A Private Universe

Another video that can be used to trigger student-faculty discussion about learning is “A Private Universe,” also available free as streaming video on the web from Annenberg Media; it was produced by Matt Schneps and his team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. You have to create a sign-in to watch it. But the questions are for assessment purposes and not invasive. The streaming video is not as smooth a download as I would like. I have to keep stopping it and starting it when it would freeze up. It's worth the effort though.
Why is this video important? It shows exactly how difficult it is to change people's preconceptions of how the world works. Since that is our project, especially in anthropology, the video is a sobering reminder of exactly how subtle and how difficult the task we face really is. Anyone who still thinks they can construct a lecture that will do the job after seeing this video has their head in the sand.

A Vision of Students Today

If you have not yet seen this video "A Vision of Students Today," you must! Mike Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, created it in his introductory cultural anthropology class. It is a great example of a SUNTA-style course design. One compelling project, collection of data from nearby "field, " discovery of patterns, some of which are commonplace and others of which are surprizing, and the assembling of a report that communicates these finding to others, all withy the instructor tutoring the method, rather than supplying the information.
Mike produced a video last year that was a major meme (a link that gets repeated in multiple blog posts) called "Information R/evolution" that you might have seen. He's doing wonderful, cutting edge work and he deserves more recognition and support from SUNTA members.

The Washington AAA Workshop

Even though the deadline for pre-registration is past, you can still register in Washington for the SUNTA-sponsored teaching workshop. Last year ten colleagues from all over the country participated. From the emails I received after the conference, it was evident that they found the experience valuable. The workshop provides a forum to discuss successes and concerns that SUNTA members experience and to work together to develop stronger classroom presences for our approach to anthropology. The workshop is particularly valuable for colleagues in their first five years of teaching, including graduate teaching assistants teaching their own courses, but colleagues with all lengths of teaching experience are welcome. Some of the topics we consider include how to develop a SUNTA inspired introductory course, how to teach without a textbook and still satisfy the knowledge-base exposure departments want, and how to effectively build and assess out of class exercises into classes.
I lead the workshop but take no remuneration for doing so. All proceeds from the workshop go to the SUNTA account. My interests in doing so lie in strengthening what I believe to be a valuable approach to teaching our discipline by encouraging students to learn about culture "where we are and with the people we live among."
Unless the workshop is supported by the membership this year, it will not be offered in the future. If you think this is the sort of discussion that is valuable and appropriate for us to offer during the annual meetings, then please set aside Friday afternoon from 2 to 5 PM, register for the workshop when to pick up your materials, and bring your experiences. I look forward to meeting you.

Designing Introductory Courses

This summer, I'm finally getting around to reading the ten year old book "The Teaching of Anthropology" edited by Kottak, White, Furlow and Rice (Mayfield, 1997). As I read through it, I'll post my reflections here on the blog. Please feel free to react with your own comments.
One of ideas immediately relevant to the design of introductory courses appears in full form in the introduction. I refer to the issue of the relative effectiveness of designing the course around case studies or designing it around a text book. In this volume the champions of the case study approach are the Spindlers (as one might expect) and the champion of the textbook approach is Kottak (gain, as one might expect).
My take on this is: "A pox on both your houses!" Neither choice is an effective way to design a course because both designs start with the literature the students will read instead of what you want them to learn. OK, I hear you saying "Hey, what I want them to learn in what they read in the book(s)." Well, sorry, friend, but that just won't cut it anymore. You are allowing authors and textbook editors to do your thinking for you. More importantly you are letting them do the thinking for your students. There are very good reasons for choosing to read case studies and very good reasons for choosing to read textbooks. I actually use both. I also use trade books that are neither case study now textbook and sometimes not even remotely related to the canon of introductory anthropology. It all depends on what I see as the role of the text in support the learning promises I have made to my students.
Here are some examples of what I mean. My 100-level general ed-style cultural anthropology course has been taught two ways. In one of them, my goal is seduce students into loving anthropology. I throw out all the stops. I choose only activities, treading and films that I know will delight my students and convince them that anthropology is just about the coolest thing they've ever seen. I find three or four case studies that wild and push the limits. Take Paul Stoller's "In Sorcery's Shadow." Based on his research in Mali, it is an unabashed ghost story, complete with things that go bump in the night. I remember when I was an undergraduate that Carlos Castenadas "Teaching of Don Juan" had a similar fascination. The difference, of course, is that Stoller's work is defensible ethnography. He has pictures.
The goal of my introduction to linguistic anthropology for majors is for them to get deep enough into conversation and discourse analysis for them to see the relevance of studying language use in society, even if they choose never to do linguistic work ever again. Here Is use a textbook, Duranti's excellent "Linguistic Anthropology." The emphasis here is on capacity building through the development of control over increasingly complex concepts. I need to take them from phonemics to metapragmatics in ten weeks. The textbook provides a consistent structure for this journey. I can assess their progress at every step. However, the fit between the textbook and the major learning activity of the course, an analysis of five minutes of conversation involving four or five of their acquaintances, is weak. Duranti address most of what they need, but at a crucial stage in the project, adjacency pair analysis, he comes up short. Textbooks always have their weak spots.
The goal of my 100-level general ed-style "Food and Culture" course is to have my student remember three different ways of thinking about culture: culture as mediation (between humans and nature), culture as a system of unevenly distributed knowledge and culture as a system of participation. The idea is to illustrate these tropes using food entirely. This is where I am likely a trade book, like Michael Pollan 's "The Ominivore's Dilemma." Pollan is a journalist who writes extensively on modern food system issues. The book lends itself to all three tropes. However, I add research on their personal food habits to the mix for stronger evidence , especially in the unequal knowledge and social participation tropes. Please notice, there is neither an ethnographic case study nor a textbook involved. The database they use to analyse their food diaries is on-line. Yet, contemporaneously relevant aspects of anthropological perspectives are effectively communicated.
Finally, I have 100-level general ed-style cultural anthropology course that has no books at all! It is based entirely on research projects through which the student write their own texts. That text is literally an introduction to the anthropology of where they live and with whom they live. This is about as totally SUNTA a class as I can imagine. Those projects include several hours of observations in a coffeehouse, hair salon/barbershop, bookstore or bar (anyplace with regulars); several hours in a food shop where the student can't read the language of the signs in the window (obviously possible in large cities only); several hours of observation in traffic court; and several hours of observation at a public festival or sporting event. If you want to try this, start with a small class and work your way up to your college's norm. The scalability is there but depends upon setting up several smaller learning clusters within a larger class. The tipping point is about twenty students. Don't worry about having a schedule of topics. They will emerge as the students report on what they have observed. If you'd like some backup on the coffeehouse/barbershop/tavern project, pick up a copy of Ray Oldenburg's "The Great Good Place."
So, my response to the debate between case study enthusiasts vs. textbook aficionados is "all if the above and more." It all depends on what kind of learning you want the students to do.

End of Term Reminder II

As that final stack of papers shrinks and the grades begin to fill in the empty spaces in the spreadsheet grade book, I start thinking about how I can make the whole process smoother, fairer and more efficient next time. So, I take out my grading rubrics and refresh the language, based on this term’s crop of papers. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop on effective grading with Barbara Walvrood, co-author of the popular Jossey-Bass book Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment. Every college teacher should own this book. What made it so enjoyable was the clarity she brought to the process. Here is how I currently frame the argument she presented. These are my words, not hers.
Grading is not very different from coding a set of interviews. In coding, you perform an initial “read” and use this to develop a list of distinctive features, words, phrases, or other qualities that indicate a separation or difference in the way the speaker understands something. Technically, this is called discriminant function analysis, but I have always called it coding. You then do a second read in which you apply the list of features to the transcriptions to discover patterns of separations and affinities across the interviewees.
In grading, you perform an initial read of the papers and use this to develop a rubric. This is Ed-speak for that same discriminant function analysis. In a rubric, however, the purpose is not really the discovery of inter-subjectivity across social actors. It is the determination of a grade based on the presence or absence of the features in an essay or research paper. These features occur in the students’ work in at least three different ways: readily apparent, inferred or implied, or absent. So, you can think of a rubric as a grid with the features listed on the left and with three adjoining columns that indicate how that feature might appear in student work if it was readily apparent (++), inferred or implied (+), or absent (-).
To apply the rubric, you first have to be confident that you have indeed identified the important features. Often, I change the wording as I read the essays to be more precise. My rubrics are always evolving. Eventually, I want to use these features as the core comments I supply the students through feedback on their work. So, I want these be as precise as possible. When I’m fairly confident that I have it right, I then read the papers with a blank grid, checking ++, + or – as I find or fail to find what I am looking for. Walvrood calls this criterion-based grading. Once you get used to your own rubric, it is highly efficient. You can go through a stack very quickly. It is also fair. By have some auto-text entries for each of the ++,. + or – possibilities, you can tell the student exactly what worked and what didn’t work, as far as you are concerned. It is actually quite easy to convert the assessments to a single grade. More importantly, it is the best antidote against grade inflation. Student with very different feature profiles are far less likely to get the same grade.
I have written these rubrics for all sorts of learning tasks. The ones for descriptive tasks start out as the longest and most detailed, as you might expect. But I’ve been surprises at how quickly the ones I write for analytical and interpretive tasks grow over time. Two years ago, my department decided to see if we could build a rubric we could use to help build the writing skills of our majors. You can see it at this address. It applies to interpretative and analytical tasks, such as interpretations of theory, research reports and comparative studies. We each add whatever features pertain to a particular assignment. And, we ignore features that are irrelevant to a particular assignment. It’s a good base from which to start.
Anyway, if you like to try it next term, now is the time to start. What are the features that made a difference in the way you graded your students written work this term? What did these features look like when they were readily apparent (++), inferred or implied (+), or absent (-). That’s it. You’re on your way to fairer and more efficient grading.
By the way, it's perfectly reasonable to put the rubric for the assignment in the syllabus. Students perform better when they understand the criteria for evaluation ahead of time.

End of Term Reminder #1

As I approach the end of term, I try to spend some quality time with my syllabus. I may teach this course next term, or I may teach it two years from now. When I do, there’s a good chance I won’t remember everything I wanted to change. The syllabus is where I keep those thoughts.
First, every syllabus I write offers me a detailed breakdown of the course design. I can comment to myself (in a different color or font) on whether the description is still accurate (did the student experience what I said they would?). I can adjust the language of my course goals, adding or subtracting them to reflect what actually happened. I can adjust my course policies (attendance, evaluation, etc.) to take into account anything that occurred this term where I had to make up a policy on the spot, or wish I had established earlier.
I can think about the amount of time I devoted to topics: too little, too much. I can look at my project descriptions to see if changes in wording could head off questions that came from the class. I can review the texts I chose for the course. Did they actually support the goals and projects I set for the students? Should I look for better ones?
I can look at the written assignments or tests? Were they described accurately? Did any students fall into wholes that I created through faulty or ambiguous wording? I’ll know more about how they in a few weeks, after I grade the last piece of work, but at this point, explaining the assignments to them ids still fresh in my mind.
What do you do as the term is winding down to prepare for the next time you teach the class?

Welcome!

At the suggestion of the membership at the SUNTA business meeting in Tampa, last March, I have initiated and will moderate a blog on university-level teaching. This blog is especially intended for our members, but contributions will be welcome from any university-level teaching professional. To stay abreast of what I hope will be a lively discussion, please add this blog (http://suntateacher.blogspot.com) to your RSS or Blog reader (Goggle Reader is a convenient for those new to the medium).

I hope that this blog will prove especially useful to graduate students, adjunct faculty, visiting faculty and newly hired faculty. While "old dogs", like me, still have much to learn, the discussion of teaching is particularly crucial in the first few years of full teaching loads. And no, you will not become a good teacher just because you were a good student or are a good researcher. It's a different skill set.

Every two weeks or so, I will start a thread on a different teaching topic. I'll tie most of these threads to what I happen to be doing at that point in time in my own practice. If anyone else wants to start a thread, that's fine. Do it. I'm merely trying to keep the conversation going, not dominate it.

Since most of the courses I teach are connected in some way to the research tradition embodied by the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology, my threads will try to make the connection between research and teaching (and service) as often as possible.

Some of the newer members of SUNTA may not know who I am or why I would do something like this. I have been both secretary and president of SUNTA. I have also conducted several workshops on teaching, including one last November in San Jose that was sponsored by SUNTA. I am a member of the Professional and Organizational Development Network, the professional group for directors of faculty development centers around North America. At my own school, I'm a sort of ninja-faculty developer. That is, I do it, but I don't get the title. I also wrote a book on teaching for new professors and graduate students.

So, please visit the site: http://suntateacher.blogspot.com and subscribe. Then, contribute! This is the place to ask, answer, comment, vent, complain, celebrate, and share your experiences in the classroom; the site of the most complex, the most compelling intellectual problem you will ever face: teaching!