Teaching and Learning Anthropology

This article details and reflects on how student learning was elevated to a new level through inviting real life into the classroom of a course in cultural understanding, aimed at engineering students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In preceding years, the learning was organized as two group assignments where students authored a make-believe narrative, wherein a technical project was accomplished in collaboration with a foreign party. This year, the students’ second project was a collaboration with social science students from the West University in Timișoara. The students not only learned facts about Romanian culture, but, more importantly, they became immersed in culture as an experience and a process, observing a turn from culture understood as a reified scientific entity, to culture as an environment or lifeworld. Rather than trying to approach culture at a distance, distance itself became the students’ environment. Only as the students came to accept a state of unknowing, with associated feelings of frustration and anxiety, were they able to dwell in a nearness to Romanian culture quite unlike that in which a “native” dwells. The students’ project solutions evocate this nearness. In previous projects, cultural challenges were hurdles for the technical product that needed solving much like any technical hurdle. This relationship was flipped upside down in the real collaboration, putting technical products in the service of culture rather than the other way around. We show and discuss how our open-ended pedagogical philosophy was critical in unlocking this new level of learning.

Conceptual artist Rafa Esparza argues that adobe bricks are loaded with meaning and represent ethnic Mexican heritage and communion with land through Chicanx ritual labor. Our ethnographic experiences in northern New Mexico and our pedagogical and research work in experimental archaeology in California confirm Esparza’s assertion. Among traditional Chicanx villages in New Mexico, adobe construction serves to reinforce community relations. Among Chicanx college students, constructing experimental earthen ovens in the California laboratory creates new student communities and validates familial and social memories of adobe making in ancestral homelands. Bringing together initially separate research threads, we consider adobe’s culturally sustaining capacity and its potential in scientific archaeological research as inextricable facets of the same research-teaching system we now call ChicanXperimental archaeology. This article plants three interrelated seeds in that vein, offering starting points for: (1) a culturally sustaining college teaching model centered on adobe making; (2) a replicable experimental adobe oven construction and testing model with field-applicable results; and (3) project expansion to California elementary school classrooms with the same pedagogical and scientific goals in mind. We invite our readers, especially archaeologists and K-12 teachers, to explore and experiment alongside us, providing an experimental oven blueprint and suggestions as to prospects and best practices for both sides of this project.

This commentary describes a pedagogical experiment in youth-led, open-source learning design carried out between Autumn 2022 and Spring 2023 while I was teaching in the University of Chicago’s Colonizations sequence. “Colonizations” is one among several sequences that undergraduate students can elect to take to satisfy their College Core requirement in “Civilization Studies.” Using an iterative “Design a Learning Module” assignment sequence – comprising both a mid-quarter and final submission together with an in-class introduction to principles of curriculum design – I structured the learning pathway to achieve three outcomes: first, to create experiential learning opportunities for students to engage with curriculum design principles through the hands-on creation of an online learning module; second, to expose students to open-source, creative-commons alternatives to dominant, colonial forms of proprietary knowledge; and last, to provide students with tools to analyze, interpret, and navigate their future learning environments.

In this essay, I reflect on my own experiences as a graduate student in applied anthropology working in the context of ongoing higher education legislation implemented under the DeSantis administration in the state of Florida. In particular, I focus on the ways Florida’s House Bill 7 and Senate Bill 266 have impacted my experiences as a graduate student teaching general education courses in anthropology. This commentary argues that these laws have promoted a culture of uncertainty and precarity by disrupting the academic freedoms of people in teaching positions, while potentially undermining critical and creative thinking in the classroom.