Teaching Anthropology: Lectures, Film, and Written Assignments
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I am Alex Dent. I am an assistant professor of anthropology. The classes that I teach here at GW are mostly linguistic anthropology classes. From the perspective subject matter, Language and Culture is one that I teach. That is a big undergraduate intro class that usually has about 120 students. I teach a class on media, technology and performance, which is about 30 or 40 students. I also teach Peoples and cultures of Latin America, which has about 80 students in it. [I also Teach] classes on language, culture, and cognition, which is about the relationship between language and thought. The sizes range from 15 to 20 students all the way up to 120 students.
I have talked a little bit about the strategies that I use for the sort of larger undergraduate classes. There are three things I would like to talk about. The first thing is how I lecture. The second thing is, within in the context of that, what kind of examples I use. The third is the kind assignments that I like to make.
With respect to the first thing, interestingly, I don’t use PowerPoint very much. Or when I do use PowerPoint, I use it exclusively as a slideshow. One of my graduate school teachers suggested to me that the way to think about PowerPoint was to think about it as emphasizing whatever emotional or affective point you were making. So rather than put a whole bunch of text up bunch on a slide, which, personally I find absolutely brain numbing. I actually don’t look at it. I just tune it out and listen to what the person is saying. That is just the kind of learner that I am. What this teacher would do is he would show a picture. It might be something directly related, it might be something not directly related. I don’t use PowerPoint, but when I do use it, I place one or two words of text and often a picture, often an image, that will reinforce the affective point I am trying to make. What I do instead of that is, and I think the substantive point to made here, is that I actually have written outlines of every single class. Basically I hand the students an outline of every lecture stating, here is the class, here are the points that I am going to talk about today, using some of the language. In particular, if there are concepts that seem sort of abstruse, you know, I'll give a definition there. If there are terms, the spelling of which is in question. They have it right in front of them so that they can sort of take notes right on that particular sheet. An accompanying point that I'll do is that whenever I show a film excerpt in class I'll always hand them a list of questions that go along with the film. One of the problems I used to have as a student with films is sort of, what I am looking for, what sort of content am I sifting for.
I provide them with a series of chronological questions that run through the film that ask them little detail related points of what is going on. So as they are watching the film, they are writing. And that makes film time actually engaged time. So no one is dozing off because that is actually a text that is going to be tested and they are writing. I actually don't put those outlines online. It is an incentive I tell the students for coming to class. I want them to come to class, and I have a kind of roving attendance policy. That is point number one.
Point number two is about films. I am always talking about some kind of theoretical concept in class. So maybe its morphology or pragmatics, or maybe its phenology. I'll always try to pick something from popular culture, very short, something ranging from 30 seconds to 2 or 3 minutes. I'll show that, I'll explain the concept, and then I'll show it Usually it’s a video, sometimes it's a piece of music. Sometimes on the back of their class outlines I'll give them a little photocopy - a paragraph by Proust for example - if I'm trying to explain sentence structure - how not to write. But there is some moment in the class that they have a little text they can engage - that isn’t strictly speaking anthropological. It's from popular culture, it’s from literature, and it’s from poetry. This one exercise ask students to do is when were thinking about whether language is good at describing things or not – where they have to describe abstract sculptures. So I hand them each a different abstract sculpture and I ask them to describe it. The point is there is some moment of every single class everyone can engage with in an absolutely equal terrain. No one has more knowledge of whatever it is. Everyone can look at this thing and have a reaction right then and there and apply that to the concept.
When I talk about media, I show a little excerpt from Goodnight and Good Luck. So there is always some sort of clip I put in there. Even if it is something for a little comic relief. If the lecture is a little heavy and a little dense I’ll throw something in there.
So there is a scene from meet the Fockers for instance, where Ben Stiller’s character accidentally teaches the kid a word he shouldn’t have taught him. So when I do child languages I show that 20 second clip. So that is the second strategy. Always have some sort of text that everyone is on equal footing with. Then we go back and talk about it. We’ll even have some decent discussions with classes of 120 people and definitely down to the 35 person class range. We will talk a lot about those texts and I encourage that. That is kind of the second thing that works for me.
The last thing to talk about is the written assignments that I do. My personal experience has been – as a professor – the most challenging thing for me is grading. The challenge is much simpler when I encourage the students to do something about primary research. The way I focus the assignments is I say that you have to apply course concepts. It’s not that anything goes. Use course concepts and do something you are interested in. I usually have them come in and speak with me about it. I want them to do something they are interested in because if they are excited about it, the paper is going to be better, they are going to do a better job of learning the concepts, and in a self centered vein, it is going to be a lot easier to read that paper because it is something interesting going on for me there. In all this I push them very hard, and it’s over half the assignment, to focus on how are they applying course concepts to whatever it is they are looking at. They have to show that they understand performitivity or they have to show they’ve understood pragmatics or Roman Yacobson’s argument about reference – whatever it is. They need to apply those concepts judiciously.
The big undergrad class – the way to enforce that – I have them go out and observe something. I have them go out and observe a religious ceremony and think about the ways that language shifts in the course of the ceremony. In my more advanced classes I have them go to a public event and choosing to think about the relationship between language and thought. They are more interesting for students and for me. It is virtually impossible to plagiarize. I make sure to emphasize to see me at office hours, grab me after class, and check this topic with me. Usually I give them a little bit of feedback. I can tell right away.
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