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.