Returning to UNC-Charlotte Approaching the 4th Anniversary of a Mass Shooting in My Class
Tomorrow, I get on a plane to fly to Charlotte, NC to attend the unveiling and dedication of a new memorial for Reed, Riley, and the other victims…
Tag: teaching
Meta-Reflection as a Teaching Tool
This semester I taught a new course called “Wicked Science,” which examines the challenges posed by wicked problems — those problems that defy solution because of fundamental di…
How to approach a research proposal: The Literature Review
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “How to approach a research proposal: Writing Questions.” In that entry, I laid out a dynamic hierarchy of questions—conceptual questions,…
How to approach a research proposal
No matter where I have taught, one job that often challenges graduate students is the writing of a research proposal. When first encountered, it is a peculiar piece…
Anthropology for Liberation assessments
Over the past few years I have been sharing the readings I assign for an undergraduate course I teach at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, Anthropology for…
Lecture: Introduction to Social & Cultural Anthropology
It is for the last time that the lecture “Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology” in the BA program “Social and Cultural Anthropology” at the University of Vienna…
Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How It Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist
In many ways, Dungeon Masters are the ethnographers of their own worlds. Granted, we’re not exactly interviewing the people who populate them, and we’re inventing most of the…
Building a “Web of Intrigue”: Teaching Food Studies
Pamela RunestadAllegheny College I presented a framework for building a Food Studies syllabus at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy on June 10, 2022. Thanks to positive responses…
What is “Labour-Based Grading”?
(This is an explanation of Labour-Based Grading that I provided to a first-year anthropology class I taught in 2020.) Labour-based grading is not what you are used to,…
Kathleen Gough
I could not find a single volume biography, which seems like a gap, but this special issue of Anthropologica from 1993 is a welcome find. Since it is…
Another Kind of Concrete – Koushik Banerjea
being ill is my excuse for catching up with novels, but I interrupt the stream of hackery to give a progress report on this as its the best…
#Hackademics- Hacks for Succeeding in Academia #1: Balancing Family Drama Trauma Fieldwork & Teaching
I recently participated in a webinar with the American Association of Biological Anthropologists and the Sausage of Science Podcast. We discussed mental wellbeing in academia and Dr. Rebecca…
What online learning taught me about (online) teaching, by Andrew Walsh
Andrew Walsh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western University, London, Ontario. He is the author of Made in Madagascar in the Teaching Culture series. What more…
Ask-Me-Almost-Anything (AMAA): Centering Student Engagement with Ethnographic Monographs by Christine Sargent
“Why is this a book?” The student who volunteered this question during a class discussion could not have known how meaningful – and unsettling – I found the…
30 Minute Methods in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, TDTU.
The most useful thing I heard anyone say (it was Olivia Harris) about a methods course is that it should never be a discussion of how to, but…
Welcome Back to the Teaching Culture Blog!
After a two-year hiatus, we’re delighted to announce the relaunching of UTP’s Teaching Culture blog. We are mindful of the incredible changes and challenges that have occurred and/or…
What Should Teachers Teach?
Source here. Educators are wringing their hands these days about how much students have “fallen behind” the past year. News story after news story laments a year of…
Feeling Digital and Reimagining Fieldwork during COVID Times
Yichen Rao, Anna Castel & Lili Almási-Szabó* During the outbreak of COVID-19, everyday life has been modified in accordance with the protocols that every country has implemented. These…
Anthropology for Liberation readings 3.0
2021 marks the fourth year I have taught Anthropology for Liberation, an undergraduate course in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. The course…
Fall 2021 Syllabus: Introduction to Anthropology
(NOTE: SOME OF THE FORMATTING IS OFF IN TRANSLATION FROM WORD TO THE BLOG. I HAVE MADE THE PDF AVAILABLE BELOW) anth-103-syllabusDownload ANTH 103: Introduction to Anthropology Virginia…
My Most Recent Publication on Faculty and Student Mental Health
You can read the article here: “Mental health in academia: Hacks for cultivating and sustaining wellbeing” Johnson and Lester 2021
California’s budget a win for families, early education challenges remain
California’s budget compromise adds a pre-kindergarten year for all 4-year-olds, funds 200,000 fresh child care slots, and modestly raises wages for pre-K teachers and subsidized child-minders. These …