty) focused on how misled this practice was, and that “if only the Sambia knew the facts about semen” and so forth then they wouldn’t do this stuff. I don’t personally endorse ten year olds performing sex acts with adults, and I admit that Sambia practices would change if they had ‘our’ understanding of exactly what semen does. But the challenge of the course is to see that this is not a case where ‘we have science and they have culture’ –that biomedecine is itself a cultural phenomenon, albeit one that is calibrated to the physical world in unique ways that allow for the control, manipulatin, and prediction of biological phenomenon etc. etc.
Anyway it occured to me recently that a good way to explain this would be to discuss the culturally-specific understanding of semen at play in the US, so I brought some excerpts from “Emily Martin’s”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/anthro/faculty/martin.html 1991 essay “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” (Signs 16 (3):485-501, btw). I didn’t really have enough time to pull it off completely, but I think in the future I will for sure try to play this article off the Sambia. And I think you should too.
Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology
A Google search for Ralph Linton (don’t ask) turned up this remarkably useful site from the AAA: “Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology”:http://www.aaanet.org/gad/history/index.htm which includes a bunch of free PDFs of obituaries of anthropological greats as well as other articles from the AAA. It’s a great collection of articles and free — and totally obscure. Has anyone else heard of this site? Well gratz to the AAA for putting it together even if they have (as far as I can tell) kept their lanthorn under the web’s bushel. These are great resources for Wikipedians.
In other news our site problems should be over soon. That’s also a long story.
Helpful hints for biological determinism
In the final stage of my intro course my students and I read “Jonathan Marks’s”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/ “What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9172.html. Marks has pretty much decided to be the post-genome Stephen J Gould (or perhaps Richard Lewontin) and produce the updated version of the anthropological critique of race. I like the book because it is easy to disagree with, but even when you disagree with it it is still an interesting and worthwhile read. At any rate the book sells itself as being about genetics but its really a sort of a crypto-introduction to science and technology studies.
In my last class I discussed the way that the media portrays science, and often presents complex and ambiguous findings as clear proof of ‘genetic determination’ of whatever traits its audience want or expect to be told are genetic. In order to keep the class current (and since this is constantly happening), I always get online before class, print up a couple of articles, and ask my students to imagine what Jonathan Marks would say about them. It’s a nice lesson in critical reading.
Well if you are like me and need a steady diet of overly-simplistic, prejudice-reinforcing reportage, look no further because yesterday I discovered “livescience.com”:http://livescience.com/humanbiology. The site’s section on human biology does a masterful job of producing article after article demonstrating how not to report on science.
Thus while Science publishes articles with titles like “A ‘his’ or ‘hers’ brain structure?”:http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/407/1 Livescience reports on similar studies with the headline “Men and women really do think differently”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050120_brain_sex.html. And while the article in Science quotes scientists saying things like “No one knows quite what it all means, but the findings are food for thought.” you get no such consideration in the LiveScience article.
LiveScience also excels in running headlines which explain how something or other is genetically determined (or predicted) but then producing data to the contrary in their articles themselves (typically in the penultimate paragraph). Thus we get a headline which says “Genetic basis for increased risk of impulsive violence”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060320_genetic_aggression.html about a study whose author says “By itself, this gene is likely to contribute only a small amount of risk in interaction with other genetic and psychosocial influences; it won’t make people violent” Similarly we get an article entitled “Fingerlength predicts aggression in men”:http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050203_finger_length.html in which the scientist interviewed says “Finger lengths explain about 5 percent of the variation in these personality measures, so research like this won’t allow you to draw conclusions about specific people. For example, you wouldn’t want to screen people for certain jobs based on their finger lengths.” I particularly liked this quote because in our readings for that day Marks quips that “behavioral genetics is the only science in the world where you can make headlines by leaving 95% of a phenomenon unexplained.”
Anthropologists are notorious for being overly-critical of anything that smacks of a biological explanation of human behavior, so I am sure that there are many readers out there who are ready to defend the research described above from the evil anthropologist who Wants To Hold Back Real Research because of a blind commitment to a politically correct cultural relativism. But my point here is about the way science is reported in the press, and to get my students thinking critically about reading popular sources. For that purpose I found LiveScience to be great. And of course LiveScience’s willingness to quote scientists to the effect that their results are merely suggestive of directions for further research does the website credit — in fact its what makes the website so literally edifying.
World Simulation Part Two: The Basics
Using the now classic metaphor, if we imagine all of human evolution to have occurred in the past hour, the last 550 years that the World Simulation attempts to simulate is no more than a few tenths of a second. While these final tenths have brought us tremendous technological advances, they have also brought us unparalleled global inequality, the most deadly wars of all time, and a precarious environmental situation. Our population is more than 10 times what it was just a few short tenths of a second ago. The richest 225 humans on earth have more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people combined and the richest 20% of humans on earth account for 86% of consumption and on average make over $25,000/year. Meanwhile, 1.2 billion people make less than $1/day and over half the world makes less than $2/day. Humans produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, but at least 800 million people are starving. In 2004, worldwide military expenditures were $950 billion. In that same year, Worldwatch estimated that it would cost just $12 billion for reproductive health care for all women, $19 billion for the elimination of hunger and malnutrition, $10 billion for clean drinking water for all, and $13 billion to immunize every child in the world from common major diseases. In these final few tenths of a second we have created a global economy running on nonrenewable fossil fuels, all of which will be gone within the next second on our imaginary clock. The use of these fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels by almost 30%, nitrous oxide by about 15%, and concentrations of methane have more than doubled – all of which contribute to a rise in global temperature leading to rising sea levels, expanding deserts, and more intense storms. Perhaps most dramatic, it is in these final tenths of a second on our metaphorical clock that we human beings have attained the ability to literally stop the clock and annihilate ourselves. Whether or not the clock keeps ticking into the next hour will largely be up to the students we are now teaching. This is no small task they face. It may take an almost complete reinvention of how we live and a total revision of how we see the world and our fellow human beings.
So how do our students view these problems and what do they plan on doing about them? Some students are well aware of these issues and are seriously engaged in finding solutions. Unfortunately, the more common perception among students is that these problems are not theirs to solve. Technology will take care of the environmental problems and those in poverty should take care of themselves. “We” are rich because we are smart, hard-working, and have our head on straight. “They” are poor because they are lazy, not smart, and probably corrupt. In short, our system works. Their systems do not. There is little recognition that “our system” might in some ways depend on those of others and vice versa – that perhaps there is ultimately only one system after all, the world system.
It is almost impossible to say all that and keep the attention of those who don’t want to hear it. These are statements that are destined to always be preached to the choir and not far beyond. Fortunately these statements are really secondary to what we really need from our students: good questions that will drive them to understand more about our world and become active and responsible global citizens working to ensure our clock keeps ticking.
World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World
In my last post, I described my “anti-teaching” philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the “World Simulation.” In this post I will briefly discuss some of the background of the simulation and then discuss how our “world” is constructed prior to the actual simulation itself. This project is a major work in progress, of which I can no longer claim to be the sole author. Many of the 1000+ students who have been a part of the simulation over the past 2 years have added innumerable remarkable ideas that have since been incorporated.
I first thought about doing the world simulation when I discovered the Pandya-Chispa game used by the Peace Corps (with other variations used in various leadership and diversity training seminars). In this activity, people are split into two groups and each group gets their own handout describing their “cultural norms” which tell them how to interact with outsiders. The two groups then try to interact using their different cultural norms, resulting in misunderstandings, difficulties, etc. This creates a platform to discuss the challenges and importance of effective cross-cultural communication. I used this game with my students as an “ice breaker” and then started wondering what it might look like if we just expanded it to simulate the entire world.
About 6 months ago I discovered I wasn’t the only one who has ever tried this kind of thing. Starting in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller created a “World Game” which is similar to the simulation we do here. Fuller created the game with the noble cause of critiquing “cold war games” by challenging participants to find a way to make “the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or the disadvantage of anyone.” The development of his World Game has since been picked up by o.s. Earth, which will do a Global Simulation Workshop for you for $3,500 – $8,000. From what I can see on their website, the simulation looks great, but it is designed for 3 hours rather than a full semester. Because of this, it misses out on the most important part of the simulation. As my TA Kevin Champion noted, most of the learning comes from building it, setting it up, and designing it, not in its performance. While I provide guidance in the form of lectures, readings, handouts, and basic rules, most of the actual construction of our imaginary world is done by the students themselves.
I have found that every little piece of the simulation raises questions for the students and me. I find myself asking questions and pursuing information I would have never otherwise pursued, and it all feels extraordinarily relevant and important because it is all fitting into that big picture question about how the world works and why it is the way it is. Why are some people so rich and others so poor? Are the two related? In what ways? How can it be that we produce enough food to go around and yet some people are starving? How will we, as the human species, survive the next 100 years (or 1,000 or 10,000 or 1 million years)? It’s like taking Yali’s Question and pursuing it both as it was taken by Jared Diamond (How the West won) and how it was (more correctly) understood by Gewertz and Errington (Why the West thinks they won and how they – perhaps unconsciously – ensure that they keep on “winning”). All the while I’m wondering (and I hope my students are also wondering) whether or not these are really the right questions to be asking – or if there might not be better, more productive questions to ask.
World System + connexions
Apropos of Mike’s post about his one-man 400-person world Introductory Extravaganza Simulation, I thought it necessary to alert Savage Minds readers, who may also be educators and hopefully fans of all things open access (and despite my recent post, ASCII, or better yet UTF-8). The Connexions Project, of which I am an occasional advisor, at Rice University, is an experiment in open access textbook publishing. More than publishing, however, the aim of Connexions (cnx for short) is modeled on open source collaboration–instead of creating a full textbook and simply publishing it online, cnx encourages people to write short chunkish textbook “modules” which are all added to a central repository. Instructors can than search the repository for relevant content, chunk them together (perhaps with some additions of their own) to form a textbook, and use it in a class.
There are a couple of reasons why this is cool, and why it is better (and worse) than Wikipedia. The system uses a simple XML language for markup, which gives the content a very wide flexibility. It can just as easily be styled, for instance, in the team colors of your university as it can in black and white; it can be converted to a LaTeX pdf document with the push of a button (including conversion of links to footnotes, and continuous pagination, and a couple of other tricks); it uses MathML, which is probably irrelevant for all but the most hardcore kinship geeks on SM, but it does allow something very cool, viz. cutting and pasting of equations into Mathematica/MatLab. It will eventually integrate with QOOP.com so that you can order up a stack of old-school textbooks for your students to have and to hold. Of course it suffers by comparison with Wikipedia, because there are not 8 billion people using it, so the whole effects-of-scale thing has yet to really have its effects (though a number of people have undertaken translations into french, chinese, thai) and it can be a bit tricky to edit the XML documents you create, but getting better all the time (there is also aside-project underway to create an open-source XML editor to ease the process. Believe it or not no such beast worth its salt actually exists). The project was recently freatured at the uber-digitastic love fest known as TED.
Right now, the high quality stuff in the repository is mostly digital signal processing stuff, k-12 Music education, and a couple of other areas. I won’t speak for Mike, but a kind of protocol for his World Simulation project, with instructions on how to do it, would find a welcome home in cnx. Of course, Mike would have to be comfortable with people all over the world simulating his simulation–but that would be pretty real world now wouldn’t it? In any case, please have a look… if anyone has ideas for the project, I, and cnx, would love to hear them…
a brief philosophy of “anti-teaching”
Without a doubt, this is my favorite place in the blogosphere, so it is a great honor to be invited as a guest blogger. I think anybody who reads Savage Minds will immediately see the contributions blogging (especially group-blogging) might add to anthropological discourse.
This little corner of the blogosphere seems to be the perfect place to begin a discussion about some rather strange teaching habits I have picked up in the past couple years. Lately I find myself doing such bizarre activities in the classroom that I can scarcely refer to myself as a “teacher.” So this is my “anti-teaching” philosophy, illustrated with a short description of the “World Simulation,” a massive class activity that provides the primary structure for my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course here at Kansas State University. On the surface, the World Simulation appears to be little more than “just a game” but underneath is a good deal of theory – both pedagogical and anthropological – which I look forward to discussing here over the next two weeks.
Welcome Guest Blogger: Michael Wesch
I’m happy to announce our next guest blogger: Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University.
Mike was mentioned previously on SM in relation to his hypermedia project, Nekalimin.net. However, what caught our attention and led to him being invited on as a guest blogger was a news story about his innovative teaching practices. Specifically, a role-playing game he uses with his large intro-level courses:
Wesch has created a “World Simulation” project, where students are placed into 15 to 20 small groups, and have to survive in their environment by building their own culture, as different components are discussed in class.
“Everybody in the world is profoundly interconnected,” Wesch said. “Processes of globalization send products, ideas, media, money, and people everywhere throughout the world, connecting us all. This creates great promise, but also tremendous challenges. The ‘World Simulation’ allows me to challenge students to begin thinking about the world and our role within it.”
We look forward to learning more about his teaching methods and his use of multimedia!
Below is a brief bio/self-intro by Mike:
Continue reading
Erasing the Slate
As Stephen Pinker so persuasively argued, modern evolutionary psychology tells us clear and simple that there is no such thing as a “blank slate.” Humans are born with a set of natural dispositions, endowing them with the basic building blocks of social behavior: language, cognition, desire, etc. However, a recent discovery by genetic researchers in Korea could change all that.
Yesterday, the South Korean research firm Klonaid announced that, in the process of looking for a way to bypass the human body’s natural resistance to cloned embryos, they discovered a way to effectively turn off the set of genetic switches which determine who we are. In other words, using genetic science it is possible to wipe the slate clean, creating babies free of any genetic predispositions.
While real-world implementations remain far off, the possibilities of such tabula rasa babies (TRBs) is already beguiling researchers. Yale scientist Stanley Milgram was quoted as saying:
Freed of their natural wiring, TRBs would allow us to truly observe the effects of socialization for the first time. Whereas before such effects were filtered through each subject’s biological filter, such baggage would be absent in TRBs.