- Thank you all for coming this afternoon
to our presentation.
Our panel here is entitled
Why Anthropology Matters:
Making Anthropology Relevant and Engaging
A Larger Public Audience Through Pedagogy.
My name is Audrey Ricke
and I'm the organizer for
this particular session,
though I worked also with Theresa Winstead
who was not able to be here today.
The panel idea came out of a discussion
that we had here last year at the AAAs
with the teaching
Anthropology interest group.
And I was really inspired
by Kathy Davidson's 2017
Anthropology News article,
The Future of Higher Education,
as well as my own approach
to teaching in the classroom,
which it takes more of an applied
engaged perspective on pedagogy.
And from there, this
particular session was born.
So, as educators, we have the opportunity
to work with a large group of individuals.
Sometimes almost 1,000 students
in a given academic year.
So, today's panelists
will be sharing with us
some strategies they have developed
to bring anthropology
to a broader audience
and to show why anthropology matters.
I would like to invite up,
our first speaker today is Michael Wesch.
And his title of his presentation
is Teaching as Ontological-shifting:
Living toward new ways of
thinking on anth101.com.
- Thanks.
You can bring up my slides
and I'll show you a
picture of my class here.
So, this is my class.
I teach a really big class
at a state university.
It's a required class.
You can imagine the scenario there.
And of course, higher education
is in a bit of a crisis
and since the crisis, these
students that you see here
have come to be known as
SCHs, semester credit hours.
And what I do is deliver
what are called SLOs.
And if you've ever been in the throes
of trying to figure
out what a good SLO is,
you know that it's quite difficult
because there seems to
be inverse correlation
between meaningful SLOs
and measurable SLOs.
Just as an example of this,
I can show you,
say if you take like a really
sophisticated definition of anthropology
and what it is that we do,
something like John Comaroff's article,
The End of Anthropology,
and you see that it
involves being holistic,
critical estrangement, mapping processes
by which social realities are realized,
attention to context, context, context,
which is always theoretical,
grounded theory, being
empathic and reflexive,
you'd see that students
then should be able
to identify multiple dimensions,
connections, and casualties,
see beneath surfaces
and beyond appearances
while attempting to transcend
biases and assumptions.
Understand how we co-construct the world,
see the world big and small,
identify, apply and shift perspectives,
sit in the immersive
ambiguity and uncertainty
of a messy problem for an
unknowable length of time
while slowly giving birth
to a meager little insight,
treasure it for a moment
and then throw it away.
Imaging their way into
another's perspective
and embrace it even if, or especially if,
it is contrary to their own.
And understand themselves as culturally
and temporarily bounded entities mired
in cultural biases and taken
for granted assumptions
that they can only attempt to transcend.
And of course, the problem is
that these are very meaningful
but not very measurable
and we end up somewhere over here
in a lot of these really big classes
with questions like this.
So, I find this to be a bit of a crisis.
It's these SCHs and SLOs
ultimately lead to the big crisis,
one I would call a crisis of significance,
a crisis of students trying to figure out
what's the purpose of this,
what are we doing here?
Like these multiple choice exams,
what's the point of this kind of material?
So, I've been teaching now for 12 years
and I've been mired in this
crisis this entire time.
Just a few years ago it
kind of really hit me
and I tore up my notebook
and I just started rolling
through my syllabus
and realizing kind of what
a fraud it was in a way.
I realized that typically
we teach these 16 topics
which are defined largely by
the fact that we have 16 weeks.
And I started thinking,
(chuckling) you know,
what I'm really trying
to do is teach something
like the ethos of anthropology,
and I really sat down and I
thought about what those were
and I came up with these 10 things
which I listed into what I call
The 10 Lessons of Anthropology
and now I enter my classroom
and I introduce it like this,
excuse the dramatic music here.
People are different.
These differences represent the vast range
of human potential and possibility.
Our beliefs, ideas, ideals,
values, even our abilities,
are largely a product of our culture.
We can respond to such
differences with hate or ignorance
or we can choose to open up to them
and ask questions we have
never considered before.
When we open up to such questions,
we put ourselves in touch
with our higher nature.
It was asking questions,
making connections and trying new things
that brought us down from the trees
and took us to the moon.
It's not easy to see our assumptions.
Our most basic assumptions are embedded
in the basic elements
of our everyday lives,
our language, our routines
and habits, our technologies.
We create our tools and
then our tools create us.
Most of what we take as reality
is a cultural construction
realized through our
unseen, unexamed assumptions
about what is right, true, or possible.
We fail to examine our assumptions
not just because they are hard to see,
but also because they
are safe and comfortable.
They allow us to live with
the flattering illusion
that I am the center of the universe
and what matters are my
immediate needs and desires.
Our failure to move beyond such a view
has led to the tragedy of our times,
that we are more connected than ever
yet feel and act more disconnected.
Memorizing these ideas is easy.
Living them takes a lifetime of practice.
Fortunately, the heroes of all
time have walked before us.
They show us the path.
They show us that collectively
we make the world.
Understanding how we make the world,
how it could be made or
understood differently
is the road toward realizing
our full human potential,
is the road to true freedom.
And then of course we have the challenge
of measuring that and thinking about
how do you actually measure
whether the students master that.
And I just wanna call your attention here
to the challenge of this
by calling your attention
to this guy here.
He sits in my classes and
sleeps through most of them
or he's looking at me
like this all the time.
And after a while I got really mad
and I decided to approach him about this.
And so I walked up to him
one day and woke him up
and I said, "Hey, you wanna go to lunch?"
And so we went to lunch
and I asked him why he
slept in my classes.
And he said that he had
an addiction to games.
And then he went on to tell me
that it wasn't just an
addiction to playing games.
He actually made games as well.
He started describing
this game he designed
on hexagon cards that uses
these mythological figures.
I found out that he knew more
about mythology than I do
and I teach a class on mythology.
(audience laughing)
So, I started to see him
a little differently.
I started to realize that the system
that he was inside of had
defined him in a certain way
that made him disengage and check out.
So, I invited him to be part
of a different type of class.
One where there would be no lectures
and no textbooks and no grades,
a class where he could use his talents
and merge them with the talents of others
to create something really worthwhile.
So, over time he found that
he could redefine himself
in a class like this.
He ended up spending many, many nights
working on this video game
and I started to see him
and these other sleepers
a lot differently.
What he created actually
is this empathy game,
you might say, about
living with Alzheimers.
This was a small class and the students
did field work throughout
the entire semester
living in a retirement community
and they took people's real memories
to create this virtual reality game.
And what that experience taught me
was that you can't just think your way
into a new way of living.
You have to live your way
into a new way of thinking,
but I wondered could I
do that in a big class?
It was easy to do in a small class.
Could I do it in something bigger?
And so I took these 10 lessons
that I just read to you
and I decided we really have
to put these into action.
So, I created 10 challenges
to go along with the lessons.
And then we created this website.
This was created along with my colleague
Ryan Klataske at Kansas State.
And we decided to just open this up.
Everything would be free.
We'd create connected
courses around the nation,
maybe around the world some day,
offer a free textbook.
There's copies here if you'd like a copy.
It is available at cost
on Amazon for $15 dollars,
but it's free online.
And that compares pretty well
to the other textbooks
on the market right now.
The idea is to create these 10 lessons
and then merge them with
these 10 challenges.
So, the first lesson,
People are Different,
the challenge is to go talk to strangers.
And we do a lot of this on Instagram,
so if wanna just follow the #anth101,
you can see some of
the student work there.
You'll see things like this,
students going out talking to strangers
at a Wal-Mart parking lot
and asking questions like,
what's your favorite
thing about being in love?
and they say this,
and drive off into the sunset.
Or this woman, Leah,
who's pushing carts
trying to stay in shape
so she can donate a kidney to her sister.
The student found her
trying to save the life
of a baby bird and then he looked down
and saw her tattoo.
It says sisters here.
Lesson three is about evolution,
basically what it is to be human,
about asking questions,
making connections,
trying new things being the core of that.
So, trying new things becomes
the quest, the challenge,
and they try something new for 28 days,
to try to learn something
new or break a habit
and there's all kinds of
different things people do.
They try to do back flips or learn guitar
or whatever it might be
and they do make progress
which is kind of fun.
And then of course, we join as well.
So this is me trying to learn violin.
This is day four now.
And then this is Ryan Klataske,
my partner with anth101.
And we started a little
band with the students.
It's called the 28 Day band.
And on the 28th day, we premiere.
Lesson eight,
we are more connected than ever,
yet feel and act more disconnected.
For this challenge,
students have to take
some object that they own
and find somebody who actually touched it
in a foreign land before it came to them.
So, students end up
Skyping all over the world.
This is a Skype call to India
where some Victoria
Secret clothing was made.
The whole point here is to
create the world as a classroom.
It really tears down the
walls in so many ways.
I find myself even
lecturing outdoors sometimes
and recording it.
And this is the best classroom ever.
I love it.
I love teaching out here.
And we also send TA's all
over the world as well.
- My name's Ben and I'm
in Jakarta, Indonesia.
- Hi, my name is Matt and
I'm in Barcelona, Spain.
- I'm Amy and I'm headed to Samoa.
- I'm Darren Wilkinson
and I'm here in Santiago
- [Crowd] Let's go Santiago, let's go!
- And so the TA's are actually
doing these challenges,
but all over the world
and students can ask them questions
about the cultures they're encountering
and the people they're
encountering in these other places.
And so it really just starts
to tear down the walls
and give a sense of
possibility to the students.
Then I also bring my lectures
out into the world as well,
so I've always lectured about race,
but I thought why not
actually take that lecture
out into the town,
and so we did a story
about racial segregation
in Kansas City.
It just brings the whole
world in the classroom
or at least our community.
Over a million people,
most of them around Kansas saw
that video and discussed it.
It became a major platform of discussion
for the whole community to think about
why we're so racially divided.
And it's these types of things
I think we could all be doing
by tearing down the walls so to speak
of what we're talking about.
And the main thing though is to get out
and do these challenges
and to show students
that it is possible to
experience difference
and experience differently
and experience more,
because ultimately learning anthropology
is really a shift in ontology.
It was for me and I think it
probably was for many of you.
It's a sense of a new
way of being in the world
and that's what I wanna
translate to the students.
So, Lesson nine then is
memorizing these ideas is easy,
living them takes a lifetime of practice,
and the heroes show us the path.
So this was inspired for
me by a former student
who was a amazing student,
a wonderful student,
but while he was prepared
for class every day
with his readings,
he wasn't really living life.
And in my class,
he said the most important
thing he ever learned from me
was about these heroes
that I talked about,
that they somehow felt
called to adventure,
would go on a road of
trials and were transformed.
He said there was a young woman in there
that was like the heroes I talked about.
And she really had been
on a road of trials
and was transformed and
had a lot to teach him.
So, that when they first met,
they instantly fell in love.
And I remember this.
They got together,
they rose a kid together and I thought
they would live happily ever after
until he wrote me a few years later.
He says that after that,
he just started running.
And he's just trying to
figure out what went wrong.
So he'd run all day and all night,
20 miles a day sometimes.
He ran through all seasons
for months after month.
He said he'd often run
barefoot just to feel something
as he was trying to numb
himself to the pains.
And then one day he said
he just felt like he was
lifted outside of his body
and he could see himself
running through the park.
And he said this is what
anthropology taught him.
It gave him this perspective,
this ability to see from afar.
And he looked down on himself
and he had this sense of empathy
and compassion for himself
that he never felt before.
And he said to himself,
"My goodness. You're a hero."
But he wasn't thinking like "I'm a hero
"and I'm better than everybody else."
Instead he thought,
he was suddenly running through the park
and seeing heroes everywhere.
And it just opened up
the whole world to him.
He says it was this sense
of wisdom and compassion
that ultimately healed his relationship.
So, challenge nine, inspired by him
is to see yourself as the hero.
The last two challenges are
very reflective and reflexive
in the student's trying to figure out
what they really learn
from these challenges
and how they can carry
them forward in their life.
So, I'll just end with a
sense of the plan for this,
for the future of this.
We'd like to create a
hub for free resources
for teaching anthropology
guided by two key ideas.
One that anthropology can be
and should be for everyone,
free, engaging, speak to a diverse public.
Two, it could be such that
you have to live your way
into a new way of thinking,
designed around this key idea.
We want to connect multiple intro courses
taught independently yet collaboratively.
We want faculty sharing of
great content and challenges.
Someday we'd like to provide
small grants and funding
for anthropologists and students
to produce great content
and small videos, articles and so on.
Go to anth101 if you'd like
to join our Google Group.
I also have free copies of
rough draft of this textbook
if you're interested.
Thanks.
(audience clapping)
- I'd like to invite up our
next presenter, Willa Zhen.
The title of her presentation is
Chiefs need, I'm sorry.
Chefs Need Anthropology:
Critical Reflections on Teaching
at the Culinary Institute of America.
- Okay, good afternoon, everybody,
and thank for being here
this afternoon with us.
I know the distractions
of this area await,
but we appreciate you being here.
And I'd like to start today just by
asking a few questions.
And first of all just asking you, oh dear.
Sorry technology never ceases to impress.
All right, so my first
question for you all is
what were you like at 18?
Did you know what you were
gonna be when you growing up?
Did you have a clear goal?
Did you have something in mind perhaps,
that you wanted to be?
And just take a moment to think about that
and just keep in the back of your head.
I'm not gonna ask you to respond
since this is sort of a,
not necessarily most
conducive session for it.
But I want you to hold
that thought for a moment.
Because most of you
probably when you're 18
had very little idea of
what you wanted to be
or maybe you had some big ideas, right?
You wanted to be an astronaut still
and then you realized, you know,
social scientists don't generally qualify
as real scientists for the NASA program.
Or maybe you wanted to
become a real doctor
and not the type of philosophy,
like many of us are in this room.
So, okay, maybe at one point
you wanted to save lives
and not just change
them through education.
All right.
Maybe some of you were interested in law
or becoming a lawyer.
Others perhaps are interested
in becoming an engineer, right?
And somehow all of us in this room
found our way to anthropology.
We fell down the circles of hell
and we ended up the sixth one here.
The six layer of hell,
for those of you who've never read Dante,
is heresy which explains our
current situation very well.
But anyway, for most of us,
the way we found our way to anthro
is through some happy circumstance.
Perhaps some of us took a really awesome
general ed anthro 101
course like Michael's.
If I had taken that,
I probably wouldn't have
been one of the sleepers,
maybe I would've done
something interesting
or maybe you've watched
some really cool film
featuring anthropologists
and you decided this is it,
this is what I wanna do when I grow up.
Maybe something like this.
Oops, this guy.
Maybe you saw him,
you thought, decided I
wanna go hunt treasure
and you realized, "Oh
great. I have to battle
"with funding agencies and other things."
Maybe it's not so straight
forward being an archeologist.
Or maybe you took a really
interesting vacation somewhere
that opened your eyes
to a different culture,
different place, a language,
a different set of habits and rituals.
Perhaps you did an internship
at some type of agency
or there's some other chance discovery
that led you to your
current place and status.
And indeed that's really
common for most of us
in anthropology, but also
other liberal arts subjects,
that it was some type of chance discovery
for you as a young person that led you
to your interest in the subject
that you end up pursuing
as part of your career.
And so as a result,
we see articles like those
published in higher ed journals
and magazines such as
the one recently featured
in the November/December
issue of Anthropology News
which was titled Who Majors
in Anthropology and Why
by Daniel Ginsberg.
And these types of articles
are what I call the agonizing articles.
They're the ones that
are trying to uncover
and also explain who's
coming into our fields
and also justify why we need to exist
because honestly we live in a climate
where programs are being cut,
funding is being cut and we
have to explain to parents
who are footing the bill
why our students need anthropology
or need other liberal arts subjects.
And in particular, this recent article,
Who Majors in Anthropology
and Why, Daniel Ginsberg/
highlights the importance
of helping students
among anthropologists,
highlights the importance
of helping students
and their parents see
the value in anthropology
and other liberal arts subjects.
And he points out that we,
in anthropology train our students
to develop important life skills
like critical thinking and writing
in our cultural perspective.
And authors of these
articles always suggest
that these skills are
important not just for careers,
but also for developing
a well rounded life
as an engaged global citizen.
So, these are the types
of things we have to say
to parents, to administrators,
to funding boards
to justify what we do, our existence.
And so when we teach
these types of students,
which is the type of
student I used to teach
before I ended up at
my current institution,
it was trying to help
them connect the dots
and see where anthropology
would fit into their lives.
And you're talking
about passion, interest,
and seeing that world connectedness
rather than talking about careers.
Now imagine the opposite.
Imagine teaching in an institution
where all the students in the room
have a very clear vision of
exactly what they wanna be
when they grow up.
They are career focused.
They are driven.
They know exactly what they
wanna do in 5, 10, 15 years.
Some of them even have a 30 year plan,
which is quite impressive to
think about an 18 year old
being able to see themselves
30 years down the line.
And these are the types
of students I teach
at the Culinary Institute of America.
My students and those at other
vocationally-focused institutions
leave with very tangible skills.
And unlike traditional
liberal arts majors,
where they might be exploring themselves
during their four years of undergraduate,
and then thinking about a job
at the very last month and a half
or maybe the last two
days before graduation,
my students leave often with a job offer
or several job offers in hand.
They depart college without that angst
that most other 22 and
23 year olds experience.
They don't generally have that question of
what do I want to do with my life
and what do I wanna be when I grow up
because that has often
already been answered
at least in part before the
students even arrive on campus
for their first day of orientation.
By and large they come to CIA
because they want to do
something related to food.
We are indeed the Culinary
Institute of America.
So, for those of you who
are not really familiar
with this institution,
I don't wanna assume,
we are here, of course, in DC.
It's very easy to get
confused with the other CIA,
the one in Langley.
We like to call ourselves,
the ones that prefer
butter, they prefer guns.
Econ joke for those who've done econ.
So, we are the Culinary
Institute of America
and we were found in 1946 actually
as the New Haven Restaurant
Institute in downtown New Haven
and yes, we do have a
connection with another place
in New Haven you may have heard about,
they're just this little institution.
The Culinary Institute of America
which was then found as the
New Haven Restaurant Institute,
was founded by Frances
Roth who was an attorney
and Katherine Angell
who was actually married
to the then President of Yale University,
James Rowland Angell.
So, this institute, the New
Haven Restaurant Institute,
was founded to help train
returning World War II veterans
and give them a trade, in essence.
And it was a very clear vocational school.
We took young men in.
At that point it was all exclusively men.
We gave them a trade and we
sent them off to work in a job.
And often in better
restaurants and better hotels.
In the intervening years,
the school changed its
name eventually settling
on the Culinary Institute of America
and it also moved out of New Haven
and to its present day site
in Hyde Park, New York,
which is also the home of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and other historic sites.
So over the years,
the school has gained a reputation
for being the preeminent
institution for culinary training.
And this reputation
really started coming up
in the 1970s not long
after the school moved
to its present day location in Hyde Park.
And it was reinforced by media coverage.
So for instance,
Life magazine at that point declared
the Culinary Institute the
Harvard of haute cuisine,
very impressive, in 1979.
And New York Times food
critic Craig Claiborne wrote,
"Almost every profession has
an outstanding training ground.
"The military has West Point.
"Music has Juilliard
"and the culinary world
has the Institute."
So that reinforced it.
It certainly didn't hurt our reputation
that prestigious culinary figures,
those like Julia Child,
you may recognize her,
one of America's preeminent
and many consider to be
the first celebrity chef,
came and visited many times
and also champion the school.
We also graduated many illustrious alumni.
And the Culinary Institute
America's graduates
have routinely topped the best of lists
in the culinary world.
Perhaps the most famous
today is Anthony Bourdain
who, for those of you who are
not necessarily food people,
but are interested in anthropology,
which I hope many of you are,
he does a bit of an anthro lite.
You know he goes to
different parts of the world.
He engages with the local population.
He uses food as a vehicle to
speak with the local people
and talk about issues of local importance.
So, we have this illustrious alumni list
and many of these alumni
work in operating restaurants
and other food and beverage
operations around the world
including some of the best
restaurants here in DC.
So, these students that I teach
are not necessarily the target
audience for anthropology
and other liberal arts subjects,
but as I will reflect and
comment upon in a moment,
these are the types of students
that perhaps have the most
to gain from anthropology
because it forces them to challenge,
question, think in ways
they may not have otherwise
and may never ever again be
pushed to do in the future.
For most of these students,
this will be the one and
only anthropology class
they will ever take in their lifetimes.
And what I mean by that is that
we offer an anthropology food course.
We don't offer a anthropology degree.
We don't have the resources for that.
We don't have an intro
anthropology course.
We just have an anthropology food.
Although I am happy to report
that we will be offering
archeology food in the near future
taught by a colleague.
So, this is really a one
shot for them to get exposed
to this field and to think about
and consider the issues of anthropology
and specifically through the lens of food
which is the field I work in.
So, occasionally I do have a student
who gets the anthropology bug.
They will go on and do graduate work
in some liberal arts
field, often food studies,
which is an interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary field
that incorporates anthropology
and also ethnographic analysis,
but these are by and far
exceptions to the rules.
My students will by and large
be something like this in the future.
They'll go on to be cooks, chefs,
restaurateurs, managers, owner operators,
sommeliers, and other hospitality workers.
So, the value of anthropology
and other liberal arts subjects
at a culinary college can't be discounted
because it reflects a broader change
to what we think of cooks
and what they need to know.
As the reputation of the institute
has grown over the years,
we've added branch campuses,
we've added programs
and this is part of what
you can call the
professionalization of cooking,
that we're formalizing the trade,
we're formalizing this industry,
and this shift is something
that has been documented
in different societies
and different places,
notably anthropologist
Amy Trubek has written
about the professionalization of cooks
in 18th and 19th century France.
Now I've also done so,
writing about cooks in
contemporary 21st century China.
And this is interesting
because cooks don't fit
into this definition of professionals
by traditional sociological
and anthropological definitions
by which I mean white collar professions,
some of those which I named
at the very start of this presentation,
doctors, lawyers, engineers.
These skills and these
professions codified
through specialized knowledge,
formal education, and also set of rules,
regulations, and professional habits
reinforce who belongs and who doesn't.
So, this is interesting because
we're training cooks to be
and to think about anthropology.
We're helping them professionalize.
And what it is is that
we're encouraging them
to think in different ways.
Because it helps us a lot to think about
and understand where
individuals like myself
fit in at CIA and why
chefs need anthropology.
So, it's a common misperception
that we only teach cooking
and we only teach future
chefs or hospitality workers.
And to a degree that's true.
Our main program is
focused in an occupational,
is an associates in occupational studies
which is two years of heavy
hands on applied work.
But as we've grown our campus,
we've grown our programs.
And we've taken on this
attitude of professionalization
that chefs need to engage with
more than just the physical
applied hands on work.
That increasingly they need to be able
to dress things like ecology,
food policy, nutrition,
obesity, food history,
thinking about food in culture,
thinking about food coverage and writing.
And this is where our
current courses have come in.
We have courses now in
the ecology of food,
food policy, food history,
sustainable food systems,
food writing and of course,
the anthropology of food.
So, what I will do is comment
on some of this and where we fit in
and what we do to help our students think
about these issues and help them develop
that professional extent
that's expected of them.
That in the 21st century,
chefs are not expected just to do,
but they're also expected to think
and to explain and
communicate often with people
who are not from similar
backgrounds as themselves.
So, there's a couple of things
I'm gonna highlight at this time
in which I do in my classroom
that help students who are very accustomed
to thinking about point A to B.
My students are trained
to make the souffle rise.
And what I mean by that,
it either happens or it doesn't.
If you've ever had a souffle,
you either have that wonderful moment
where a souffle comes out
and it puffs up and it rises
and you have this beautiful
product and you're happy
or it doesn't and it deflates
and you have this sad mess of a dish
and you're probably not so happy.
Perhaps us normal people,
our emotions are perhaps
not as tied, but for others,
but for the culinary world,
this is a very significant moment
of you either accomplish a task
by physically producing it or you didn't.
So, with my students,
there's three things I wanna focus on
that I've been training them to do
that are broader life skills,
but also part of where
anthropology sits with them.
And for me the focus is
not so much getting them
to memorize who Margaret
Mead is and Franz Boas was
and all these other things
that traditional classical
anthropology classes focus on
in the 101 introduction,
but for me, it really is getting them
to develop the sense of
inquiry and challenge
and get thinking outside
their comfort zone.
So, first of all, what you
see in front of you here
is part of this first idea
that my students need room for play
and room for accepting fear
and what I mean by that
is my students are so used to that A to B,
making the souffle rise
and it cooks or it doesn't.
And what I do with them
is I make them do activities
often hands on experiential
because they are so accustomed to this,
there's no other way for them to operate,
that challenge them.
What I have them do are
activities like this.
In a lesson about technology shifts,
the agricultural revolution,
the invention of agriculture,
and the technological revolution.
I have them grind ancient grains by hand
and what they have to do
is they have to find a rock
that they think would be
an excellent grindstone,
and in my part of the world,
there's a lot of slate and shale.
You can imagine what that does,
for those of you who are
archeologists in the room.
I'm a socioculturist,
but even I know that's not a good idea.
So, they grind grains and you can see here
that's exactly what they've picked.
One of them's got a bit of slate
and they grind and grind
and they realize just
how physical material
and difficult it is
because they're so used
to buying industrialized white flour.
They take for granted how difficult
and heartbreaking this process is.
And it makes them fear a
little bit, but also accept it
because they're so used
to following recipes
and listening to orders.
When they have to do something like this
where there is no recipe
and no prescription,
they're forced to rethink
the narrative a little bit
and also play because normally
they don't get to play
to the same extent, to the same degree.
And sometimes they get
very creative and fun.
As you can see,
the student decided to
find his own grind stick.
Unfortunately, he realized
that using just any old branch
doesn't work very well as
a pestle, but he tried.
The second thing I try
to do with my students
is give them room for reflection
and get them off that mode
of yes chef to why professor
And by what I mean by this
is that instead of the
traditional model of education,
what Paulo Freire calls the banking model,
where they're absorbing education
instead I get them to challenge
and think and question.
And for instance,
we do exercises about
class, caste, and waste.
I'm sorry, class, caste and identity,
sorry, waste fit in there wrong,
but I have them look at things like
of what are cooks getting paid
and where do they fit in,
because they're asked to
absorb all this cultural,
capital, know all these
things about expensive wines
and expensive foods, and
depending on where they are,
they may, if they're working
the front of the house,
they may be paid $2.13 for all that labor
and all that knowledge,
and so what does that mean
for them and their careers?
Lastly, what I do is try to get them
to see themselves in the world.
And what I mean by that is
if I were to use traditional
anthropological methods
and talk about traditional
anthropological texts
and things that anthropology classes
at more traditional four
year colleges would use,
things like Peggy
McIntosh's White Privilege
and Packing an Invisible Napsack,
it falls flat.
The students don't see the
relevance of anthropology
when it's just general anthropology.
They're not interested in the Neyamomano.
They're not interested
in those other tribes
because they're very vocationally focused.
So, my goal is always getting them
to think through food lens
and use that to engage them in culture
and realize that oh,
there's cultures everywhere
and food becomes a good
way to talk about this.
So, I've rewritten the
script on certain things.
For instance,
instead of using Peggy
McIntosh's list wholesale,
I've rewritten it and using examples
that relate to things
that they can understand
and have experience with,
in particular, question number two.
I have them consider this
as a discussion of race and ethnicity.
Question number two is
I can be pretty sure that my neighbors
will not be complaining
about the smell of my food
and my students who have
some type of ethnic identity or heritage
often talk about how that is
something that they've
experienced in their own life
and then they start
understanding what it means
to have these racial
and ethnic differences,
what it means to talk about privilege.
So, in wrapping up,
chefs and other vocation learners
benefit from anthropology and
other liberal arts subjects
and I think in particular in these times
when we're talking about
the need for anthropology
particularly in these
difficult socioeconomic
and political times,
it's especially important
to consider teaching
those who are not within the
normal anthropology audience.
Students like mine who
are vocational learners
who don't normally get this exposure
to different ways of
thinking, to asking why.
I think the more we engage with that,
the more we can expand our
dialogue with anthropology
and we can create richer
conversations within our field.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
- Hi, so if you just came
in, my name is Audrey Ricke
and I'll be presenting today on
Service-Learning,
Citizenship, and Pedagogy:
The Role of Anthropology
in Structuring Learning
and Civic Engagement.
Today's emotionally
charged political debates
about immigration in the
US reflect a growing need
to increase public
understanding about the lives
of those at the center of these debates.
Increasingly, service
learning is being adopted
as a pedagogical strategy that
brings students into contact
with immigrant and other communities.
The goal of service learning
is to integrate course learning outcomes
with host community goals
and foster civic
engagement among students.
Despite the high impact
of service-learning,
it also presents some new challenges.
Much like ethnography,
service-learning involve
many uncontrollable variables
that can cause discomfort for students.
While emotions both positive and negative
can lead to transformative
learning as Felton et al 2006
and Keeley 2005 point out.
They can also serve as barriers
and reinforce stereotypes
or erroneous understandings
about the social issue
which Fetherston and
Kelly 2007 and Marulo 1998
for example, found.
Given the parallels
between service learning and ethnography,
anthropologists role as educators
uniquely position us to make
significant contributions
to the design of service-learning.
Anthropologists such as Russell Rhoads,
Melanie Medeiros and Jennifer
Guzman have pointed out
how anthropology can
contribute methodologically
with participant
observation and reflexivity.
Yet anthropologists in
general have been slower
to enter the discussion about
how to design effective
service-learning pedagogy
to address the emotions
that surface for students
during the course.
As an anthropologist and instructor
of service-learning courses,
that partner with the local NGO
that assists refugees and immigrants,
I drew upon participant observation,
my own reflexivity as an educator
and student surveys to design
and test a pedagogical model
for structuring undergraduate
service-learning.
This model focuses on helping students
reflexively work with and
through their emotions
to make sense of their
participant observation
and better understand the local refugee
and immigrant communities.
The model builds upon the literature
for structuring service-learning.
Drawing on the work of
Erickson, Rasroe, and Keagan,
Cunningham and Grossman 2009
identify these three steps
for transformative learning.
They highlight the need
to provide students with
and I quote, "a reflexive
scaffolding", end quote.
That integrates a
growing awareness of self
and structural barriers.
This is where my model picks up.
For the pilot study of the model,
undergraduate students
worked with immigrants
and refugees from various
countries at a local NGO,
volunteering at least 68 hours
in either English or citizenship classes
as part of their service-learning project.
Based on topics recommended from the NGO,
students produce learning
activities that could be used
to help clients improve their knowledge
of US language, custom,
history, and political system.
The model itself involves five steps.
Step one includes a pre and
post identity reflection paper
that asks students to explicitly reflect
on their social identities
and that of those they are working with.
This is an important first step
for promoting self awareness.
On the screen there are some prompts
that students were given
in this particular pilot.
And for the post identity,
they were asked to respond
to the exact same three questions,
but this time focus on what was different
and what had remained the same
as a result of their experiences.
An important next step
in preventing emotional
barriers to learning
is to ask students early on
to identify their emotions
going into the project
and also identify potential
problems and solutions.
So, here on the screen are some prompts
which took the form of the
first critical reflection
for the pilot study.
And for the problem solution chart,
students were asked to think
of three possible problems
that they could be encountering
and then to come up with three
possible solutions for those.
And what's really important
is as an instructor,
when you get this back to
go back to the students
and share in their aggregate, the results,
particularly the emotions
that were coming up
because this is gonna help students know
that emotions like frustration
or nervousness is normal
and something that many
people are anticipating
and experiencing.
Also, the problem/solution chart,
by discussing some examples,
it helps students understand,
okay, this is what I might run into.
And then also, they
have tangible takeaways.
And for example,
you notice option one.
Sometimes students brainstorm
doing something new,
but if you kind of collectively
bring in the knowledge,
doing something new may
not mean much of anything
unless we know exactly what that is.
So, maybe you're trying basic English
or switching to drawing
images on the board
when you run into a
communication challenge.
The next is sharing culturally
relevant information
about the service-learning community.
The idea here is really
to avoid emotion based interpretations
that could block learning.
So, I'm not promoting
an overgeneralization
of a whole group of people or stereotypes
but rather to let students
know, for example,
the concepts of time and
punctuality do different
in terms of across
different cultural groups
as well as icon intellect.
These kind of basic things
that maybe naive realism
might lead someone to a negative
assumption about a person
if they didn't know this
going into the site.
And in step four,
involves a combination of
readings on ethnic graphic methods
in a frameworks for
understanding structure
to structural challenges and inequalities.
And it's key to combine this
with in-class activities
because what that is going to do,
it's not only gonna give
students that framework,
those alternate frameworks in some cases
to interpret what they're seeing on site,
but to also give them experience in more
kind of safe environment, that classroom,
to help them process their experiences.
So, for example, you might do,
and this is what the pilot did,
was an on-campus participation exercise.
So, during the actual class time,
you go in small groups to
do a observation exercise.
Following classroom, you come back
and it's the class you
talk about what you found,
you walk through to gather the analysis
and connect it to a particular concept
that you're reading in class.
Also doing any type of
role play or simulations
that put students at the center
in terms of the experience
helps them, too,
they kind of process
some of these frameworks.
Like Bourdieu's forms of capital
and Mulling's intersectionality
may feel kind of foreign
and distant until they experience it
through some type of role play.
And that really allows
them to kind of recognize,
kind of unarticulated assumptions
and overall kind of reduce their anxiety
going into the service-learning projects
and as they're unfolding as well.
And the final step, step five,
includes multiple structured,
critical reflections
with interval due dates.
And this part is really crucial
for helping students work with
and through their emotions.
And basically to kind of articulate,
divide out their assumptions
from the actual descriptions.
I combined Patty Clayton
and Sara Ash's DEAL Method
with Dr. Edward Zlotkowski's
three part structure
for journal entries,
to help students discern
if their conclusions
were actually based more on
assumptions than on the data.
And I like Clayton and Ash's DEAL Model
'cause it's really easy to remember.
You can tell students, here's the deal.
You wanna describe what you're seeing.
You wanna examine it and you
wanna articulate learning.
Being kind of connecting it to a term,
a concept in class.
And what Dr. Edward
Zlotkowski's model does,
it gives a really nice
visual framework for this,
a sort of description, the raw notes,
those are in regular fonts.
And then students are
required to put in italics,
their emotions and their assumptions,
so they have to reflect on that.
And then lastly in a bolded section,
they talk about their
academic connections,
so the concepts from the course.
Also having those interval due dates,
such as every two weeks,
volunteer two hours and
submit a critical reflection
helps students manage their time
and gives them time to process
what they're experiencing.
It also gives you time as
well to grade the material
and get it back to them with comments
to help them work through
maybe some emotions
that they're struggling
with or some challenges
that they're experiencing on site.
To test how effective this model was,
it was employed in an introductory
cultural anthropology
course with 24 students
who represented a variety of
ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Most were first year students
and all were non-majors.
I collected survey data from students
about the model and did a content analysis
of their identity reflection papers
and service-learning projects.
And I coded for such things as emotions,
changing perceptions, and
desire for civic engagement.
Returning to the model steps,
the associated data illustrates the degree
to which these steps
work to support students
and their projects and growth
as engaged and informed citizens.
For example,
in terms of the top three
emotions students reported
throughout the
service-learning experience,
these were anxiety, nervousness,
happiness, and frustration,
but they worked through these
and they were able to dive
deeper into the meanings.
And one of the things that
helped them to do that
was that problem-solution chart.
So, 16 out of 20 students rate it
at a four or a five out of five
in terms of helpful or very helpful
for their service-learning experiences.
When I asked students about
the on campus participation exercise,
16 out of 20 students rated it,
again, a four or five out of five
in terms of very helpful
for their service-learning.
And I also saw in student comments
they were reflecting back and indicating,
for example, such things as the role plays
that were helping them.
So I'm gonna just quote
one student comment here,
this student reflected,
"Experiencing the role play
"and volunteering with the Syrian women
"woke me up from just book
and social media stories.
"I witnessed how people are treated,
"I learned what it's like to be different
"and not the social norm."
While 12 out of 20 rank
the Deal-Zlotkowski format
a four or five out five
in terms of helpfulness
for their service-learning project,
I actually saw an improvement
in students' awareness
of their own personal bias
and assumptions and emotions
and how that influence the
conclusions they were drawing,
and this was based off a comparison
with a previous upper
division anthropology
service-learning course which
was at the same location,
but did not use this particular format
for reporting their field notes.
And then finally returning
the students' reflections
and their post-service learning papers,
what I found was that across the board
there was some increase,
either in an increase
civic engagement desire
or in terms of their
self-awareness and that of others.
So, I'm just gonna share
a couple of comments
that are representative
of the larger pool.
So, one student wrote and I
quote, "Observing and helping
"the citizenship class
was very eye-opening
"to my roles that I have in life,"
and the student was talking
about the role as a citizen,
"I got more into politics
"and have even gotten the opportunity
"to enact my right to vote.
"It never intrigued me and
because of this citizenship class
"and this awakening, I got involved.
"To not only help myself,
"but to help the students
in the citizenship classes."
So, students showing here self-awareness
as well as civic engagement.
Another student wrote and I quote,
"It opened my eyes on the reality
"of the refugee issue going
on today around the world.
"I made sure I voted
"and I also started to
volunteer at new places
"ever since I started my
volunteering at the NGO,
"so next time I hear the
topic of refugees brought up,
"I will definitely share
with others what I learned
"and what I saw to hopefully teach others
"about the settlement of refugees."
So, here the student is
showing awareness of others
as well as civic engagement
in terms of volunteering
outside of the requirement for the course.
And then lastly, I
wanna share this comment
from a student who
together showed evidence
for transformative learning
and what we mean here
is like a paradigm shift
or worldview shift and
how they saw the world.
So, this student wrote,
"First, I had some bias
"going into the service-learning project.
"I thought that the refugees would be
"exactly like they
portray them on the media.
"This experience has been
life changing for me.
"I have experienced so much
emotion, over a lot of bias,
"and I have learned that helping others
"really is my calling in my life."
The student went on to say
that they are volunteering as well
outside of the regular
kind of class requirements.
"When I see the ways some
of the people are living,
"it makes me sad.
"They came to this country to get away
"from poverty and violence,
"but they are put in places
with poverty and violence."
So, here at the end, the student
showing structure awareness
as well as civic engagement
and that changing awareness of self.
So, to conclude with a quote.
As Bradley Levinson explains,
citizenship education means and I quote,
"To educate the members of a social group
"to imagine their social belonging
"and exercise their participation
"as democratic citizens," end quote.
For service-learning educators,
the social group is both the
students and community members.
As these students' comments illustrate,
this pedagogical model help students
become more self-aware citizens
which involves both
understanding themselves
in relation to others
and the structural challenges in place.
At the same time, the
service-learning project
assisted a diverse population
of immigrants and refugees
in gaining the language and
cultural knowledge skills needed
to be active members in US society.
Following the theme of this conference,
Anthropology Matters,
and the discipline has
and can continue to play an important role
in designing pedagogical frameworks
that assist instructors across disciplines
in helping their students grapple
with complex and
emotionally charged issues
and grow scholars and
responsible citizens.
So, I'd like to wrap up by thanking
the NGO Community Partner,
the instructors, and clients
as well as the intro to
cultural anthropology students
who participated in the study,
and finally for the grant
support from IUPUI RISE program.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
Unfortunately, Angela Jenks is
not able to be with us today,
so we'll move right to
Shannon Telenko's presentation
Engaging White Working-Class Students
in the Struggle for Equality
Through Anthropologically
Informed Pedagogies.
- Thank you.
Anthropology and anthropological
pedagogy saved me
as a white working-class kid
so far as understanding from where I came
and to where I needed to go.
This paper elaborates on this
notion as well as how my work
which includes teaching
and academic advising
has been informed and
shaped by the subject
and its forms of pedagogy.
As teachers, scholars, and practitioners,
anthropologists must develop praxis
and agility to explore new audiences
and engage more students
in the struggle for equity
by raising consciousness
around the causes for inequity.
Our struggles are often used to divide us,
but I anxiously search for the ways
in which they connect us.
In addition to connecting struggle,
humanity must help one another
to contextualize struggle.
Educational anthropologists have recently
challenged one another
to think more expansively
about what true solidarity and
resistance might look like.
Indeed, what they must look
like in the post-Trump era.
While I didn't set out to focus on Trump,
partly because I am also
reflecting on moments well before,
but leading up to Trump's election,
it seems that the tenor of
this era is weighing heavily
and calling more of us
to action and activism
and I am keenly aware that
writing and reflecting
on white working-class
and/or rural Americans
has in the last year or
so become all the rage
thanks to portrayals of these
oft overlapping populations
in moderate to progressive forms of media
leading up to and since the
2016 presidential election.
These articles maintain the narrative
that Trump was elected by white, racist,
resentful working-class people
and perpetuate the idea
that economic injustice
is something for which only
poor whites, but not poor blacks
may have reason for their disillusionment.
Yet the American National Election study
found that two-thirds of
Trump voters were not poor
and that white non-Hispanic
voters without college degrees
making below the median household income
made up only 25% of Trump voters.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes
that white political pundits
are being modest by giving
the white working-class
all of the credit as Trump's performance
among all whites was dominant.
Perry Gilmore in the latest volume
of Anthropology and Education
points to how this modest
clouded the media's
in-depth data predictions
that Trump would lose,
that white supremacy
infects American society
and is taken for granted
is not a new phenomenon.
As sure as he notes there is precedent
and this time the veneer
of neoliberal inclusion
has been partially
removed from the ideology
of American exceptionalism.
Bonilla-Silva notes in
Racism without Racist
that unlike most social scientists
who posit that educated, mostly white,
middle-class white folks
are racially tolerant
and hence more likely to support
the struggle for racial equality,
his research suggest
that working-class women
are significantly more likely
than any other segment
of the white population
to be racially progressive.
In this spirit and with
these data and insights,
I ask us all to keep faith
in our white, rural,
working-class students
and actively engage them in topics
around inequality and injustice.
Adrienne Maree Brown
urges community organizers
to work within fractals
which is to see our small daily actions
as part of the movement
toward making change.
Freire pointed to praxis in
which as teachers and educators,
we continuously take action and reflect
in order to eradicate oppression
for our individual
students in their world.
For Freire, the ability to
communicate various realities
and to listen to and
learn from our students
makes us better educators.
Those various voices of oppression
must include students from urban, rural,
indigenous, non-white, and
white working-class backgrounds.
Cathy Davidson has been
examining the ways in which
those of us in higher education
can make college more relevant
to the challenges students face today.
What bigger and sadder perennial challenge
is there in the US
besides racial inequality
and those institutionally
grounded racist practices
like housing segregation that
support and perpetuate it?
Housing segregation maintains the divide
between black and white
or white and citizens,
documented or not,
and contributes to a
negative racial climate
in every corner of American society
and I see this play out in the classroom.
White students from all
socioeconomic backgrounds
are stunned into silence when we discuss
the condition of predominantly
black public schools,
students of color feelings of loneliness
on a predominantly white college campus,
and the perception that Penn State
is actually not very diverse
compared to the schools and neighborhoods
from which our students of
color tend to matriculate,
but it's also been hopeful
to witness white students
developing critical thinking skills
and moving through their
own identity development
as white allies and
accomplices for racial justice
while honoring the need for
positive identity development
for students who are not white.
For the rest of this paper,
I provide an autoethnographic account
on growing up white working
class in rural America
and being drawn to higher education,
reflect on teaching introduction
cultural anthropology
at a community college
and share my experiences as an
academic advisor and teacher
after the 2016 election on
topics that are a response
to not only his policies,
but also to the rhetoric
of a divided America.
Put together, I offer suggestions
for making anthropological pedagogy
more ubiquitous on our college campuses
as a means towards social justice,
inclusivity, and human dignity.
So, I still don't know what
I want to be when I grow up.
Is that not showing?
Not showing, okay.
That's okay.
Let's see if it's, a little bit.
Here we go.
So, I didn't know what I wanted
to be when I grow up then,
maybe I did, I wanted to
be a princess or something,
but I still don't know what
I wanna be when I grow up
and I wonder is the habitus
in which I grew to blame?
The reality is that I have students
from all socioeconomic
backgrounds who are also lost.
In advising and student development,
we talk about self-authorship
which is the ability to craft
your own goals and life plans.
In particular, it's been used to defend
against helicopter parenting
which seems to confine
white middle class students.
One could see how a theory
like self-authorship
when approached this way
could have limitations
as it fails to take into account
structural and contextual factors
related to the reasons
low-income families,
regardless of race, send
their children to college
which is to get a well-paying
job when they graduate.
Still, majors in the liberal
arts do not fare well
among any socioeconomic or
socially constructed population.
Although, the industry of higher
education via Jeff Selingo
has been trying to make the
case similar to Davidson's
urging that we remake
higher education for our age
and that the liberal arts
makes one world-ready
as opposed to workforce-ready,
but Davidson and Selingo were sadly
not available for comment
when my parents were sending
me off to college in the 1990s.
They understandably pressured me to study
and stick with business
which didn't work out so well for me.
So, I went on to graduate school
to study what else, but higher education
because I enjoyed helping
my undergraduate peers
to navigate the system.
Studying higher education
and eventually anthropology
made me curious about the reasons why
some rural teens go to
college and others do not.
Wasn't it beaten into all of our heads
that jobs were scarce in
Appalachia like it was mine
and that college was not a choice,
but a necessity and a way out
of working-class drudgery.
Even my great-grandfathers
dissuaded their sons
from coal mining as far back as the 1950s.
The point of the American dream
in my corner of working-class life
was always to do more and do better
which, at least according to the media,
is not how all Appalachians
currently feel.
Despite the frustrations
between my parents and I
regarding the money spent
on my business education,
ironically, they have come to understand
how my education as a
student of anthropology
has been formative to who I am today
and the value that I
have provided back home
among family members, our church family,
and next semester with community
organizers in Johnstown
who are peacefully confronting racism
as well as within higher education.
So, for several semesters,
I taught an introduction to
cultural anthropology course
at a community college in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
In this role, I try to be creative
when covering what I anticipated
as controversial topics
having an understanding
as someone who grew up
in communities similar to my students.
To quality, the Johnstown
community is predominantly white.
While part of my teaching was online,
I can say with some confidence
that few if any of my students
were African-American.
The students taking classes
were in many cases, though,
the first in their
families to attend college.
They also tended to be more socially
and also religiously conservative
which shouldn't have
created a lack of empathy,
but it was often a hindrance
when some kind of behavior,
tradition, or value
that anthropologists consider to be
social, cultural, or biological
was regarded as sinful in that context.
For example, when covering
sex, gender, and sexuality,
a section I anticipated would
be ripe for controversy,
I somewhat hastily, but
in retrospect wisely
told students to wear the
hat of an anthropologists
when writing their papers and
participating in discussions
online or in person.
I explained they would be graded
on their ability to think
like an anthropologist,
but they wouldn't have
to believe all of it,
even though it was science,
but they would need to try on
the anthropological
theories and approaches.
My discussion questions
were like the following,
what do we know about
how gender is presented
and sexuality is practiced
cross-culturally?
Is how we handle this in
the US similar or different?
If people are born intersexed
and therefore biological
sex is not binary,
how can we say that gender
and sexuality are binary?
I supported some of this processing
with current events articles.
My favorite cover to very different
parental and therapeutic approaches
for children who identified as the gender
opposite to what they
were assigned at birth.
I was able to gently challenge students
when their religious beliefs did not align
with biological or
social science research.
I credit my mentors and friends,
Drs. Brett Williams, Celia
Prince, and Rachel Watkins
who while I was a student
at American University
and was helping them to teach
or getting ready to start
teaching my own courses,
they taught me that the point
of the introductory courses
was to engage students in this subject.
It was crucial to make them a little fun,
somewhat challenging, and
incredibly informative
and this was anthropological
pedagogy at its finest.
This is an excellent
way to study the world
and a great way to engage
students around issues
to which they may not have
previously been aware,
particularly around their
own social locations
and identities as they are
developing into adulthood.
For Freire, a truly humanist
endeavor may forget,
I'm sorry.
A truly humanist educator may forget
that the fundamental objective
is to fight alongside the people
for the recovery of the
people's stolen humanity,
not to win the people over to their side.
This, I believe, is how I was
able to create the perception
that my lectures were not political,
but scientific and undeniably humanistic.
In a similar vein, I
have been thinking more
in my role as academic
advisor at Penn State
for the last several years
how I can help my students
to not operate as
expectant needy customers,
but rather in ways that help them
to not only find themselves
vocationally and personally,
but also to think about the bigger picture
and how their decisions can
impact the world around them.
That's my son booing the Trump Hotel
at the Women's March earlier this year.
My full time work is
to academically advise
undergraduate students at Penn State.
A few years ago, I started to look at
how academic advising can and
should lead to social justice
for my students and the world.
Academic advising is a combination
of teaching, guiding, and advocating
and relates not only to academic matters,
but also matters that may
impede or enhance education
and ultimately lead to degree completion.
This means that a student who
cannot afford their education
without working a part time job
may get less out of the
experience and opportunities
than a student who doesn't have to work.
In terms of teaching, I
also have the opportunity
to suggest to students who
think that a liberal arts degree
is not worth the money and in fact it is
and as citizens of the world,
they have a responsibility
to think more broadly
not just about what they
will do for a living,
but how their career
choice can impact the world
or make a difference in the world.
I talk to students about purpose
which means finding that sweet spot
between vocation, passion,
talent, and values.
What can they offer that the world needs
that also helps them to
wake up in the morning?
Campus climate in terms
of how well students
feel included on a college campus
has also received much needed attention.
We can thank student voices for that,
but then we must also be in
tune and listen to those voice.
For me, I was lead to meet with students
from underrepresented backgrounds,
become involved in work
where I have the opportunity
as part of a team to give recommendations
to our university president
around racial and ethnic
diversity and inclusion
and to teach them one credit courses
on prejudice and everyday diplomacy.
Sadly, there have also been times
where I've had to show care for students
by reporting concerning
behaviors and activities
by pro-Trump, white supremacist
students and groups.
Some students can't be reached
through anthropological pedagogy
and in my mind are best
left to the authorities
who often are already aware
of these groups and activities
I'm coming to learn.
Yet I also get nervous about
turning potential allies away,
so I'm left with thinking more and more
about how to best help our students
and one another connect through similar
and disparate struggles,
and then help them to
contextualize these struggles.
Finally, to where from where?
I will continue what I've been doing
and demand intentionality
in how we teach our students
within anthropology and through
anthropological methods.
In Freirian pedagogy,
we're in a constant state
of reflecting and doing
and our students can be
trained to do the same.
Perhaps it's possible to
help our white students
develop healthier forms of white identity
related to privilege and
dismantling oppression.
We can challenge our colleagues
who police the tone of student voice
without providing guidance or support
and participate in curricular
and co-curricular development
that helps both our
students and colleagues
to connect and contextualize struggle.
I promise to not give up on myself, you,
or our white working class students.
(people clapping)
- Our next presenter is Shery Briller.
Her presentation is entitled
Teaching Public Engagement:
Preparing Students Who Can Confidently
Explain Why Anthropology Matters!
- Thank you, Audrey, hello, everybody.
Thanks for staying 'til the bitter end.
Some of you know me from other contexts
and you know I'm an
end of life researcher,
so this is actually a very
familiar speaking slot for me.
(audience laughing)
Well, I'm really pleased
to be talking today
about a topic I care a great deal about,
so I made it my title
that Audrey just read
Teaching Public Engagement
and then I kind of
upped the ante this time
and said, "Preparing
students who can confidently
"explain why anthropology matters,"
this is a new way of doing this.
So, just to be real, I
think about this topic
literally every day in my job
role which involves helping
to think about and guide the expansion
of applied and practicing
anthropology at Purdue.
Also in my work with COPAA,
the Consortium of Practicing
and Applied Anthropology programs,
I've had a chance to talk
with a lot of different people
who are interested in this topic
and are trying different
approaches out for teaching it
and I think it's a really
crucial subject matter.
Today, I wanna tell
you a little bit about,
oh, hey, what's going on here?
Oh, there we go.
So, as it said in my
abstract in the program,
today I wanna tell you a little bit about
the design of a new graduate class
that we have in public engagement.
I've taught it two times at Purdue now
and then I wanna go beyond that
and give a little bit more
extended teaching example
of how I actually teach
the course material
and I think this is important to do
because I've been to and
given a lot of presentations
where we say we should be doing this.
So, today I wanna talk a
little bit more about the how
and tell you a little bit more about
an assignment that I give.
So, how can we teach these kills?
I really started thinking a lot
about teaching public engagement
when I wrote this a
number of years ago now
with my colleague Amy Goldmacher
and it's a set of professional
development exercises
for anthropology students
and in the book, we have
two main kinds of examples.
The first kinds of exercises
that we have for students
are about understanding
yourself as an anthropologist
and these exercises involve
thinking on the front end
about what kinds of publicly engaged work
you actually might be setting out to do.
The second kinds of exercises
that we have in the book
are about representing
yourself as an anthropologist,
so that involves a lot
of creating documents
that might help you to get jobs,
things like resumes, CVs,
nowadays portfolios and so forth,
the kinds of things that show employers
what anthropological knowledge
and skills you possess
and why they might be
interested in those things
or I guess in terms of our
session why anthropology matters.
So, that's when I really
started thinking about
teaching this publicly engaged,
about teaching this kind of class
and it led to what became
this course description
which is the course that I'm teaching now,
how public anthropology is a course about
both using and communicating
anthropological knowledge.
It's basically a graduate seminar course.
We talk about what it means
to work as an anthropologist,
what it means to be a public intellectual,
I guess that dovetails
with the presentations
we've just been hearing,
and perhaps most importantly
if you wanna do this work,
about how you might go about
effectively working with stakeholders,
presenting anthropological information,
and using that in an action-oriented way
to make some kinds of social
or other types of change,
so that's what we set
out to do in the class.
This is just the learning
goals, oh, sorry.
These are what the
learning goals actually are
and we look at various
people who've been successful
in this realm over time.
So, we look at some classic figures,
people like Margaret Mead and Boaz
who did this back in the day
and then we look at a
lot of modern figures
even including some who are
speaking here at this conference
to understand how various people
are going out and achieving
this in their own work,
looking back over time all
the way to the present today.
The important piece of the puzzle
for the students themselves
is the stuff you see down at the bottom
to gain more critical thinking skills
and to then to be able to go out
and use these types of skills
in your own areas of interest.
And for the sake of time today,
I won't go over this more,
but basically the learning outcomes
then turn around and say,
"How are you gonna do this
"for yourself in the type
of publicly engaged work
"that you're setting out to do?"
So, now I wanna change over and talk about
a specific assignment that I give
called the generations assignment
because well, I told you I'm
an end of life researcher,
but before that I was a gerontologist,
so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about
how I use a piece of
my own work and writing
from being an applied cultural
and medical anthropologist
and from my own background as
a community aging practitioner
to sort of demonstrate to students
how they can do this type of things.
So, in order to do that,
this is the cover of a journal
issue that my colleague
Andrea Sankar at Wayne
State and I guest edited
and the journal is called generations.
You may not know it if you're
not an aging practitioner,
so I will tell you about it.
Basically, this is the official journal
of the American Society on Aging.
It's a key resource for
aging professionals.
I say that because it's received
by 5,000 aging practitioners every month
and they read about different types
of current issues in the field of aging
and that's a gamut of things,
that's policy issues,
things about aging research,
clinical issues, all
types of different topics.
So, about five years ago,
Andrea and I were approached to guest edit
a special theme issue.
I believe truthfully
that they had never had
an anthropologist do this
and they asked us to focus
on a particular topic
which we did which is aging and ritual
and the significance
of ritual in later life
and to tell aging practitioners,
this is where it comes to
teaching public engagement,
why that was relevant for them
and why they might care
about ritual in later life.
So, that's what our
special issue was about.
We have a longer introduction
where we explain all this,
but basically our main goal was to explore
the benefits and meaning of ritual,
talk about how it can validate, support,
and enrich older people's lives,
and what aging practitioners can do
to engage in this most classic type
of anthropological concept.
The reason I bring this up as an example
is you're gonna see in a couple of minutes
steps I have the students go through
to do this on their topic of interest
'cause lo and behold, they're
not all that interested
in aging and ritual, who knew?
The framing of our special
issue, it's a tribute issue.
Some of you might know the
anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff,
she did a lot of groundbreaking
work on ritual and old age.
This is the cover of her
widely acclaimed ethnography,
Number Our Days,
it happens to focus on older adults
living in Venice, California
who all attend the same senior center
and even though Myerhoff
didn't label herself
as an applied anthropologist,
I have chosen to apply
that label to her over time
and what she was interested in,
the publicly engaged part of her work
was she was interested in
how this particular community
of elders who were considered poor,
socially marginalized, somewhat isolated,
and increasingly frail,
how they used ritual to strengthen
both continuity and
community in later life.
So, the part where it's
important for public engagement
and we have a whole session of class
where we talk about this is what happened
after she produced this ethnography
'cause it looks just like this,
it's a classic ethnographic book.
You open it, you read it like a book,
and then it became a lot of other things
which is part of the
inspiration of why I use it
to teach about doing
publicly engaged work.
So, this ethnography was eventually
adapted as an art exhibit,
it became a stage play,
and then it became an Oscar award winning
best short documentary,
so a lot of things came off,
if you went to the book fair,
you'd pick up a book like this,
a lot of things came
off of this ethnography.
So, I use this as a model to talk about
how an anthropologist could
use their ethnographic work
to have a lot of community impact
and I also talk about it personally
and how very inspirational this book was
and a touchstone for me in my career
early on in the anthropology of aging
and becoming a gerontologist
and how it influenced
my own way of working.
So, I hope at this point that the students
are inspired to try something.
So, I then explain to them to
process that we're gonna do.
I talk about why in our case
we wanted to communicate
with a large audience
of aging practitioners
and we wanted to show them how ritual
is infused in the everyday
life of older adults,
that was thing number one.
We wanted to show why
it would be beneficial
for those who work with elders,
community aging
practitioners, to understand,
this is the very classic
anthropological explanation,
what rituals role is in
structuring social life
and we wanted to introduce
the very anthropological idea
that rituals connect people
through the shared sentiments
and meanings they create.
Just to sum, we wanted to use
these key ideas about ritual
to speak in new and important ways
to practitioners working in aging
about what the anthropological
concept of ritual
really has to offer for them
and why they should work with it.
So, with these learning goals in mind,
basically, then I invite the
students to try it themselves.
So, this is how the assignment works.
It could be modified in other ways,
I just happened to use this
as my teaching example.
So, first they read the special issue.
It'd be nice if they read the whole thing,
but they at least read the introduction
to get where we're coming from
and that's where we give the framing
of why is this anthropological concept
salient for practitioners
and then they take a look at what we do.
Using our work as a model,
they try and do the same thing themselves.
This is last year.
Just to show you it's really
not all about aging and ritual.
I might be really interested in that.
Here's some concepts people
picked to work with last year,
so there are things you are familiar with
and things you can find
books on downstairs,
caregiving, kin,
some of them you see are
about social relations,
the ones below are a little different,
waste, disgust, social justice,
and they do the same type of activity.
So, here are the steps
that they go through.
They select the anthropological
concept they wanna use
and then they do some research on it.
I usually encourage
them to do the research
a couple of different ways.
They're picking things that
their own master's projects
or dissertations are on,
but I encourage them to also go back
and look at an introductory
anthropology textbook
and kind of return to the
roots of understanding
when they first might've
meet up with this concept
and see how it gets explained out there.
Then from there, they can
look at any other literature
and any other stuff they want to.
So, once they feel that
they have their concept
sort of under control
and that they have a good
anthropological understanding of it,
then the next step of the
assignment is to identify
what specific audiences
they wanna communicate with.
So, in my case, I was telling you,
I want to communicate with
these 5,000 aging practitioners.
So, they pick some audience,
usually one or two major audiences
they wanna communicate with
and then they say what they wanna do.
So, they might not all wanna
produce a written journal issue,
they might wanna do something else.
They might wanna make a skit.
They might wanna make a toolkit.
They might wanna make
something else for practice.
Then they actually make
the definition themselves
and I usually warn them that they have to
leave a little time in their
planning during the week
'cause this usually
takes them a longer time
than they think it's going to.
So, they try this a few times
until they have it under control
and they're supposed to bring back
a definition that is
user-friendly for the audience.
The first round of this we usually have
varying degrees of success.
And then they give some examples
of how they would explain out
the concept to the audience.
I also have them do at this point
also sort of a self-reflective
step where they talk about,
well, why do you actually
think it's an important concept
and why do you think
this particular audience
would need to know about it
and why would they need to
know about it for practice
or for some form of social
action or social change?
And then I also ask
them to drill down more
and not just, I mean, whatever,
I'm really interested age and ritual,
but to try and back up and understand
what's actually interesting
about this concept more broadly
'cause it might be a concept
you think about every day,
but maybe everybody else is not quite
as interested in it as you are.
How can you get them to
understand why it's important?
And then like I say what's
its implications for policy
and what work should actually
be done in this area?
Then they're usually ready
to write and go from there.
Just for the sake of time today,
I just wanna tell you about the
last part of the assignment.
The last part of the assignment
is a self-reflection about doing it.
They write about the process.
I'll show you a couple of
student comments in a minute,
but basically, in
addition to talking about
how it got done and how they
feel their result turned out,
we talk about the actual process
of whether it was easy
or hard or challenging
or why it might be difficult to fit
work they're already doing academically
onto some type of social justice
or other types of social
change work they might wanna do
and what they can learn
from the whole assignment.
So, just 'cause we're a
little short today on time,
I'll just cut to the chase
because I think obviously
in this type of pedagogy presentation,
students should speak last and loudest.
So, these are some things students said
about this assignment.
They said and this was
said over and over again
that it was much more difficult
that they thought it was gonna be.
They said it was helpful
because they were able to plan better
how they were going to
organize their ideas
and have the right language
to talk about some of the
audiences they're interested in.
One of the things they
consistently talk about
is this middle quote, "One
of the most difficult parts
"of the assignment was
learning how to write
"for a different audience,"
and they talk about and this
is probably a commentary on us,
they talk a lot about being in schools,
some of them talked a lot
about being in graduate school
and how they've had to unlearn
some writing habits that they had,
and they were very good at
peer-reviewing each other
and they're like, "That
is very jargonistic,
"you should not talk like that,"
and they talk to each
other like that constantly,
but it was harder to deal
with their own work that way,
but this was a good
piece of the assignment.
And they said they liked everyone
getting to comment on what was included
and the other thing they found hard
was they found it hard to cut back
because a lot of them were writing
either theses or dissertations
and they had a tendency
to wanna go on and on
about this concept that they love so much.
So, learning how to write about it
and communicate about it
and talk about it concisely
was actually one of the
most challenging parts.
So, since we're out of time,
I'll just give you this final thought
about this assignment.
This is what a student said,
"This class drew from
multiple perspectives
"in grooming," what she
called, a public intellectual
"with the skills and competencies required
"to succeed beyond the academic corridors.
"I learned a great deal."
I'm happy to share the activity with you
and it's something I'm
playing around with.
I'm gonna do a next book of
similar activities to this,
but it's been a lot of fun
to work with it so far,
so thanks for listening.
(audience applauding)
- Well, thank you,
and this is actually a
recorded session for AAA,
so we definitely welcome questions,
so we ask if you could walk
up to the mic to place those,
thank you.
- [Woman] Thank you, and this question is
for any of the panel members.
I'm interested in the challenges
or how any of you might address
when you have students who are interested
in doing service-learning
or public engagement,
how do you address the
community's concerns
about their needs and
not the students' needs
and also how do you figure out
how to not burn those
bridges in the community?
So, as faculty, you will
work at the university
students go through and they pass through,
my concern is one with individuals
who live in the community
and maybe not from organizations,
but also individuals
as you may be working,
students may be working with,
how they're not overburdened
by the university
and then also that trust
and rapport that's needed
to create those alliances.
- That's a great question.
So, a couple of things is trying to start
really early in the planning process
and meeting with the
community partner to say,
"Okay, here's some of the objectives
"and things that we are
looking at in our class,
"how does that overlap with some things
"that you're concerned about,"
and you can come in with some ideas
and that's what I had initially done
to see if the community
partner was interested
and they happened to be, and
then from there we built.
I also put in my syllabus
something for students
where I told them they are
representatives of the university
and they should be respectful
and kind of treat this
as like a job experience.
So, they're treating this
as kind of a professional interaction
with the community and the clients
and then also the
community partner comes in
and they do an orientation
like they would with
any type of volunteers.
So, there's kinda that
interfacing at the beginning,
I think is really important,
and then dropping in like for example,
I would even recommend doing
your own personal observation
at the site before you set up
the service-learning project
and that way you can help identify
some maybe unarticulated needs as well.
- I think it's a good question.
I agree with everything that Audrey said.
I might be a little advantaged
'cause a lot of the time I'm
working with older adults
and drawing on another
classic anthropological idea
of knowledge transmission
between generations,
sometimes they feel that
they should help out.
Also, I think to just kind
of make the stakes lower.
We say this is a good partnership
and these students can be helpful
and they can go out and find
some kinds of information
you might be interested.
We work a lot with our local city
and they're really interested in people's
perceptions of the city
and our students have the time to do that,
so it is win-win that
sense, it needs management,
but we also remind, especially older folks
working with younger folks,
that these people are starting
out and they're learners
and trying to understand that,
so in a way it's a real advantage
because a lot of times
the students approach
these topics with a lot of interest
and a lot of a enthusiasm
and a fresh perspective,
and a lot of times on the other side,
there are things people in community
especially older people might wanna say.
It's a really great chance in our society
which happen more to promote
that kind of
intergenerational interaction.
So, I try to start out that
it is a really positive thing
and something that should
maybe be potentially going on,
maybe this is a wider social
goal that we should have,
so that's been helpful, I think.
- I'll just reiterate the importance of
maybe doing it yourself first
and it not only builds connections,
but you do kinda see
these unseen challenges
that you might not have seen otherwise,
that's been really key in the
things we've done for sure.
- [Audrey] We welcome other
questions, don't be shy.
- Hi, my name is Michael,
thanks again to everybody
who shared with us today.
One of my questions is on the advice
that anthropologist are in a position
to be offering solutions and perspectives
to implement the change,
my question is how to do
this when we find ourselves
in an arena and environment,
a community or a society
that isn't really conscious of
the teachings of anthropology
or maybe to the extent it doesn't have
respect for anthropology?
- You want, okay.
- So, that's a really
great question to ask.
These are just some thoughts,
so please do not take
this at the gospel truth.
I do have some similar challenges
with that every day in my work,
teaching at the Culinary
Institute of America,
because I'm dealing with
students who by and large
will probably never be in
anthropology ever again
in a formal academic sense.
They're never going to
get an anthro degree
'cause it's not a thing that's
offered at my institution,
so it's not gonna appear formally
and I think one of the greatest
things I can do for them
is to get them to take
away the bigger message
of anthropological thinking,
but also broader liberal arts thinking.
It's that idea of not having the answer
and being able to go with
change and being able to adapt
and so instead of feeling like you have
to be able to have a solution
at the end of an hour and 20
minutes of lecture on whatever
or feeling like you ended a
15 week course of a semester
able to have something
very tangible and concrete
because liberal arts classes,
particularly 101 classes
do not leave someone with something
very concrete and tangible
in the way that my
students normally expect.
My students expect to finish a course
and know how to make certain
things or do certain things.
By the end, you can make a souffle
or you know how to butcher a cow
or you know how to make
a cake or certain things.
It's leaving them with a sense
that you can at least address change
and be able to be resilient
and be hopeful hopefully
and to be comfortable
with not having an answer
and be able to see yourself in that.
And for me as an educator as well,
being able to feel confident and say,
"I'm just teaching 'em to be comfortable
"with being uncomfortable,"
and I think that's something
of a solace as well.
- I guess I would add,
I think something students
are really looking for,
maybe especially if they either
think that they're training
to be an applied practicing anthropologist
or they're just taking a class like that,
is that they're looking sometimes for you
to model ways of working.
So, I'm pretty upfront with my students
and I tell them I was a
community aging practitioner
before I was a researcher
and before I was an academic
and so I kinda explain to them,
so for example, if we're gonna go in
and try and understand
something that's going on
in a healthcare setting like
the dynamic in the waiting room
or certain kinds of interactions
that occur in the clinic,
I sort of model and show for them
and also what I tell the healthcare staff,
it's like we have a different role,
I'm not there to treat any patient,
you know A 'cause I'm not legally able to
nor would you want me to,
that's not what I'm there to do,
I'm there to watch what goes on,
talk to you about this context,
know how to understand
that and analyze that
as a social scientist,
so I kinda help them frame up
telling people what they're there for
and I think that's a really useful skill
that people really should learn in school
to be able to be useful
if they're gonna work in any
kinda change-oriented way
as a social scientist,
so I think we probably have
too little emphasis on that
in our education right now.
In addition to being able
to be good at those things,
describe what you're seeing,
learn how to analyze data,
I think that learning how to really
set up those interactions
and maybe make sure they kind of go well
or, I don't know, there's no way to say
they really go properly,
but kind of that they do go well
and that they are
co-created and negotiated,
I think those are really important skills
that are probably under-emphasized
in anthropological education
and training today,
we should do more there.
- I have a couple of thoughts.
The courses that I've been helping with,
they're at the college level,
so they're not within a discipline,
they're not housed within a department,
and so they're interdisciplinary.
Maybe this is unethical,
but you kinda sneak in
anthropological ways of doing things.
For example, in our class this semester,
we're having students take notes
in like a real notebook
and write a letter as well
which is something, students
are used to write texts,
they're not really used
to sitting and thinking,
so some of those things are helping them
sort of learn how to reflect,
and I don't think that's necessarily
specifically anthropological.
The other thing I was gonna say, too,
is I found it really powerful
when I was teaching at a community college
how many students were
just like blown away,
just fascinated that
they had an opportunity
to take this intro course.
They didn't know what
anthropology was before.
I remember having a student say,
"You gave me language
"or you gave me a way to kind of argue
"with my loved ones about
why my cousin who came out,
"why this is okay,"
that was just one example.
I think it happens maybe
in smaller more subtle ways
in my experience
and maybe that's not enough,
but those are just my thoughts.
- [Woman] Hi, I just wanna say thank you
for a really great panel.
I'm a grad student at Florida
International University
and I also teach an entry level
writing in rhetoric class.
I'm very interested in kind of this
anthropological pedagogical approach
to different learning styles.
Our student is primarily,
well, it's over 60% Hispanic,
and overwhelmingly first
generation in higher education
and also the vast majority
of the students work.
The work and home life demands
of most of our student body
changes throughout the semester.
I had several ghosting students,
for example, during black Friday
because they're working
one, two, or three jobs
and just disappear from class.
So, I'm wondering what
strategies you guys might have
to support those students
who may disappear
for short periods of time
throughout the semester
and then specifically what kind of
like online solutions you might have
to help me keep them engaged,
even if they can't
physically make it to campus
and to help them kind of like
come up with strategies of their own
to help them learn how
to deal with these times
where they may not be able to
be in person in class, thanks.
- For me, this is a really important shift
that's happened in our college
as well, at Kansas State.
Just a huge portion of our students
are now working a lot and
can't make it to class.
It's become a matter of course
now that every class I teach
has sort of an equal component online
and always offers ways
to engage with the class
if they can't be there.
It's a tricky balance and I don't know,
it be worth like a whole session.
There should be several
books out about it by now
'cause it's a really important problem
and I think you're right
to bring up the issue,
we do have to figure out strategies
for helping those students.
It's gonna be all over higher ed,
like this is the future of higher ed,
and we need to think about that.
- It's really awkward,
kind of like we're being recorded now,
but the class I'm teaching this semester,
we have like a TV and like a
film crew in there every week
and I don't know if you have that,
and so I've had students who've
had different health crises
or family emergencies,
and it was a short one credit course.
It was like what we
call dynamically dated,
it didn't start and end with
the rest of the semester.
So, there was a short amount of time
and you could lose credit
or lose points really easily
if you've missed one or two classes
for participation and whatnot.
So, that was really useful
because I could say,
"Just go onto the online
course management system,
"watch the course, send
me like a paragraph
"as part of your participation grade,"
give them the option.
I don't know if this is helpful,
but in my academic advising role,
students who are thinking about
not going to undergraduate school,
but going out and working,
I'll encourage them to
use that work experience
as a resume builder
and to think about what they're learning.
Again, this may not be super helpful
kinda to what you're asking,
but I don't know if there
could be some creative ways
to kind of incorporate
their work experience into
how you wanna grade them
or what they wanna write or reflect on.
- A couple of things, I
agree with what's been said.
I think this is the future.
It behooves the teachers to be organized
and have the thing laid
out with what's gonna be
a process or a project,
like have that ready to go,
and like you said, test
it, test it yourself,
and I also believe in the flip classroom
and a lot can be done,
but I think also teaching that kind of
very intense time project
management sort of skills,
those are important,
and sort of also scoping things out.
This wasn't really a big part of, again,
maybe of anthropology education before,
but like if you know you're gonna have
a finite amount of time,
what's realistic to think you can get done
and what's realistic to promise?
Someone is counting on you to deliver
what you said you were gonna deliver
and I think you might as well learn that
while you're in school.
I think where this is
an issue is it requires,
I don't know if you'd call it
a different way of working on our end,
but I think we have to be
attentive to those things.
Again, I think that's
a part of the modeling
of this way of learning
and making sure that
knowing the demographics
of the field that most
people are gonna come out
and be a practicing anthropologist,
they really need to be on top of that
because that's gonna be expected of them
in jobs and to be
successful and to get paid
and really to do the kinds of work
they may be wanting to do.
So, I think a real goal is to help people
learn to become successful in those ways,
that would be maybe as important
as any other goal in
the class, I don't know.
- I'll just wrap up, I agree
with all my colleagues here
and I just wanna say as
you design assignments
if you break them into smaller chunks
that will help a student manage
and even friendly reminders,
"Make sure you have
this done by this time,"
that can give them a little bit of headway
and meeting one-on-on and planning.
I even tell people sometimes,
"Think about your bus rides,
"you can read at that time,"
so kind of where can you
work in those little chunks
to kinda schedule your day?
- To make progress.
- Yeah.
I think we are at time.
I encourage any further questions.
We'll just kind of head towards the back,
but thank you all for attending today.
(audience applauding)
