Teaching and Learning Anthropology

Written by a teacher and two students in an undergraduate course titled Housing: Planning and Policy, this commentary explores screenwriting as a pedagogical device used in service of experiential learning about the city in the classroom. It reflects on the employment of this device over two semesters wherein ethnographic vignettes were drawn upon to iteratively craft scripts, with fictional interventions guided by critical frames derived from the learning objectives of the course. We highlight the usefulness of screenwriting as a tool to embrace the urban as a becoming-space in the classroom, wherein students: 1) freely express their encounters with the built environment and feed them into the process of learning by doing; 2) immerse themselves in the ongoing city politics outside the classroom; and 3) appreciate the entangled realms of policy, governance, markets, bureaucracy, and media. Our experiments with screenwriting have been inspired by anthropological research that has brought out the multiplicity and perpetual becoming of urban political spaces. We articulate here our arrival at the screenwriting exercise and point to its potential for teaching and learning the city in anti-positivist ways.