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Mongolian students describing a potato, as part of a class exercise in demonstrating anthropological skills such as observation and note-taking. |
By training and inclination, I am an anthropologist. So, not surprisingly, most of my teaching deals with anthropological topics. I have extensive experience in teaching anthropology at a variety of levels, and a number of different courses, including (of course) Introduction to Anthropology (both cultural and four-field), research methods, ecological anthropology, colonialism, and a number of other topics. I have taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
In teaching I am concerned with presenting students with more than what a professor of mine used to call "National Geographic" anthropology. By this he meant the presentation of anthropology as a collection of facts and stories about strange and interesting people, but not much more. In contrast, when teaching - particularly at the undergraduate level - I try to give students a set of tools they can use. I try not to teach dry facts about Yanomami cross-cousin marriage, but to use such facts to get students to think about their world and themselves in a different way, to realize the possibilities different cultures offer and use to these to understand who they are in a new way. I carry a similar approach through to upper-level undergraduate and graduate teaching, seeking to actively engage the students in constructing their own knowledge and understanding of topics at hand.
Although my degrees are from American universities, I have also trained at the University of Cambridge, and maintain ties there. This gives me a strong grounding in trends in both American and British anthropology and social theory more generally.
In addition to teaching anthropology, I also have experience teaching expository writing and critical thinking in the US and Mongolia. In the latter, I inaugurated the course in academic writing for the social sciences, which included a strong critical thinking component.
SyllabiYou can use the links at left to check out some course syllabi I have developed.
WorkshopsI also have extensive experience conducting workshops on critical thinking and writing skills, and education-related issues, such as course and curriculum development and plagiarism. I was a also one of the authors of the curriculum reform project currently being implemented at the School of Social Sciences of the National University of Mongolia.
Contact me for more information on any of these.