AAA in San Jose - Anthropological Concepts for Non-Anthropologists

As blogger Rhiannon and I slog through the end of the semester, we're striving to post at least 1 blog post per week. Despite our want to continue our biweekly posts, life/administration/teaching/striking is getting in our way.

Instead, the bloggers of Anthro Everywhere! are cooking up an idea for a panel at the next AAA conference in San Jose. The theme this year is Change in the Anthropological Imagination: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptation

One potential idea that we were throwing back and forth is the idea of writing an edited book about Anthropology (its concepts and uses) for non-Anthropologists.

Here is the idea in its nascent form - posed by blogger Long to partner-in-crime Mosher:

What do you think about writing a text that defined, described, or compared and contrasted anthropological concepts terms used in industry (e.g. ethnography in user design or market research) or other disciplines to our own? These terms could come from other social sciences, hard sciences or technology, engineering or maths. 

It would be an applied anthropology text but one that could also be used in interdisciplinary courses or by industry partners who want to understand the root of the terminology they're using. It would include examples and activities as well, which could be workplace or community-based experiences. 

This text could also serve as a guide and translation piece as to the usefulness and the pliability of anthropology - coincidentally anthropology's greatest secret and which "people" are taking way to long to figure out. I also thought it would help recent anthropology graduates articulate their skillset and knowledge to employers. 

We could write a book proposal for the AAAs timing this year (I'm going, are you?) while checking interest at the same time. 

Therefore, in a potential AAA panel proposal, we'd ask authors to identify a term, and present its application in either a work or community-based concept. Additional notes on the application of this term and its use within anthropology would also be required. 

As organizer and chair, Mosher and Long could present answers to such lingering questions as:

How would such a text be similar or different to other texts already out there, for example, Caroline B. Brettell's Anthropological Conversations: Talking Culture across Disciplines (2015).

Would such a text be more like a handbook or a textbook? Would it be an accessible text for anthropology majors/ grad students/ instructors? Would it be aimed at those who believe that most anthro grads are not going to be academics and need some guidance on how to speak to prospective employers about the value of an anthropological perspective?

Would the text be more useful if instead of presenting the info from a disciplinary perspective, it instead took a more career-stream oriented approach? More like a So what are you going to do with that? but anthro-specific approach? Or both?

Dear AnthroEverywhere! readers, what do you think?

Is there need for such a book?

Would such a text help/behoove the anthropology community? Its research participants? Its stakeholders? Its practitioners or students?

If you'd like to be a part of this panel or this book, please email us at anthrolens (at) gmail.com or tweet to us @anthrolens

Geek Culture and Games in the Classroom

What's wrong with your patient?
Do all the symptoms and signs point to one diagnosis?
Or are there multiple diseases at work?
Can you remember which symptoms indicate which diseases?

This is how the ad for Occam's Razor Card Game - or as the creator's term it, the study aid - introduces the deck of cards meant to challenge a player's diagnostic ability.

Nerdcore Medical created this game to enrich the learning process with game layers and visual design. We publish medical-themed study aids for students and practicing professionals, as well as gifts for a broader audience designed to raise awareness about public health.

According to their 'about us' page, this team of three medical students (or doctors?) created these games because of their interest in gaming, in fantasy, in "geek culture", and who are passionate about how people learn.

With the help of game-designer Brandon Patton (who also happens to be bass player for the Godfather of Nerdcore HipHip, MC Frontalot) the Nerdcore Medical team created 'game layers' to medical education.

This game follows in the footsteps of Idea Couture's Impact game about Foresight.

These objectives of these games are different from those of 'regular' board games in that their purpose is to teach or educate. The popularity of the BreakOut Edu in the grade and high school classrooms seems to have grown in the post-secondary world.

Take Wilfrid Laurier as an example: students can get a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Design in Game Design and Development. They describe the purpose of gamification and gameful design techniques as a means to motivate people to get engaged with the real world by adding a game-based layer.

The bloggers on this site could definitely see their next 'getting-up-to-no-good' project being a game for anthropology students detailing perhaps the anthropologists' toolkit, a history of anthropological thinkers and theorists, or perhaps, a game in a similar vein to Occam's Razor Card Game to help archaeologists engage with their field sites.

On another note: Was this your first time you're hearing the phrase Nerdcore? Urban dictionary defines this as Any form of music that is made by nerds, for nerds, or about nerdly things. Nerdcore can be made in any style of music, but most people identify it in either its pop-punk or hip-hop forms.

For more information about Geek Culture, you may want to head over to The Geek Anthropologist blog and check out the posts in their The Anthropology of Geek Culture category. We've written about the Geek Anthropologist before when we wrote about Jediism as Religion: Anthropology for a Changing World.

Quick Links: 

• Nerdcore Medical Occam's Razor Game http://occamsrazorgame.com/
• The Geek Anthropologist  
• AnthroEverywhere! Jediism as Religion: Anthropology for a Changing World (August 17 2017)

One Size Does Not Fit All - Preliminary Findings

On November 13th, anthro everywhere! blogger Jennifer Long continued her One Size Does Not Fit All series where she provides readers with an overview of her new pedagogical research project in collaboration with Ms. Silvie Tanu Halim at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology. This research explores mature and non-traditional students' educational experiences where we seek to understand how these perspectives differ depending on our medium of instruction: online (synchronous, asynchronous), or face-to-face.

We left off on Nov 12th discussing how blogger Jennifer Long invited students to participate in their survey.

Although the survey is still open, the following is a line graph outlining when we received our 86 responses (thus far):

Figure 1. Responses according to date

As mentioned in previous posts, although we did use incentives to encourage participation, it appears that most participants decided to take part soon after the project was introduced by Blogger Jennifer Long.

Dr. Long attended Ms. Tanu Halim's classes on November 07th (online, yes, I made an appearance in the online course) and November 9th (in class). November 7th sees the greatest spike. This spike can perhaps be accounted for, if we consider that students were already in front of their computer when they were invited to participate in an online survey. The second spike appears to be on the Sunday or Monday following my visit to the classroom (after the weekend) on the 10th.

I also thought I'd share some of the aggregated information about those taking part in the survey. When speaking about mature students, it became apparent that the majority of our respondents were between the ages of 21 and 25.

Age Ranges of Participants thus far (Nov 16 2017)

It will be interesting to compare this information with that of other scholars and how individuals 25+ experience education at SEPT when compared to those in the 21-25 category.

What is also informative are their responses to preferences to learning:

Learning Preferences of Mature Students

It will be very interesting to delve into their comments to understand what we see here, that more respondents prefer to learn new course material in-class rather than online.

Check out future posts to learn how the researchers will collect and analyse their data -- or see all posts in the One Size Does Not Fit All research series on our updated page Special Series: Ethnography & ... (formerly "Ethnography & Tourism")

Want to use these findings for your own work? Please cite this source as follows:

• Long, J., & Tanu Halim, S. (2017, November 16). One Size Does Not Fit All - Preliminary Findings [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://anthrolens.blogspot.ca/2017/11/one-size-does-not-fit-all-preliminary.html

One Size Does Not Fit All - Encouraging Participation without Coercing Participation

We take up from where we left off on November 8th when anthro everywhere! blogger Jennifer Long continued her overview of her new pedagogical research project in collaboration with Ms. Silvie Tanu Halim at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology. All posts that begin with 'One Size Does Not Fit All' describe a project which explores mature and non-traditional students' educational experiences and seeks to understand how these perspectives differ depending on our medium of instruction: online (synchronous, asynchronous), or face-to-face.

We left off on Nov 8th providing a final overview of our survey questions about educational experiences and preferences. Today, we're going to discuss how blogger Jennifer Long invited students to participate in their survey.

As discussed in previous posts, the target population of our research are our own students. To be more specific, they are Ms. Tanu Halim's students. To conduct this research, Ms. Tanu Halim and Dr. Long had to submit an ethics proposal to our university's board of ethics for research projects involving human beings. This is standard practice for any researchers working with consenting individuals. Unsurprisingly, our research board wanted to understand how we'd be mitigating the pressure students might feel if their own instructor is asking them to take part in research.

First, as researchers, we had to outline how our research was voluntary, as in, our participants would not be negatively effected by choosing not to take part. Therefore, our letter of consent included the following text:

Your participation in this study is strictly voluntary. This study is not an assessment component for this course; therefore, your responses will not be evaluated in any way during this study. As such, your grade for your class will not be negatively impacted if you choose to withdraw or not participate in the study. 

We also outlined the potential risks facing students if students chose to take part. For this project, we identified the potential of both psychological and social risks. The following is the text describing how we will try to mitigate these risks:

Psychological risks:
Participants are informed in the online invitation and Letter of Information that this study is voluntary. If worried about the social risk, students are informed in the invitation text and Letter of Information that they can access the survey and choose not to participate while still contributing to the 70% participation threshold. 

Social Risks:
Further, if participants wish not to answer particular survey questions, they will have the option to skip any question they are not comfortable answering. 

As described in the psychological risks, we're awarding everyone in the class a bonus mark once we've hit a 70% response rate threshold. To maintain anonymous responses, we've decide to dole out these bonus marks to everyone as we're not collecting their identifying information. This could however make some students feel forced to take part and therefore, we've included an option where students can click on the survey and then decide not to take part (selecting 'no' to the consent screen). In so doing, these click throughs to 'non consent' still count toward the 70% threshold.

There has been some debate regarding how much incentivizing participants will influence the responses researchers receive.  As becomes evident, Ms. Tanu Halim and I had to walk a fine line of trying to entice students to participate (online surveys suffer from low response rates) and overstepping our boundaries as instructors by influencing our students to take part.

Another step we're taking to encourage realistic responses and experiences is to collect this information anonymously.  In taking this approach, we're hoping that our students are able to willingly take part and provide us in-depth information about their learning experiences and preferences in ways that are meaningful to them. Further, if we don't know who took part, we can't give preferential treatment to anyone.

Finally, when inviting students to take part in our survey, Dr. Tanu Halim left the room while Dr. Long provided a brief explanation about the research and its project plan. This 'script' is outlined again in our ethics proposal, as a means to avoid undue coercive behaviour. This approach allows students to ask questions and speak to any concerns they may have away from the eyes and ears of their professor. Blogger Jennifer Long told the students about the study and where to find the link, but students have the choice to take part at a later point in time and not, for example, under Dr. Long's 'watchful eye'. This would present few options for some students.

Check out future posts to learn how the researchers will collect and analyse their data.

Want to use any ethics phrasing for your own work?
Please cite this source as follows:
Long, J., & Tanu Halim, S. (2017, November 13). One Size Does Not Fit All - Enouraging Participation without Coercive Participation [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://anthrolens.blogspot.ca/2017/11/one-size-does-not-fit-all-encouraging.html

One Size Does Not Fit All - Research on Mature Students' Educational Experiences

In a follow up from our post on November 2nd, anthro everywhere! blogger Jennifer Long continues to discuss her new pedagogical research project in collaboration with Ms. Silvie Tanu Halim at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology. 

Check out last week's posts to learn the context behind our study. In a nutshell, we seek to know more about mature and non-traditional students' educational experiences  and, to explore how these perspectives differ depending on our medium of instruction: online (synchronous, asynchronous), or face-to-face.

We left off on Nov 2nd by showcasing some of our questions about the demographic information of our participants. In today's post, we get down to the nitty-gritty of the learning experiences and preferences.

The rest of our questions deal with student experiences of online learning. Therefore, we have to narrow our participant group to those with online experiences. 

Question 8 follows: Have you ever taken an online course (including high school, college or university courses, training, or workshops) in the past? Yes/No

Here, we put a little logic into things, if a student answers 'no', they are thanked for their time. If they answer yes, students will continue on to the question set below.

If student participants select yes, they are asked to fill out a matrix  with answers between not very effective (all the way) to very effective for the following items:

1. How effective do you find time spent attending online lectures (in synchronous [defined in survey] format)?
2. How effective do you find time spent watching pre-recorded lecture videos (which you can watch at any time)?
3. How effective do you find time spent reading through course notes (for comprehension of material)?
4. How effective do you find time spent working through problems in the course textbook (through self-directed learning in complement to online resources)?
5. How effective do you find time spent discussing course content with student peers? 
6. How effective do you find time spent discussing course content with your instructors?

Then we ask them questions about their use of resource materials for online learning: 

1. Do you prefer synchronous or asynchronous learning for online courses? Why?
2. Do you use the accommodation/preference options on the pre-recorded videos (e.g. slow down, speed up videos)? 
3. Do you replay videos if you do not understand a concept? Why (or why not)? 
4. How important is it to have an online community with your student peers? Scale of not at all to very important.

As it happens, our survey opened up last night. Check out some of next week's posts to learn how blogger Jennifer Long invites her colleagues students to participate and how we work to avoid undue pressure on our student participants to take part in our survey.

Want to use these questions for your own work? 
Please cite this source as follows:
Long, J., & Tanu Halim, S. (2017, November 02). One Size Does Not Fit All - Research on Mature Students' Educational Experiences [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://anthrolens.blogspot.ca/2017/11/one-size-does-not-fit-all-research-on.html

Quick Links:

• Simon Coleman and Bob Simpson, Unintended consequences?  Anthropology, pedagogy and person Anthropology Today (1999) http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678353
• One Size Does Not Fit All - Anthropological & Pedagogical Research on Mature Students Anthro Everywhere! (Nov 2 2017)
• One size does not fit all - Applying Anthropological Principals to Pedagogical Research Anthro Everywhere! (Oct 30 2017)
• What do Cultural Anthropologists do? "Decode" Human Behaviour, Anthro Everywhere! (Aug 28 2017)
• Qualitative versus Quantitative Research - from a business perspective (Feb 23 2017)
• A New Home for Ethnography: The Use and Legacy of Ethnography by Anthropologists and Non-Anthropologists Anthro Everywhere! (June 9, 2016)

Did I plagiarize? A flow chart

For teachers and students alike, early November is the heart of the mid-term assignment swamp. As we wade through various assignments, questions of how to maintain academic integrity in one's work are bound to arise.

Well, since I am also in the middle of that swamp, here's a quick, kind of fun infographic to share from The Visual Communication Guy's blog:

Did I Plagiarize? Infographic Flow Chart from The Visual Communication Guy

Click on the photo's caption to follow the link to the original post (and zoom-able graphic).

Good luck getting through the mid-term marking! See you on the other side...

One Size Does Not Fit All - Anthropological & Pedagogical Research on Mature Students

In a follow up from our post on Monday, anthro everywhere! blogger Jennifer Long continues to discuss her new pedagogical research project in collaboration with Ms. Silvie Tanu Halim at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology. 

Here, we as researchers are interested in exploring the educational experiences and learning preferences of mature and/or non-traditional students and, to explore how these perspectives differ depending on the instruction medium. We left off last day promising to further explain the types of questions would wanted to ask.

As mentioned in the previous post, our population would include students signed up to the Degree Completion Program. These students have completed (at least) an advanced diploma from a College. 

What assumptions do we make about this population? 

As mentioned in the last post, we assume that these students will have more or different competing responsibilities for their time. To expand on this point, we find that the majority of our students do not come straight from a college program but are returning to post-secondary education after having begun their career. Therefore, these students typically work a 40 hour work week, may have dependents to care for, and other commitments on their time.

In their exploration of the role of anthropological knowledge outside the classroom, Coleman and Simpson (1999) find that anthropological knowledge provides: (1) a unique opportunity to hold a mirror up to one's own life circumstances and (2) a chance to reflect on one's personal experiences. However, the cultural outcomes of participating in higher education may generate contrasting relationships outside of school and personal change that is not without a problematic middle-class undertone. Citing David James (1995), the authors warn  that post-secondary participation may very well reproduce a social distance between one's university and home life. Importantly, these authors - using Alison James' work - help us question how a return to university may be felt by some to be a world of new possibilities and for others, an alternative form of personal  displacement and dis-empowerment.

How then, are our DCP students experiencing their education here at SEPT? Are they experiencing a new world of possibilities or personal displacement and dis-empowerment. What is the role of the medium of pedagogy - and how does his affect how these students experience their post-secondary education? 

Below are a list of questions we included in our online survey to help understand the rounded picture of people's lives (borrowed from Coleman and Simpson). Next week, we'll follow up with an overview of the questions around the mediums (paths) of learning:

1. Your gender (multiple options available)
2. Your age (range)
3. Hours per week spent on family and household responsibilities (range)
4. Hours per week spent on work, work-related activities (e.g. travel), or other weekly tasks (e.g. volunteering, searching for work, etc. ) during a typical (or average) work week throughout the year (range)
5. How do you prefer to learn new course material? (Options include in class, online, or on your own through self-directed learning (i.e. using course materials to complete tasks at your own pace according to set deadlines)? Follow up question: Why? [Open text box]
6. How do you learn (new course material) most effectively? Options include in class, online, or self-directed learning (definitions integrated into survey). Why? [Open text box]
7. As a mature student, how will your educational experience differ from those traditional students entering university directly from high school? [Open text box]

Want to use these questions for your own work? 
Please cite this source as follows:
Long, J., & Tanu Halim, S. (2017, November 02). One Size Does Not Fit All - Anthropological & Pedagogical Research on Mature Students [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://anthrolens.blogspot.com/2017/11/one-size-does-not-fit-all.html

Quick Links:

• Simon Coleman and Bob Simpson, Unintended consequences?  Anthropology, pedagogy and person Anthropology Today (1999) http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678353
• One size does not fit all - Applying Anthropological Principals to Pedagogical Research Anthro Everywhere! (Oct 30 2017)
• What do Cultural Anthropologists do? "Decode" Human Behaviour, Anthro Everywhere! (Aug 28 2017)
• Qualitative versus Quantitative Research - from a business perspective (Feb 23 2017)
• A New Home for Ethnography: The Use and Legacy of Ethnography by Anthropologists and Non-Anthropologists Anthro Everywhere! (June 9, 2016)

One size does not fit all - Applying Anthropological Principals to Pedagogical Research

Blogger Jennifer Long has begun a new research project which looks at the various ways in which students' unique context and identities influence their learning experiences. Where you ask? In her new field site: the post-secondary institution where she works.

What is the purpose of the research? Dr. Long and Tanu Halim seek to better understand the educational experiences and learning preferences of mature and/or non-traditional students and how these perspectives differ depending on the instruction medium. To make matters a little more complicated, these instruction mediums include: (1) asynchronistic online learning; (2) synchronistic online learning; and (3) face-to-face in-class learning.

One of the research team's presumptions when approaching this research was that: mature students have different work-life responsibilities than traditional students entering undergraduate education after high school. That is, we assumed that there were more competing responsibilities for their time.

Why is this research important? ... We wanted to follow the money.

Earlier this year, the Government of Ontario made an announcement (May 2017) that they will begin funding research projects that explore technology-enabled learning and highlight best practices in student engagement.

This announcement follows up on past Ontario funding (in 2012 -2013) for universities and colleges that focused on developing further online learning opportunities for undergraduate students (Council of Ontario Universities, 2017). As one of the funded schools under this mandate, the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology redeveloped many of their courses as online offerings - with a particular focus on Degree Completion courses. The Degree Completion Program (DCP) is a two-year program designed for students who wish to upgrade their advanced College diploma into a Bachelor of Technology university degree. As such, this degree appeals to non-traditional students (as opposed "traditional" younger students who enter university after high school) who may be juggling work and family obligations in addition to their academic responsibilities.

The argument behind moving courses online includes the supposed ease of access to educational options for non-traditional students, for example, greater uptake and attendance if the requirement to commute to class is alleviated.

So how is this anthropology? As an anthropologist, I was struck by the unique set of circumstances this group of students brought to their learning environment. Within the McMaster student body then, this population - although connected - used the campus differently (largely at night or on the weekends for in-class courses), had less access to resources since supports are made more available for daytime students, and typically came from different backgrounds and pathways to education than more traditional students. Our goal with this research then is to challenge assumptions (non-traditional students prefer online courses) and explore these individuals' unique experiences of post-secondary education. 

Here on anthroeverywhere! we'll keep you up to date on the outcome of this research as a means to explore conducting anthropological research, everywhere including inside and outside the discipline. 

Check out this Thursday's post to learn more about the types of questions we'll ask and concerns from the ethics review board.

Quick Links:

• What do Cultural Anthropologists do? "Decode" Human Behaviour, Anthro Everywhere! (Aug 28 2017)
• Anthropologists visualizing data: The Packaging of Anthropological Knowledge Part Three, Anthro Everywhere! (Aug 03 2017)
• The Packaging Anthropological Knowledge Part Two, Anthro Everywhere! (July 31 2017)
• The Packaging of Anthropological Knowledge and Its Merits According to Market Research Experts. Anthro Everywhere! (June 29 2017)
• Qualitative versus Quantitative Research - from a business perspective (Feb 23 2017)
• A New Home for Ethnography: The Use and Legacy of Ethnography by Anthropologists and Non-Anthropologists Anthro Everywhere! (June 9, 2016)

Resources for Anti-Racist Pedagogy

As a scholar who "grew up" in anthropology decades after the crisis of representation debates emerged, I am well aware of the colonizing power dynamics in our discipline's past, and how these power relations continue to reverberate through our work today. But, what does it look like to address these kinds of questions in the everyday of our classrooms?

In 2013 I took a teaching course offered through my university's Teaching Commons. It was free for students to complete and was specifically directed at Teaching Assistants, who do the bulk of small-classroom teaching and assessment for larger lectures at my university. It was a really valuable experience, and I learned a lot about things like pedagogy in general and creating and evaluating assessment tools.

During this semester and since, one of the questions that I have kept coming back to has been how to create inclusive classroom spaces for all of my students.

How do I strike the right balance for inclusivisty in my teaching between my intersectional privileges, the diverse identities and experiences of my students, and the course content? 

As anthropologists, we may be used to critiquing the complexities and nuances of power relations and underlying structures in the context of our research -- but are we examining or accounting for our own positionality in the classroom, vis-à-vis our students, our topics, our pedagogical choices...?

Hopefully, yes -- even if it demands an ongoing process of growth, including missteps and teachable moments for ourselves and our students. I'm sure we can all think of a few of these missteps, and what we've learned from them.

It's with these questions and issues in mind that we share some new resources for anti-racist pedagogy, and point up a few more of these kinds of discussions from previous posts and pages:

There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times (2017, National Council of Teachers of English)

• This page contains a wealth of resources on anti-racist pedagogy. These resources are not intended for university-level educators, but offer important points for reflection, strategies, and approaches for thinking about race/ racism and other forms of discrimination in the classroom grouped under headings like: Resources for Working with White Students, Resources for Understanding White Supremacy, Resources for Understanding Bias, and additional articles.

Inquiry into Practice: Reaching Every Student Through Inclusive Curriculum (2011, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto)

• This edited volume includes discussions of research into a variety of classroom issues, especially in the Canadian context. Again, these chapters are not directed at university-level educators, but are written by academics specializing in education. The end of the document also includes an annotated reading list of further resources that "have been selected for their relevance on issues of inclusion in the Canadian context, their focus on classroom practice and strategies, or their ability to raise awareness of individuals or groups in society" (2011, 124). Resources include texts as well as multi-media sources.

From anthro everywhere! here are a few relevant posts and pages for thinking about anti-racist pedagogy, collegiality, and the role/ perspective of anthropology:

• How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally (8 July 2016) links to Ellie Adekur's How To Support Blacademics: For Non-Black Faculty and Grad Students Teaching Black Faces in White Spaces.
• Teaching Resource: Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy (25 May 2017)
• Syllabi resources for challenging systemic racism, colonization, and more (14 August 2017)
• The Relationship between Social Justice & Anthropology (19 June 2017)
• Anthropology against white​ supremacy (13 April 2017)
• Building Vocabularies for Everyday Discussions about "Race", racism, and Inclusion/exclusion (10 April 2017)
• How a Teacher's Race Affects their Ability to Teach about Race (11 August 2016)
• Our Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources page for more links to publicly available syllabi centred around contemporary events and topics like racism, Islamophobia, disability, and decolonizing anthropology

Fake News: Questions and Resources for Back to Class and All Year Round

Ah, fake news.  As a phenomenon, its truthiness is both fascinating (from an epistemological perspective, at least) and highly troubling (from the perspective of anyone who cares about information literacy, quality research, social justice, ...). Many anthropologists and others have spent a lot of time not only countering fake news messages -- the recently infamous Google Memo is a good example -- but trying to understand how and why fake news works. For instance, take Scientific American's Anthropology in Practice articles on "Understanding The Social Capital of Fake News" (28 November 2016) and "Three Historical Examples of "Fake News"" (1 December 2016).

Discerning valid arguments based on evidence from what might be called "fake news" has always been an important part of a university education. Yet, the challenges we face in how we teach this kind of critical thinking seem to be becoming ever more difficult in the current climate and through the proliferation of messages in our contemporary media.


Luckily, hardworking librarians exist to help uphold information literacy teaching and learning, like those at the Toronto Public Library. Toronto librarians have put together an accessible page on How to Spot Fake News that poses important questions to consider (and why to consider them) when assessing the validity of a message, article, post, or news site, as well as links to additional resources. While some of these additional resources are available only to TPL patrons, many more are accessible to anyone, such as this list of Research Guides:

• How Do I Spot Fake News? (University of Toronto Libraries) 
• Fake News: Resources (Indiana University East) 
• Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda (Harvard University) 
• Fighting Fake News: Start (Gustavus Adolphus College) 
• Evaluating Information - Applying the CRAAP Test (PDF) (Meriam Library) 
• How to Identify Fake News in 10 Steps (ProQuest)
• Updated 14 January 2018: The BBC has another 10 point checklist Fake news: Universities offer tips on how to spot it
• Updated 14 January 2018: And the TLDR version... check out this informative, accessible video from Quartz featuring journalist Damaso Reyes (3:05 minutes).

Now that you are armed with these great resources and questions, happy back to class!

Quick Links and further reading:

• What is ‘Fake News’? (Sociological Imagination, 2017)
• "Understanding The Social Capital of Fake News" and "Three Historical Examples of "Fake News"" (Scientific American's Anthropology in Practice, 2016).
• Anthropologists need to address the Google memo on its merits. Again. (Anthrodendum, 2017)
• How to Spot Fake News (Toronto Public Library)
• anthro everywhere!'s page on Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources including a link to the Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data Syllabus

Updated 14 January 2018

Anthropology Podcasting

Heard any great podcasts lately? What about anthropology podcasts?

We've posted about anthropology and podcasting before on anthro everywhere! as a way of communicating ethnography in a different format, as Dr. Lindsay Bell has done with her students. Podcasting can be an opportunity to engage a wider or different audience than text-based communications. The medium and our possible audiences might also challenge us to think through and present theoretical ideas and ethnographic details as a public anthropologist speaking to a perhaps non-specialist audience.

So, what about the podcasts that are already out there? You might be surprised that so many anthropological associations and initiatives have jumped into podcasting to share our insights. From audio versions of academic lectures to more intimate conversations about ideas, here's a by no means definitive list for your listening pleasure:

• As you might have suspected, the RAI Lectures podcasts are audio files of keynote lectures given mostly by anthropological rock-stars on a variety of topics.
• This Anthro Life might be the best known anthropology podcast. Episodes run about 20-30 minutes, and are put together by a team of grad students on issues "inspired by Anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s claim that anthropology’s job is to make the world safe for human differences."
• AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast is hosted by Cultural Anthropology  in line with their open-access format and mission. Many episodes deliver interviews with anthropologists on their work, while others explore particular issues more broadly. Episodes vary from about 30-60 minutes in length.
• A Story of Us comes from Ohio State's Anthropology graduate students, with series themes from researchers in the department, such as childhood, death, and migration.
• Anthropological Airwaves is American Anthropologist's new podcast series, and aims to mirror the journal's "four-field, multimodal research, the podcast hosts conversations about anthropological projects—from fieldwork and publishing to the discipline’s role in public debates."
• Oxford Podcasts from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. With over 200 episodes since 2010, this podcast showcases lecture and seminar discussions from the department.
• Thinking Allowed is BBC4's ethnography podcast, which bills itself as "New research on how society works." While the presenter, Laurie Taylor, is a sociologist by training, the focus really is on the value and power of an ethnographic perspective.
• The Sociological Imagination podcasts from a sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and is worth including in this list. It's also a great site to mine for further listening, through posts like "The LSE’s remarkable archive of public talks."
• You can also check out AAA's Podcast Library and its impressive list of archived podcasts, which include episodes covering the four-fields of anthropology.

Inspired to make your own podcasts? Check out this informative piece on the podcasting medium, "Talking Anthropology: Podcasting for the Public," (and Part 2) from Teaching Culture for ideas about how to craft your own and/or bring podcasting into the classroom.

Know about other great anthropology podcasts that should be on this list? Tweet us @anthrolens or email anthrolens@gmail.com. Here are few more from readers like you:

• Updated - 25 August 2017: From the Relevanth blog, Anthropologist on the Street interviews anthropologists and others about "today’s controversies, debates, and trending issues to examine the hidden cultural forces at play."
• Updated - 27 August 2017: The Sausage of Science Podcast with Cara & Chris is a new podcast series from the Human Biology Association. This podcast "combines interviews and lectures with and by new researchers and research in science writ large and that applies to those interested in the field of human biology."
• Updated - 27 August 2017: You might also want to check out The Leakey Foundation's Origin Stories, podcasting "about what it means to be human and the science behind what we know about ourselves and our origins."
• Updated - 10 November 2017: Thanks to René Herrera for alerting us to AnthroAlert - live on Fridays or catch up on past episodes with this public anthropology project (@AnthroAlert).
• Updated - 14 January 2018: Have you heard The Familiar Strange podcast yet? Besides having a great name, this project in public anthropology is supported by the "Australian Anthropological Society, and the Australian National University’s Schools of Culture, History and Language, Archeology and Anthropology, and the Centre for Public Awareness of Science." They've got a blog too!

Jediism as Religion: Anthropology for a Changing World

Last Thursday, anthroeverywhere! wrote about Gillian Parrish's post on Jedi-training in the classroom, which they use as a means to teach implicit skills such as empathy to students.

Today, we delve back into the connection between Jediism and Anthropology (because why not...) by pointing out a guest blog post on The Geek Anthropologist entitled When Science Fiction meets Religion: The Case of Jediism.

In their post, Maria (Polyhymnia) Menegaki outlines a paper they presented at the AlterNatives: Anthropological Knowledge for Changing World program organized by the University of Ljubljana in 2015.

In this paper, Menegaki explores the growing global movement of the Church of Jediism and their quest to become a recognized religion. In this post, Menegaki questions the process in which religions are defined and likens this movement to those of other New Age movements that came of age in the 20th Century. Menegaki goes on to explore many topics that were likely further fleshed out in their paper, which include: the role of play, the perception of cohesion among followers, the difference between fandom vs. religious observance, and their failure to be recognized beyond an online community (as decided by the UK's Charity Commission in 2016).

Menegaki ends this post stating that the exploration of Jediism can serve anthropologists as a topic of new forms of religiosity and/or as a form of social critique (the latter of which was not discussed in this post).

These are interesting suggestions indeed. To read Menegaki's post follow the quick link to The Geek Anthropologist below.

Quick Links:

• AlterNatives: Anthropological Knowledge for Changing World University of Ljubljana (2015)
• The Connection between Anthropology and Jedi Training by AnthroEverywhere! (August 10 2017)
• Jedi is not a religion, Charity Commission rules BBC (December 19, 2016)
• Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines by Gillian Parrish (August 7, 2017)
• The Geek Anthropologist website
• When Science Fiction meets Religion: The Case of Jediism by Maria (Polyhymnia) Menegaki (May 4, 2017)

Syllabi resources for challenging systemic racism, colonization, and more

In the wake of the horrific, racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, it is important for anthropologists to think about our voice in university classrooms as a way of speaking to wide-ranging systemic inequalities in our lives, and the lives of our students. For many of us, challenging these systems of oppression by understanding the social processes and forms that underlie them is part and parcel of what contemporary anthropology offers as a holistic, empirically-grounded, critical way of seeing the world.

With this in mind, we want to remind instructors of some of the inspiring resources that anthropologists, other scholars, and social justice activists have created to help educators bring contemporary issues into our classrooms collected on anthro everywhere!'s Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources.

In addition to resources already documented here (e.g. Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus project, Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservativism, Decolonizing Anthropology, or the Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus) We've also recently updated the page with the Anthropoliteia's list of course syllabi on Policing and the timely Charlottesville Syllabus:

a resource created by the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation to be used to educate readers about the long history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. With resources selected and summaries written by UVa graduate students, this abridged version of the Syllabus is organized into six sections that offer contemporary and archival primary and secondary sources (articles, books, responses, a documentary, databases) and a list of important terms for discussing white supremacy. Only “additional resources” are not available online (but can be found either through JSTOR, at the library, or for purchase).

We have also added a few great resources from Somatosphere on teaching medical anthropology and illness that might be of interest to instructors for this upcoming academic year.

• Resources for teaching medical anthropology (21 August  2012)
• Syllabi on culture and mental health (28 August 2013)
• Illness and subjectivity: a syllabus (6 November 2013)

The Connection between Anthropology and Jedi Training

Gillian Parrish wrote a post for Magna's Faculty Focus magazine entitled Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines.

In this piece, Parrish describes how longstanding practitioners develop implicit skills that can be the source of some of the deepest learning for our students. Parrish argues that faculty must try and develop empathy in their students so that their knowledge learned can blossom into expertise and wisdom.

To do this, Parrish advocates that faculty 1) identify the habitual, underlying modes of sensing in our disciplines, and 2) design assignments for practicing these modes in whole-person ways that engage our students not only intellectually, but in their embodied, emotional everyday lives.

Parrish mentions activities that she uses to achieve these goals including developing students' listening and orientation skills by having them slip into an "ethnographic mode" for an activity (writing what they describe as 'the heart of the conversation complete with pauses and description). Parrish goes on to describe other approaches that would feel quite at home in an anthropologist's classroom; for example, when Parrish advocates that students need to acknowledge how they see the world around them, engage in self reflection, and notice (their) implicit habits of perceiving everyday life as a practitioner in your field.

So why the connection to Jedi Training? Parrish states:

Jedi-training exercises require the kind of close attention and new ways of thinking that can lead to love for our subject matter. This kind of whole-person learning guards against abstraction, keeps us in relationship with the wider world, makes us better caretakers of people and planet. For after all, as observed by my four-year-old niece: “We are all connected. In a web. Like the Force.”

Read more of Parrish's post through the Quick Links below.

Quick Links: 

• Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines by Gillian Parrish (August 7, 2017)

Perspectives: checking out the new #OpenAccess textbook

In a recent post, Anthrodendum (formerly Savage Minds) highlights the new open-access teaching resource Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology.

This new, open-access textbook is a project supported and sponsored by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) and its members. As a collaborative project, each chapter is written by different authors addressing a key anthropological topic, allowing the authors to incorporate their personal experiences as anthropologists working on these questions in the field.

Chapters cover major thematic questions in sociocultural anthropology, and are supplemented with some exciting teaching resources that address current questions and concerns in the discipline, such as the role of anthropology in our everyday lives and public anthropology.

The text is available online and for chapter-by-chapter download. As an open-access textbook, the editors suggest in their Anthrodendum post that "choosing Perspectives for our classes, and eliminating the substantial cost of commercial textbooks from our syllabi, may open opportunities for us to adopt other books written by our colleagues and produced by university presses."

Check out this interesting resource and other teaching tools and tips on our Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources page.

Quick links:

• Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Nina Brown, Laura Tubelle de González, and Thomas McIlwraith
• Perspectives: An Open Access Intro Anthro Textbook (Anthrodendum)
• Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources (anthro everywhere!)

An Anthropologist In Situ: Canadian Engineering Education Association 2017 Conference

As mentioned in our previous blog post, I recently spoke about the potential of bringing anthropological ethics into Engineering classrooms (as per my current teaching role).

I was accepted to speak at the CEEA conference which had Innovation and Diversity in Engineering Education as its theme.

As part of a special symposium on diversity, I wrote a paper on the role of team work workshops in developing a tolerance for diversity and self-reflection.

Below is the paper abstract:

In their quest to find work-ready graduates, employers are increasingly prioritizing graduates with so-called transferable skills. These transferable skills include critical thinking and problem-solving skills, communication skills, and the ability to work in diverse teams. With the plethora of engineering education literature on the topic of developing undergraduates’ teamwork abilities, there are numerous suggestions and little consensus on the best way to develop these skills in engineering classrooms. This paper adds to this literature and provides an overview of group work workshops for first-year undergraduates. The hope for these workshops was to better equip students for future group work activities by providing them easy-to-remember teamwork tools that were first learned and practiced in low-stakes workshop environments. Following their participation in these workshops, students participated in focus groups and feedback demonstrated an appreciation for these workshops as well as the opportunity to self-reflect on their role as a team member. Further, there appeared to be a shift in the awareness and tolerance of the diversity found among group members, which demonstrates a potential area for further investigation. The authors conclude with a call for more research in order to better understand the role of teamwork as a means for developing tolerance toward diversity among first-year undergraduate students. 

Important to Monday's post, these workshops incorporated:

• The importance of using a holistic perspective to understand how all the parts of Engineering students' come and work together. 
• Self-reflection to understand the power and privilege of their role and how that role is perceived with the community.

Quick links and further reading:

• Anthropological Ethics outside of Anthropological Classrooms (June 08, 2017, anthro everywhere!)

Teaching Resource: Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy

As anthropologists, we frequently teach about power dynamics and social inequality in our classrooms. Especially in the context of efforts to decolonize anthropology, many of us reflect on these relationships within our classrooms, within the university, in our relationships with our students, and the course content/ materials we teach.

In this vein, we offer this five-part series (2017) in which sociologist Elaine Coburn explores "Social Inequality and Teaching in the Academy." Coburn writes that "We live in an unequal world; these inequalities do not stop at the university classroom door." In this series, she considers "some ways unjust inequalities are (re)produced in the classroom" and through our relationship with our students.

Part I: Pedagogy is Not (Just) About Technique
Part II: The Problems with the Conscientious Pedagogue
Part III: The Practical Challenges of Broadening the Scholarly Canon
Part IV: As Professors, We are Not All Equal Before Our Students
Part V: “Imagine Otherwise” – Ways Forward

How might Coburn's reflections and suggestions be useful for how you plan your next class?

Additional resources:

• Paige West's Teaching Decolonizing Methodologies (Savage Minds, 2016) from their 20-part Decolonizing Anthropology series.
• Our post on Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond (15 December 2016) and our page including these resources and more: Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources

Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus

Adding to the impressive list of open access teaching resources, the Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus provides texts for "Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States."

The authors identify the following goals of their Syllabus:

1. Define anti-Muslim racism as an alternative to the concept of Islamophobia
2. Understand the relationship of race and religion to white supremacy through the racialized figure of the Muslim
3. Provide an intersectional and comparative analysis to anti-Muslim racism
4. Strategize ways to challenge anti-Muslim racism and resist white supremacy
5. The syllabus is organized by the following themes and topics, which move from broader framing issues to more specific examples. Later readings may benefit from the contextualization provided by earlier sections.  

Bringing into conversation a wide variety of interdisciplinary texts -- both scholarly and popular -- this syllabus interrogates the relationship between Islampohobia and Racism through the following sections:

I. Race, Empire and Islam
II. The Production and Reproduction of Anti-Muslim Racism
III. The Impact of Anti-Muslim Racism
IV. Policing, Security and Anti-Muslim Racism
V. Resisting Anti-Muslim Racism
VI. Further Reading and Resources

While this syllabus provides a valuable resource for teaching on these topics, what further reading suggestions would you like to add to this collection? Do you have additional ethnographic or anthropological texts you would like to propose? Or perhaps texts that interrogate this relationship in non-American contexts? If so, email (anthrolens@gmail.com) or tweet us (@anthrolens) with your suggestions and we'll add them here!

Quick links and further reading:

• Islamophobia is Racism Syllabus
• #BlackIslamSyllabus a Google Doc "curated by Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler ....  The goal of this project is to provide teachers, professors, researchers, journalists, and people interested in learning more about Islam with resources on Black Muslims to promote a more inclusive approach to the study of Islam."
• additional Reading Lists, Syllabi, & Teaching Resources (anthro everywhere! page)

Applying an anthropological perspective in health

We recently came across this interesting article about "Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories." Anthropologists and other critical social scientists have long known that even though race is a social construction, it can have very real impacts in people's lives -- including in accessing health and healthcare.

This article explores how medical students continue to be taught to use racial stereotypes based in biology as shortcuts for diagnosing and treating illness. It also follows the work of Dr. Brooke Cunningham, a physician and sociologist, who challenges these harmful practices in teaching medicine. For Dr. Cunningham and others, the point of these reforms is to push medical students and future health professionals to think critically about race, and how these social categories impact individual health through lived experiences and structures of inequality.

“It’s not that race is irrelevant to health, but it’s not relevant to health because of innate differences. It’s relevant because racism affects people’s health.”

Although medical students are often repeatedly told throughout their education that race should be approached critically and understood as a social not biological construct, what's telling are the reactions of students to Cunningham's lecture based on the authority of medicine over social science:

Students who attended her recent lecture on race said Cunningham’s medical degree gave her added credibility.
“I think if she was just a social scientist, I would be more skeptical of whatever perspective she would bring to the conversation,” said Mac Garrett, a first-year medical student.

These insights raise some important questions to consider in how anthropologists and other social scientists might consider communicating their findings in applied contexts. How might we think about how social science evidence and arguments are interpreted by those we wish to influence, in order to be more persuasive? In order to create social change in applied contexts -- like medical students' training -- should we draw more on the the authority of critical social scientists who also have the clout of a medical degree?

Quick links and further reading:

• Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories (10 March 2016, Stat)
• You might want to check out our links to anthropologists working in the health professions on our Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university page

Bringing anthropological ethics into the classroom

With the Canadian Anthropology Society Conference next week comes CASCA's Spring issue of the network's newsletter, Culture.

One item that caught our eye in this issue was Eric Henry's description of a case-study discussion activity he created for students to work through some of the potentially thorny issues anthropologists and linguists face in the field: Targaryen Ethics: A Case Study in Linguistic Appropriation Using “Game of Thrones”

Henry writes that in his linguistic anthropology course,

language appears to students to be a relatively uncontroversial topic of research – in what possible way could listening to an oral history or eliciting verb conjugations harm someone?
I wanted to get students thinking about some of the thorny ethical issues surrounding linguistic heritage, appropriation, and ownership.

In this short piece, Henry provides the short text of his case study, where the linguistic anthropologist is approached by the producers of the hit television program about adapting a local (endangered) language to fit one of the show's mythic peoples. Henry also reflects on the outcomes of working through this case-study with his students, including some of the unanticipated issues that students themselves raised about the case, and the role of the anthropological expert in terms of language revitalization, representation, development, and what ethics means in these moments.

Henry's case-study is a great example of an activity to bring an experiential learning element into the classroom through role-playing. How might you adapt this style of case-study exercise in your own teaching?

Quick links and further reading:

• CASCA's Culture newsletter
• The AAA's Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology edited by Joan Cassell and Sue-Ellen Jacobs
• Chapter 3: Cases and Solutions provides 12 ethics case-studies on general ethical issues raised by practicing anthropologists similar to Henry's case study above
• AAA's Ethics blog
• The Smithsonian's Anthropology Outreach Office has also created an Ethical Dilemmas activity with 6 short case-studies
• anthro everywhere!'s Reading Lists & Syllabi Resources page

Updated 23 August 2017: Henry's article is no longer available via Culture