Teaching and Learning Anthropology

As a graduate student team from an applied anthropology course series, we conducted a yearlong community research project focused on an urban park for a local city government partner. This paper reflects on how learning and working as an applied, interdisciplinary team impacted our research process, our project design, and our experiences as students. Through the project, we experienced the benefits and challenges of collaborative work, like working through different disciplinary expectations and training styles, communication challenges, and equitable work distribution. Our unique positionalities and backgrounds shaped how we engaged with the park, the community, and the research. We all experienced the city for ourselves—through hands-on engagement—and learned about many different park experiences through a novel combination of techniques, including observations, interviews, a survey (with an embedded map feature), and a community design charrette. We engaged with a variety of people and population dynamics, which helped us provide our government partner with insight into how various community voices matter in the future of the park as a public space, while we also had the opportunity to grow as researchers.