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Talking
About Teaching Anthropology: A TA-Faculty
Workshop
Jeffrey
Hantman and Susan McKinnon, Department of Anthropology
During the Fall 1996 semester, teaching assistants and faculty members in the Department of Anthropology gathered together every Wednesday evening in Brooks Hall to eat dinner and talk about teaching anthropology. These sessions were the result of an innovative and energetic proposal for a Teaching Resource Center TA Development Grant written by two (then) first-year Anthropology graduate students, Jeffrey Feldman and Jeff Fleisher. Their proposal called for a semester-long weekly TA - Faculty workshop, the purpose of which was "to develop improved teaching methods for social and cultural issues that are unique to the teaching of under-graduate anthropology."
As Department Chair (Hantman) and Director of Graduate Studies (McKinnon), we enthusiastically supported the idea of the workshops and were quite pleased when the TRC awarded the grant to the Department (and happy to kick in matching funds to subsidize the dinner component of the workshop). As this is being written, the workshops are winding down and we can reflect back on what has been accomplished. There are positives and negatives to be re-viewed, to be sure, but we know that by the standards of our own experience in graduate school relating to preparation for teaching, these sessions were extraordinary.
Our curriculum stresses theoretical and (increasingly) method-ological issues in anthropology, but we have not typically stressed the preparation for careers as teachers. This past semester, however, faculty and graduate students came together every week for an hour and a half to discuss, debate, and share methods of teaching the principal lessons of our discipline. Some of what was learned is for immediate use and application; much is tucked away for some time in the future. But the issues of teaching anthropology were "on the table" and we think both faculty and graduate students took away different ideas and techniques that can be tailored to a variety of teaching situations. Along the way, we also taught each other something about our own specializations in anthropology, and about how best to share what we know with under-graduate students.
The topics we covered included ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, culture and multiculturalism, gender studies, race, evolution and religion, cultural critiques of science, the study of ritual, the study of kinship, and folklore. For each session, additional members of the faculty joined us and were asked to work with one of the participating graduate students to lead the discussion, and to describe the key points they try to convey in teaching their material to undergraduates and the key texts and other resources they use to convey those points. This was an all too rare opportunity to hear our colleagues describe how they put a course syllabus together and what methods they find particularly effective in teaching undergraduate students. As preparation for our teaching assistants, who are all now leading discussion sections, who may soon be asked to teach a general introductory level course, and who may be in a department where they must teach outside of their particular research interests, we know these lessons will be valuable in the long term. We have both taught ANTH 101, our general introductory survey of anthropology lecture course, and we would have appreciated having had the opportunity to think through aspects of that course in the way we did in these workshops.
- The second
half of each session focused on teaching methods and resources. We covered
topics such as encouraging discussion in sections, facilitating discussion
in lecture classes, using in-class writing exercises, using the Internet,
using a case study approach, creating a syllabus, the structure of the
college's advising system, and (specific to anthropology) teaching methods
in archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory classes. The students in
the workshop were each expected to prepare a brief presentation on one
of these topics. The resources of the TRC were heavily and valuably exploited
in putting these presentations together. We also drew on our faculty members
who had been Lilly/Un-iversity Teaching Fellows in the past, and their
expertise was particularly appreciated.
- The end product of the workshop will be a handbook summarizing the results of each week's discussion. Each student in the course was asked to prepare the entry for the week they covered. This handbook will be a permanent and expandable resource for graduate students and faculty. In retrospect, we know we tried to do too much in one semester. Each session might have been better spent focused on one issue, rather than having to cut off discussion so often to cover our overly ambitious curriculum. Having said that, we can only paraphrase what virtually every member of the faculty said to us after they participated in one of the workshop sessions - "That was interesting, worthwhile and fun. I wish I had had something like that when I was in graduate school." We agreed wholeheartedly. For all of the valuable information and guides to be found in the archive of the TRC, it was particularly useful to bring these issues "home" to our own discipline, to talk and learn across subdisciplines and across generations of anthropologists. The knowledge gained by us and by those of our graduate students who are now teaching in sections, and who plan careers as professors, was substantial.
© 2004-2007 by the Teaching Resource Center of the University of Virginia
