Teaching Tools is dedicated to the intersections between pedagogy, ethnography, and anthropology. The section is a growing resource for instructors, teaching assistants, and students, with everything from discussion guides and in-class activities to critically minded reflections on the practice, politics, and poetics of teaching anthropology, whether inside the academy or in alternative settings.
Learning to Teach
With my first teaching appointment in 2017, I moved to Richmond, a new town where I didn’t know anyone. Almost as soon as I got there, I enrolled in the YMCA sw... More
Pedagogies for a Particular Time
As a teaching assistant and a resident advisor (RA) in an undergraduate dorm, many of my conversations on campus have focused on how students and educators are ... More
“Decanonization” as a Spiral: Collectively Constructing a “History of Anthropological Thought” Syllabus
The authors of this piece together compose the Brandeis “History of Anthropological Thought” Syllabus Collective. * * * “We say the Earth has a circular orb... More
The Political Statement: Thinking Beyond the End-of-Term Paper
This past Fall, while serving as faculty instructor (Alyssa) and graduate student instructor (Felipe) for an introductory course in socio-cultural anthropology,... More
Editorializing the Classroom: Teaching Collaboratively in the Digital Age
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, educators and students were faced with the precarity of a post-Covid, post-Zoom classroom and are now tasked with answering the... More
Decolonizing Ethnography: A Reimagined Framework for Teaching Radical Ethnography
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all... More
Giving Students Feedback that Inspires
During one failed attempt to empty my university email inbox, I came across a few emails dating back to 2014, the year in which I changed my undergraduate major... More
Syllabus Archive: Black Anthropology
This syllabus archive brings together a range of syllabi concerned with race and anthropology, with a particular focus on Blackness. Blackness is fundamental to... More
Writing Op-Eds in Anthropology Courses
In their guide to writing an op-ed, the Washington Post lists the goals that inform their decisions about which opinion pieces to publish. The last four bullet ... More
Writing and Teaching Life and Death: A Conversation with Anne Allison
In this conversation, Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and Society for Cultural Anthropology past president, reflects on the ... More