NELL: Feel free to.
NELL: There's a lot really great ones. Nell. I'm the- yeah, I'm the
Accessibility and Meetings Coordinator for AAA, so you can find my name on the AAA website, and obviously, in this webinar
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Great. Thanks, Nell. 
NELL: Yeah.
JEFF: Okay, so let's go ahead, and get started.
I am Jeff Martin, and I am the Communications Director for the American Anthropological
Association, and
I am a white male with
grayish, brown hair,
and, due to the current circumstances, is becoming more gray than brown,
and like, I guess, many of you, I am
sitting in my kitchen, instead of my office.
So, welcome to Responsive Teaching and Learning, Part Two.
It's a, it's a series, a part of a series of webinars that the American Anthropological
Association is sponsoring
to help us through these trying times and to share resources.
We actually had Part One last Wednesday, and
there are a couple things I want to point out. If you missed that, we have a
recording of that posted, and I would urge you to go to our,
we've set up a COVID-19 resource page on our website.
So just type that in the search bar, and it'll take you to a number of resources, including many online,
engaging students,
resources.
The Communities, we also have a
Community set up for this, and if
you go to our website, the AAA website, at the top across on the bar, you'll see Communities, click on that.
If you're a AAA member, you just use your AAA credentials to get in, and if you're not a AAA member,
you'll still have access, because you've registered for this,
and you'll use the same credentials that you used to register to get in there.
So the Communities is to post questions and to keep this conversation going, even after the webinar is done.
One last thing. We have a chat room.
If you scroll to the bottom of your Zoom screen, you'll see some icons, and you'll see an icon for chatting.
I see people are already on there. You can post your questions on there, and we'll address them, and we'll
take it from there.
So, with any further, without any further ado, let's get right to Responsive Teaching and Learning,
Part Two. We have three presenters that have a great deal of
experience teaching online. So let's go right to them. Mike.
MIKE: Yeah, I am Mike Wesch, and I'm just now sharing my screen because I'm gonna kick things off here pretty soon.
So I am a white male sitting in a basement gym slash utility closet, basically,
hiding from my three children, who are homeschooling themselves upstairs, hopefully, and
oh,
let's see, well, and I'm gonna be
mostly talking about how to create engaging
assignments for an intro level, and I won't necessarily be focusing on adapting them to
explore COVID-19, because I think we need a little space for students to also not think about COVID-19 in some circumstances.
So, I'll show you some flexibility in each one, where a student could decide to apply it or not to apply it.
Angela, you're muted right now. ANGELA: Yes. Thank you. I'm sorry. Hello, I'm Angela Jenks.
My pronouns are she/her/hers. I have dark curly hair and glasses.
I'm sitting in a room in my house, like many others. You might hear the tones of Moana out in the
the other room, where hopefully my- my two and five-year-old will- will make it through this session,
with the help of [laughter in background]
the Disney Channel.
I'm going to be talking a little bit more today about how to incorporate
teaching about COVID-19 into your classes. So it overlaps with a lot of the topics that anthropologists talk about.
So we'll be looking at some small assignments that can be used, also larger assignments,
and brainstorm together, really, ways to make connections for students,
between what anthropology offers and the tools that we have, and how they can really
think about and think through 
what they're, what we're all
experiencing right now.
NELL: Hi, everyone. My name is Nell. I use she/her/hers.
I am a white woman with short black hair wearing glasses, in my living room right now,
and as you heard, each of the presenters did provide audio descriptions of ourselves,
so that way, anyone who does not have visual access to our videos, for any reason,
such as being blind, low-vision, or whatever tech
situation is going on, knows who is presenting, who is speaking.
This video is not currently captioned but will be closed captioned once it is on our website.
The way it gets closed captioned is actually through automatic captions and then a lot of editing.
So, what I will be focusing on and just kind of providing additional tidbits throughout the webinar is
prioritizing inclusion, specifically
surrounding issues of accessibility and how with the online switch, and particularly creating assignments,
make sure that the assignments you create are accessible to all of your students and that your students have the ability to
continue succeeding in your class while being supported through this
difficult time.
MIKE: All right, so let's go ahead and get started. We're gonna start with,
well, I think where we started last time is we were thinking about
kind of the different steps you go through in creating assignments.
You don't want to just start by making assignments, but really thinking about what your class is all about.
Like what is your core "why" and
so, a lot of the things we hit on last time,
we're gonna sort of hit on as we go through these assignments, are reminding you of the
some of the bigger level things that we talked about last week.
So, starting with "why", I just wanted to walk you through how I came to
my "why", and maybe it'll help you come to your why, if you don't already have one, and then also talk about
what you might consider like sort of sub "why"s, or,
or little- little "why"s that go under the big "why" that can put it into action.
So, as you can see, like, my big "why" that I mentioned last time is
"creating voracious learners who lean into difference", and you can see, I've put that here, and
now the- when you really think about that, you realize that
you can't just automatically do that, and you can't create like a multiple-choice exam
that can test students on how voracious they are and how well they can lean into difference.
You have to get them practicing that. You have to get them practicing leaning into difference.
And so, as I thought about what that would actually be, I came to this idea that I really want my students
like asking questions, questioning things about the world, questioning each other.
I want them making connections to different people and to different ideas,
and I want them out there trying new things and really taking chances. So,
then I realized I also need to give them some thinking tools,
and that's where the anthropological perspective comes in, and I tried to break that down for an intro audience
into these four ideas.
One being how we can see our own seeing, like to see our own assumptions and biases.
How we can see big?
And this is where you can lump in some
different theoretical perspectives that allow us to see the cultural, social, economic
historic, political forces in the world. Seeing small: how the little details make
a difference, and this could be everything from, say, thick description to
Bourdieu and Foucault, etc., etc.
And then, seeing it all. Understanding the cultural dynamics and the interactions of the big and the small
and how it might all fit together. So
ultimately, then I want to sell this to students, like, this isn't just an academic exercise.
This is something that will enrich your life, and so I - I
organize this around the core goal of the class as being one where we're all going to try to experience more,
experience difference, and by experiencing difference, be able to experience differently.
And ultimately, this will help us build better relationships with others, manage complex problems,
be more engaged and empathic, and ultimately, to actually just enjoy life. So
That's, that was the impetus behind these challenges that I co-created with Ryan Klataske. If you're interested,
he's done an awesome video of
where he came from and like his "why". If you're interested in that, I've linked it here, but the main idea here
is that each of these challenges is meant to allow students to practice these ideas.
It requires a photo or video post, and we think that
increases the social presence and creates a sense of community in the class, and
each one is designed to be inherently challenging and fun. So we actually
measure the value or the, the effectiveness of each challenge
largely on how many times students do them on their own outside of class.
Like, we have students coming back and doing them again,
and when we see that we're like, okay, this is- this is a good challenge,
like students actually enjoy doing this enough, that they'll even do it when it's not for a grade. So
you can see, challenge one.
We consider this like a microethnography. It's, it's pretty low level. It's pretty easy, and
yet very challenging for students to, like, just to simply approach a stranger, and talk to them, and then
see if they can share it, and it brings up all sorts of questions that any ethnographer
has to face about the ethics of representation and how do you represent them
and so on, even though it's just one person, one stranger, it can get quite difficult.
So, so that's the basic idea.
It's- it's inspired by Humans of New York,
and you can kind of see some of the student posts there look a bit like Humans of New York.
We talk about Humans of New York, and we look at
some of his challenges and how he navigates the ethics of what he does,
and then the students go out, and do it, and here you can see an example from Garret.
He went to Walmart and
found this woman here, and- and he did this neat little interview with her, and she says
"I'm pushing carts now to get in shape
for surgery. I'm donating my kidney to my sister." Says, "Wow, you're a hero." She says, "No, I'm no, I'm no hero.
I'm just- just making my world a better place like I'm supposed to do."
And he says he met her while she was trying to save the life of a baby bird whose wings gotten crushed by a
shopping cart, and then he looked at the tattoo on her arm, which says sisters and has two birds flying here.
It's very, like, touching. It's just a great example of a connection a student made to a stranger and, and then
worked with them to make this- this story. So you can see like this is, this is like mini fieldwork. It's like mini ethnography, and
it works really well in discussing fieldwork, ethnography, ethics of representation, but the problem is right
now, you know, obviously, this would be a very difficult thing to do. Certainly, here in Kansas, where we're basically
in a shelter-in-place situation.
So
we've thought up a few adaptations.
One is just reaching out to strangers on social media and inviting them to an interview over FaceTime.
You can see this is what Brandon Stanton is actually doing now. He's
eliciting stories from people, and then he does interviews on FaceTime. Another option is Hyphal Mesh.
Tom Woodward pointed this out to me. So basically, what this is, is
you sign up, and about three times a week,
there's a moderator, and they get four people together, and then they pair you off, and you talk about some big questions.
So Tuesday's questions: What would you like a pat on the back for? They change every day.
But it's a neat way to reach out to a stranger
during this time when so many people are locked away in their houses.
So it's an interesting experiment, and it's one that you could get your students involved in if you're interested,
and
just in general, for this type of assignment, you can see the tip here.
We let students decide just how strange they're willing to go with this. Just talking to someone less familiar
may be a significant meaningful challenge for them. In fact, for some students
just talking to some distant family member might be enough, and that's totally okay. You know,
you just let them decide where that boundary is where and that's their growth edge and- and let that be their growth edge.
Challenge two is
typically sort of the- the Nacirema assignment. Though in a global context, that
makes less sense,
but the Nacirema, of course, is American spelled backwards. I'm sure you're familiar with that, and-
but you're looking for the- trying to find the strange in the familiar. The, the core goal of this is to help students
see the contingency of their own beliefs and ideas and ideals and so on.
And also to think about the ethics of representation. So
this one is a fairly easy one that they could do.
They could even do it just around the house. So you can see our adaptation,
which we- this stuff, we brainstormed with a bunch of aunt 101 teachers
on a Google Doc, and we just decided to keep this one as it is. If they want to explore COVID-19,
they certainly can there's all sorts of different photo essays that could be done just around the house.
Challenge three. I think this one is
probably our most successful
challenge. It's called the 28 day challenge, and it's basically just to
try something new or break a habit by doing something consistently for 28 days.
So you're either trying to create a new habit or to break an old one, and
it pairs really nicely.
We use it in our discussion of human evolution when we talk about habits versus instincts, mismatch diseases,
diseases- diseases of captivity, and supernormal stimuli.
If you want an article about that, the entire book we use is free
so there's a link there to check that out and
this one, I think, would really work well
while people are social distancing.
It could give some sort of rhythm to their life and something to think about and look forward to every day,
maybe work in something they di- haven't, they've been wanting to do,
like maybe they've been wanting to try yoga or something like that.
They can work it in, and-
may, it becomes part of the class. Students really love this one, and it builds a lot of community as people
share their updates with each other.
The fourth one is
connected to linguistic anthropology,
and we were inspired here by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.
If you ever look at that, he basically invents new words.
He sometimes puts words together from different languages to great- create new words,
and so we ask students to do the same thing, and then try to spread it among their family and friends, and
this one has also been fairly successful. The core idea here is that
we're trying to get students to free themselves from the unexamined metaphors and ideologies that
are sort of embedded in
everyday language habits so they can think about how different gender markers are
embedded in everyday language, and they can try to disrupt them and change them.
This pairs really well with very common readings such as Metaphors We Live By or anything related to
Sapir-Whorf or Daniel Everett's
work on the Grammar of Happiness is actually, the whole documentary is free online. He has it hosted himself. So
that's a neat one to assign
during this moment.
So again, we thought we could probably pretty much keep that one as is. The next one. The Unthing Experiment is,
usually we connect that into
discussions of technology;
entanglements of technology; the impact of technology on our lives, our bodies, our economy, social structure and so on.
Some students give up something like the internet or social media,
but some students choose to give up chairs or shoes and, and they reflect on how
chairs and shoes
impact their
posture and and their body and so on.
So a lot of really sort of fun responses come from that.
With, for this one,
there was some discussion on our Google Doc, not only about keeping it as is, because it certainly
could work for that, just like the 28-day challenge.
This is sort of a flip of that one, where you're really giving something up instead of just trying something new, but
we also realized that a
student could really lean into
exploring COVID-19 through this, by thinking about what has already been removed from their life,
or what's already been disrupted, and
what are the wider ranging impact of those changes?
So we- we included some
some, some questions to start with here of how students could
explore how our infrastructure, social structure, might need to adapt
if we have to live with something like coronavirus forever.
Chapter- challenge six gets into mini ethnography. There are a lot of questions about this last time, and
so in this one, we just asked students to engage in one-hour of fieldwork, immerse themselves in some sort of
sort of cross-cultural or subcultural context that they wouldn't normally immerse themselves into,
and then write up a thick description of that experience.
So typically, you know, students like atheists go to church and Christians
go to Buddhist retreats or Muslim prayer gatherings.
It's, or even like, some people, like who don't like country music, go out to country bars and stuff like that.
People have a lot of fun with this one,
but obviously, this one is a bit challenging right now, and
so we wanted to have a bit of a larger discussion about this, because I know a lot of people in the audience
are not only thinking about how to do this for an intro class, but also for
upper level classes.
So, of course, for an intro level class and this type of assignment, one option is just to look at any sort of
online subculture. You know, you could join a massive multiplayer online role-playing game.
You could join in any of the many subcultures on the Internet.
We talked to one of our best TAs, Desiree.
She's been doing online teaching for us for a couple years as a TA, and
she had some ideas for this as well. Like, just
exploring popular platforms for like- like, TikTok. She- she doesn't understand TikTok,
so she thought for hers, she's gonna dive into TikTok and try to understand why it's appealing to her
to her younger students and so on.
They can also do
ethnographic observation by
carefully watching a TV show. Jennifer Cook did this, did this- here's a,
here's the post about it here, and she talks a bit about how she implemented it,
And- Let's see here.
Desiree also added, you know, there's all these shows that have almost like cult followings and fan fiction around them.
So those- those are whole worlds that are worth looking at culturally, that could all be done
online, and then, we wanted to draw your attention to
this crowd-sourced document by
Deborah Lipton here. It's just really amazing.
You can see here, there are dozens of different ways to
do fieldwork from a distance, and of course, this could be useful for a PhD student
who's trying to continue fieldwork during this time,
but these could also be adapted to any class.
So the- this is just such a rich document. Angela,
did you want to jump in and call attention to anything on this right now or?
ANGELA: Sure. I just post the link in the-
in the chat there if somebody wants a direct link to this- doing fieldwork in a pandemic. A lot of it's really helpful.
I think it started out really being for
professional anthropologists or graduate students who are really doing their own field work,
but a lot of the resources that have been added
are really focused on
how to teach this also. So there's a number of points - I just opened it, and it says there's heavy traffic right now.
[laughter in background and inaudible] So it's- it's having some trouble, but considering things
like video chat interviews, of course. You could [inaudible] interviews,
which I wasn't super familiar with; the kind of interview processes through letters,
and there's- there's resources for all of that.
Autoethnographic assignments or using like YouTube or online videos for students
to do some sort of observation,
and so that example by Jennifer Cook, she has students practice observation by
watching an episode of Downton Abbey, and then they- they- she walks them through a kind of analysis of that.
So even if you can't go out right now, using videos to be able to do that,
and so there's a number of, I think, resources there that can
be really easily adapted to assignments for students in classes. MIKE: Yeah.
Yeah, this is a fantastic resource. So if you're teaching a
ethnographic methods or something like that right now, this is an outstanding resource.
I mean that's a outstanding resource for all of us to add to our fieldwork kit,
I think. I mean, there's a lot of things there. I hadn't even thought about in doing my own field work. So just super fantastic.
Yeah, back to the challenges. Just a couple more here.
One of the all-time favorites of students is one we call the Other Encounter.
This is where we match students with somebody very different from them. Usually, somebody in the class, and
then they do what we call big talk, rather than small talk, and we've got some questions
to get students started. So this is the actual page here for the Other Encounters.
You can see some of the questions are things like, you know,
"What would be a perfect day for you?" "Name three things you and your other appear to have in common."
So you just build up rapport. The conversation takes off, and it's supposed to
only take an hour, but people end up spending two or three hours sometimes, and
students just absolutely love this one.
They're typically matched with somebody that they think they could never get along with,
and then, through the process, they start to
find something in common or see some way that they can understand each other. So this is a really
great assignment, and also pairs really well with a couple things that we talk about in intro.
For example, if you talk about,
you know, different moral foundations,
different moralities around the world, like Web Keene's work,
or if you use Borges' ideas about taste and distinction,
this is a great way to
connect those things. So,
because this has to happen online - normally, in class, we would do some sort of like
standing scatterplot, where people move to different sides of the room and see like where their others are.
In this one,
doing it on a discussion board works out fairly well.
So you can just set up a discussion forum, and
People can request specific others so somebody might say, "Hey, I'm a devout Christian.
I'd love to meet an atheist." Or they could say, they could state some sort of political statement
that they have like they might say like, "Hey, I really care about the future of our world.
I don't understand why somebody would not believe in global warming. Does anybody want to
stand on that side?" and you'll get people
connecting on these things, and it's very neat to see,
and
so Desiree also pitched in here. She
suggested that you could also try to pair people with,
with people in retirement communities and long-term care facilities.
So if you have any connections to those in your,
in-
in your community. We have a really strong connection
between our program and a long-term
care facility here,
and that's just a fantastic way to connect people with people who are
different from each other and try to bridge that generation gap, and then one other option
Tom Woodward suggested.
You could actually just go on Reddit, and you can post a view on there, on
the "Change my View" forum, and then just try to- I would just
encourage your students who engage in that discussion,
with open communication, empathy, and trying to build bridges rather than just defend their- their ideas.
And finally, the last big one we have here is called Global Connections. This is where you basically take the
other assignment that we just did in challenge 7, and you try to go global with it,
and so you try to reach out to somebody from a foreign country.
We up the ante on this one, and we challenge students
to find somebody who's actually helped make something that you own.
Most students fail in that, but that's actually really good.
It- It's, you know,
it shows them sort of the fetishism and the commodity, right? How the
relationships of production just disappear, and they're hard to trace. So just try having them try that is useful,
but then if they fail at that, then have them at least connect with an international student or
someone from a foreign country that they find through social media.
Again, this is just really great for thinking about globalization, structural power, those types of things. In terms of adapting it,
it's still entirely possible to do this online.
I'm sure the international student office. If you're at a large university would love to help with this kind of thing.
They love working with us to pair international students.
You could also
think about
when you're- you could either like use the questions from challenge seven to try to connect deeply with a person,
but you could also just talk about COVID-19, and- and you know, talk about how it looks different from-
from a different place in the world, and- and have students just try to get a peek
of how that looks from a different place in the world.
So finally, we also have challenge 9 and 10, if you want look at those. Those are just sort of guided reflection exercises.
Challenge 9 asks them to rewrite their own
story, rewrite the story of the world, or to analyze and reflect on their own values as
they've changed or been strengthened throughout the course, and
then challenge then- 10 asked them to look forward, and
come up with some sort of meaningful action for their future. It's sort of like a manifesto exercise.
I just want to briefly mention,
as far as assessment goes,
again like everybody's really busy, and that includes you, and
one of the nice things about these challenges is that they're actually quite easy to assess,
and that's because we've- we've designed them so that
the learning is in the production of the challenge, not- and it's not necessarily reflected in the product
so that takes the onus off of you to grade the product and really what you're looking
for is you're trying to look through the product to see if if some real learning took place.
Did the student face a
challenge, and did they try to overcome it?Did they learn something from it?
And so, for that reason, you can see here the- the way that we tend to grade these is we do this "Done/Redo"
grading. And again, this can be done by a TA or a peer,
and you're basically just looking for that evidence that it was engaged authentically,
some challenge was encountered, the student learned something, and there are no serious
conceptual misunderstandings, and then it's- it's very quick to grade because you're not
finding the nuance between say a ninety-five percent and a 92 percent, you know,
which one deserves more? It's just- it's either done, or it's not done, and they get a redo.
I also highly encourage you to use some sort of self-assessment for these,
because even though these types of challenges do force a sort of,
I think it forces a sort of self-reflection as they're doing it like, even like the talking to strangers one.
I can't even do the talking to strangers one without constantly reflecting on like, "Why is this so
hard for me?" Like why is it so hard to approach this person? And that
forces a sort of self-reflection, but unless you make that explicit, I don't think you necessarily learn a lot from it.
So I like to do a two-part submission, in which students first post their product,
and you can do that as publicly as they're comfortable with or as you are comfortable with.
That can be everything from totally private to a discussion group of just their peers,
and then have them submit a second private reflection
that's just to you that addresses things, you know, like- like
what they learned and- and what challenges they faced, what they learn from the challenges, and so on.
So these are all, of course, just starting places. You're welcome to
join our Google group and share your own ideas, or you can add some comments at the bottom of this blog here.
Yeah, and that's- that's the- that's the gist of what I have from the ANTH 101 for Intro.
ANGELA: Thanks. I wanted to, before I turn to some of the other resources we've put together,
I wanted to check, Nell, also, if you had
comments. I think you had some- some considerations about- MIKE: Yeah.
ANGELA: accessibility issues that we should think about as we, if we're having students do
this type of digital project.
NELL: Yes, absolutely. So,
with any of these transitions to a digital platform,
there's going to be two things primarily to keep in mind, which is if there's anything visual,
providing image or audio descriptions, and if there's anything verbal, providing videos with captions or
transcripts of those videos.
For a lot of the examples, so for example, I think Mike has on the screen
one of the challenges with a lot of images,
incorporate some image description guidelines for your students, and
American- we have guidelines at the AAA website, americananthro.org/imagedescription,
We'll provide that link in the chat as well, but it provides a breakdown for how to create image descriptions, and
the really cool thing about incorporating image descriptions directly into any kind of visual assignment
is that you're, as the instructor, going to see what students are observing.
So there's this anthropological
perspective that is going to come out that you're going to be able to observe as an instructor to see what is the student
highlighting, what is the student explaining in the image description,
that may not necessarily be incorporated in other ways, and
just having an image, and
it also
helps encourage the students to really think about if we're transitioning so heavily onto an online space,
how do we make sure all these images are available to anyone who is blind, low vision, or
has low tech access right now, which means that images might break.
When it comes to captioning videos,
then it's a matter of making - excuse me - making sure
that you are able to upload it to YouTube and use the automatic captioning system, and then
encourage students to community caption it, and edit the video together,
which is a sense of community building, so I can speak more to that a little bit later.
MIKE: Great. ANGELA: Thanks.
I just shared that link, also, to the image descriptions link that Nell mentioned, and then also, a reminder that
notes and a lot of the links and resources that we're talking about are available in this
bit.ly/AAAtips document. I shared the link to that too.
To build on what Mike was saying - I'm going to start sharing my screen.
There it is.
If you can see some of the other
resources that we've gathered. So here is this- this document that we put together,
and we're working through through part two here.
I know that so those of us who are speaking are primarily sociocultural
anthropologists, but I know that biocultural or biological anthropology and archeology
kind of offer particular challenges for trying to adapt assignments that you've developed
into an online environment.
So we've gathered a couple of resources here where, where people have been sharing
materials for things like online labs for virtual digs. Other resources that you have, though,
please feel free to put them in the chat, or we'll have time to- to talk and for- for questions and responses
more at the end of the session.
But for example, if you're on Facebook, the Bio Anthro News Page has put together a number of resources. So
you can see if I scroll down here, I'm sharing this page right now,
there's a couple of Facebook, Twitter groups, but then
resources- links to resources for osteology classes, the virtual
curation lab, a lot of 3D fossil hominin cranial labs.
So if you don't have students able to kind of come in and actually handle
many of the skull casts that you might use in a typical lab or in a typical class,
you can have, kind of access some 3D digital materials of skeletal remains.
Some other online teaching ideas. Some links to reliable zoo cams, if you're having students do primate behavior
assignments and some other links here through-
for teaching paleoanthropology.
There is also- the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges
has also been working on gathering some of these resources,
and they would love to hear more. There are particularly focused on open educational resources.
So on their page, they've started to post - many of these also focus on bio anthro and
archaeology - a link to online
educational content for archaeology, links to fossil sites,
the Rogers-Recommended Osteology Guide that Christina Kilgrove and her students put together,
I think a year or two ago.
Many of these- these resources are available there.
The last-
one of the last resources linked in the- the document there, is this- just to show this archaeology online
educational content resources- is an enormous spreadsheet. That is also crowd-sourced,
and so a lot of people have been adding some of their resources.
You can find them there. If you are teach now you can add resources that you found
So you'll see a lot of content for classes. So podcast videos as well as lesson plans,
websites, games students can play,
I think there's a number of newsfeeds,
virtual tours, 3D resources. Some of these things that can be used in assignments, and
you know, activity sheets that you could- could use it an adaptation of a lab type assignment.
One of the other good places, if your institution is using Canvas,
is to look at the Canvas Commons. If you haven't looked there recently,
there's a lot of instructors, and this is true no matter what discipline you're teaching in,
a lot of instructors have been very very generous,
particularly those who- who teach online regularly and have shared assignments, have shared labs, materials.
Some of them have shared entire classes that they have taught online.
If you're teaching in Canvas, then
you can access these and essentially just pool materials directly into your own Canvas site.
So you see a number of modules here, the history of evolutionary theory,
entire biological anthropology courses. This is a- a
biological anthro lab course, an online lab course from Stephanie Meredith that's been shared.
So many colleagues have- have shared materials that they've already developed.
Particularly those who have been teaching online for- for quite some time and have really perfected how to
to do many of these activities that some of the rest of us are kind of initially learning about.
The other issue I wanted to talk about though was really- so to two other things that we wanted to highlight,
last time, in the webinar, we talked about the need to build community and support for students.
also. If we get back to what Mike was talking about this question of, you know,
what is the "Why" of the course, and we certainly have learning goals for the course,
but also, especially in this moment, like one of our main goals might be
to provide some stability for students,
that our courses can actually assist by just providing some routines and stability, an
opportunity to focus on something that
directly related to
to the-the crisis that is going on around us and that we're all living through,
and so particular assignments in the class can be used
to really build this kind of community, to support students to help them feel connected to others.
So this is- I'm showing this
document of notes that we shared in the class. Using class surveys, for example, can be something that is anonymous,
but ask students for their opinions, for their own perspective and then allows them to respond to this.
This is an example that comes from a Canvas survey that I used in my medical anthropology class,
and this was a face-to-face class that I just taught this winter quarter,
but I was- I ran the- the survey in Canvas,
and so I asked students at the very beginning of the class for a series of questions together,
their positions on issues that would be- we would be talking about throughout the class,
and then I brought them back up.
I shared the results with them, the anonymous results, so that they could think through then
what the perspective of the class was, what their own positions were, as we were
navigating some of the material. So this is an example here where I just asked them,
"Is it appropriate for physicians or health professionals to talk to their patients about firearms?"
This is the class in medical anthropology, and you see 40% of the class
wasn't sure. They just haven't thought about it. They didn't know how to think through it.
And so then we talked about medicalization, and we talked about ethics, and we talk about clinician activism,
the InYourLane hashtag. We talk about all those issues in class.
They have readings. We had lectures about that, and then coming back to the survey
and having them think again about their physicians, those of
others in the class,
and discuss together where they were at the beginning of the class and then
how they're thinking about this now using some of these tools from anthropology.
Discussion groups are a great opportunity to- to have assignments
where you're also building community and connections between people,
and this can also work really well if you're using visual materials.
It's a good opportunity to do that. So having students post images,
posting videos, if they would like, while also making sure that they're aware of how to- to do image descriptions,
of how to do any captioning or
having transcripts that are available so that these these materials are available.
Nell, did you also want to say a little bit more about how some of these community-based
assignments can also be an opportunity to
support inclusion in the classes. 
NELL: Yeah, absolutely. So,
again, one of the things that many members of the
disability community are facing with the switch to online courses
is that the- the structure that exists within a physical one-on-one or large class space
disappears, evaporates, and so for people with any kind of executive dysfunctioning,
they may struggle a bit, and so using these
discussion groups as a way to encourage students to develop low-key check-ins,
so they might identify partners to work with, so they can have a sense of accountability,
is really important. It also allows for students to check in on each other,
for even basic support, especially in these times,
but having some sense of stability, of this accountability, of
"There's this person who I can talk to about where I am at with what I'm doing,
not that this is necessarily a priority, if there's other things going on,
but that I do have someone to turn to, and I won't just fall off and disappear and not be
recognized as disappearing in this moment
because of not having a person to go to talk to you every day,
not having the weight of going into a classroom and being with peers,
And a really great way to also just use
accessibility as a way to the build community is like Angela said.
If you have a group that decides to
post one image together, then that means one per- one image only needs to be
described instead of five, or one video needs to be described instead of five,
or one transcript; the point continues. But this is- moving online is a really great opportunity
to place great- to center more accessibility and to support these cultural changes,
so that virtual space's are more inclusive.
This move online has been very
awesome for a lot of people with physical disabilities who may not get around a lot, but
going more to a visual and auditory space may end up becoming even more isolating for other people,
because suddenly all of the information that is provided via
visual is not available because nobody is providing an additional image description. And so
this is a great way to relate anthropological
ideas of who is included, who is excluded, and
how is this exclusion and inclusion that we're talking about in our classroom space
applicable to current social media of spaces, and
what can we do? What are the practices we can do to minimize exclusion? So it really emphasizes
we're all in this together. We can support each other.
Who is being excluded?
Who- what actions do we take to include anyone who has been an excluded?
And provide direct- directions for how to do so.
ANGELA: Yeah, I think that's a really important point that
if you've- you've done much of the- this focus on trying to think about who's being
included or excluded in a face-to-face class,
really making sure that you're also thinking about how that might be different in an online class, and there are
different kinds of forms of inclusion or exclusion and different considerations in that space.
NELL: Exactly.
ANGELA: So, so far, we've talked mostly about how to take current assignments that you have and think about
translating them into
a digital or remote environment,
but I think it can also be really important to think about how as
anthropology instructors, we're really engaging with the current moment.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, posted on- on Twitter that we need to to really focus on teaching the virus,
and this idea that, really, no matter what the course topic, plagues,
pandemics, healthcare, can really become the meat of the lessons that we're teaching,
and I think most of us would would argue that
anthropology offers really important tools and resources
for thinking through both the the history and the social conditions that have allowed for
the current pandemic to- to take hold as it is,
for looking at the social fractures that are really revealed by the pandemic, and then for thinking about how we
move forward from here. What is it that comes- comes next from this?
So we also have a number of resources for thinking about how you can use
the classes that you're teaching to really help students engage with the current moment.
One is this Teaching COVID Anthropology
Syllabus Project that's been organized by the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal.
So this is a crowd-sourced
syllabus project, and I've just
brought it up on the screen here, but I can also add a link in the-
the chat a direct link to that document if you're- you're looking visually, you can see the
table of contents on the side here.
There's a section of class activities, lesson plans, labs.
Some of these are small activities that people are doing.
Some of these could be major course projects so it could be a
one-off assignment or a way to structure an entire course.
There's a space, a couple of
shared lecture slides or other materials, but especially other kinds of readings and materials that are are
organized right now in a kind of growing list of- of
various topics.
We will- we have plans to go back and try to reorganize this
later on, but right for right now I'm is just growing as people as resources.
So thinking about how anthropologists have fought through pandemics, how both
anthropologists as well as sociologists, medical historians,
have thought through some of the lessons of previous pandemics, how we can
think about pandemics. There's a number of
ethnographies, for example, of
pandemics. There's particularly resources for an- from anthropologists
who have studied HIV or Ebola or Zika virus that are
really helpful to thinking through the current moment.
Many of the resources are really about how COVID is linking to-
it's connected to other kinds of top that we might talk about.
So whether that's militarization, borders,
immigration and structural vulnerability, racialization and xenophobia,
incarceration, disability, mental health, gender,
work, labor practices, education, as we're all kind of experiencing right now and certainly also at the K-12 level,
ideas about activism, news and media.
All of these things- these might come up in a variety of different classes.
There's no category there right now for religion, but somebody was just posting in the chat about
the way that religious organizations have really moved to these virtual
ritual spaces.
So that's also something a way to kind of link in what's
happening in the current moment with a topic that you're- you're teaching in
a class. Some of the other resources here include things like games.
Some of these are online games that students could play, and then
assess and analyze. For example, Plague, Inc.
The goal of this game is to kill off the human race with a plague,
but this can also be useful for helping students kind of think through how we imagine epidemics.
This might be- this might not be the exact moment to use
something, like we also have to think through thinking what can be
traumatizing to students, to maybe think through too much.
But there are- are games that could be used. Other kinds of videos, film, podcast resources are listed here.
And there's- there's a number of different ways that we can really use the current moment to think about
what we're teaching in anthropology. So on the one hand, it can be helpful to just sit down and try to brainstorm
what are the connections between
what you're seeing related to COVID right now and the things you talk about in your course.
So Daniel Ginsburg,
for example, who works with the the AAA, also teaches introduction to linguistic
anthropology, and was highlighting that what we're seeing now is connected to
political and media discourse, to discursive constructions of authority, to epistemic communities
to the ideas of iterables, like out of an abundance of caution. What does that really mean?
Certainly, there's a lot of language and linguistic issues around-
around the racialization of the disease, and this- this move that you're seeing now
to referring to the "Chinese virus" and the kind of
xenophobia that that's supporting,
and so these linguistics terms are things that you can can help students analyze.
Other assignments could involve asking students to try to analyze the pandemic using tools from the class.
So, for example, Jonah Reuben teaches a medical anthropology class
and that was just recently ending, so he asked students to
embody the perspective of one of the theorists they had read during that class,
and write how that person would analyze what's happening right now, would analyze COVID, what kinds of
possibilities that person might raise for- for addressing the pandemic.
Similarly, so that's in a medical anthropology class,
but Tara Robbins, for example, teaches "Parasites in Human Evolution" class,
so coming at it from more the biocultural anthropology course,
and also asked students to apply what they were learning about
evolutionary theory and biocul- biocultural
anthropology to a research paper that would discuss the origins, the spread, and the response to COVID-19.
So it offers an opportunity to- to use this as an example of
many of the concepts that you've been discussing in the class.
This can also- other assignments can really help students examine their own experiences.
So this might be an opportunity for autoethnographic
assignments in which students are- are really documenting and
thinking through what is life like today?
What is it like in isolation?
What are the experiences that they themselves are having and are seeing around them?
One, both quick but also I think really powerful way to do this
is Linda Berry's six-minute diary.
This is something that I learned about originally from Lindsey Bell. In this,
what was previously Savage Minds and is now Anthrodendum post,
and this is, it's supposed to really only takes students six minutes,
there's actually a timing video that Linda Barry has posted on YouTube,
but they divided a paper into quarters -
there is an image on your screen now, if you're on a- on a
screen with visual access - where they divide a paper into quarters, and they write seven things that they-
what is it- I think it's seven things they saw,
seven things they did, a snippet of talks they heard, and then they do a 30-second drawing of some aspect of their day, and
I- I've used this in regular face-to-face classes,
and had the same
experience that Lindsey Bell talks about here where students at first have a lot of trouble with this,
they can't- they didn't see anything, they don't remember anything from the day,
but then the process of doing it regularly,
they start to really hone observational skills.
So they're both developing some of the ethnographic
observation skills that we might want them to be developing in some of the socio-cultural classes,
especially while they're also really starting to think through their own experiences, and then have a
collection of information that they can use to analyze those experiences.
We can also really ask students to- to contribute to what's happening now, so not just
focusing on what they're experiencing, but also what they can do in the current moment.
So Dada Docot, for example,
asks- is asking students to produce and share some sort of media on any topic
they're interested in related to COVID-19.
So she's having them do- they can choose a short film or an infographic or a public service announcement,
but something they can share. They can do some research, develop those
skills that we're hoping students develop in sorting through material and information,
but also figuring out ways to
communicate that to others and thinking about what the needs are for communication in their own communities.
I am currently- so I on the quarter system, which means that we're starting a whole new,
whole new class session next week, the spring quarter starts,
so while I know a lot of people are kind of switching classes to remote teaching midstream,
I'm actually in the different situation where I'm starting a whole new class session,
being remote and online from the beginning,
and I'm teaching a class on disease, health, and inequality,
which in the past I have organized around a group action
project that students do. So they get into groups, they identify health inequity that they're concerned about,
and then they develop some sort of,
they do some research into it, and they d- they develop a targeted intervention
project, and the idea is that it's supposed to be an intervention that they can actually do. So it's not
we need to overturn the entire capitalistic system, which may be true to address some of these inequalities,
but what could- but- but that kind of analysis and oftentimes,
the- the more, I found that the more they learn about structural inequities,
the more helpless that they end up feeling, like these are just such big overwhelming projects,
what can I as
one person without much power actually do? And so, I've structured the class to help them figure out
what exactly can you do and so they have developed petitions, they have
worked with, what they end up doing is learning about, oftentimes, many other community organizations, and
identifying what they need. Several students in the last time
I taught this class ended up working with the Food Bank on campus
to figure out what some of their needs were and ways that we can move forward in addressing something like food
insecurity among students on campus.
So right now, I'm trying to switch this project to really encourage them to focus on COVID-19,
and so in these group projects to identify ways that while we're experiencing this and it is overwhelming and
and yeah, enormously anxiety-producing and it feels like there is nothing
that we can really do about it to actually start to think through what could
I, as one person, actually do right now that would help to address some of the
inequities that are really not being created by- by this but are being revealed by this.
What could we do on a community level? What can we do on
national, international
levels? And so part of my goal of this is to- to actually
support students in feeling less helpless and hopeless about the current situation.
I think something really important to remember, though, and that Mike alluded
to earlier on, is that it's also really important to offer non-COVID-related options.
So for a lot of students and a lot of us, ourselves,
actually thinking anthropologically about what we're experiencing might be really therapeutic.
It might be a way to- to help think through what's going on,
to try to come up with solutions,
but for many other people, it may not be. It may be the opposite of that.
It can be really traumatizing,
especially as
the kind of- the trauma of this progresses, and it certainly already started, but as
more people get sick and more people have
family member to are sick, and more people are losing loved ones,
it may not always be the best moment for us to to really be thinking about this
through a class assignment. So trying to make sure that you have
some other options also that some students might really
appreciate an escape from thinking about COVID-19 and that our classes might also-
might also offer that to them.
I think some of our our final reminders, and this came up in the last webinar also,
but to remember that- that some of the resources that we're providing here, to really think of them as a toolkit.
We're not suggesting that you do everything,
everything that's been suggested, or use all of these or have students suddenly
learn 15 new digital platforms that they they need to engage with.
Less is more. So what we should really be focused on is I think dialing back some of what we're doing
but also making what remains really meaningful for students, and there are ways to use
smaller assignments, fewer assignments but in ways that really help students
achieve what those essential goals of our class are,
both the academic learning goals and also the goals of supporting them in this moment,
and so the simpler that classes are is probably the better at the moment,
but these are some options that you might use to be able to to engage students right now.
MIKE: Yeah, and I just- I just posted, I don't know if you guys saw the change.org
petition from the University of Arizona students, which was ultimately successful, in which they asked
the President to cancel classes or to provide a pass/fail option and,
with- they- allow for withdrawals that are refunded and so on. That was successful, because, you know,
I don't know, man, 8,000 students got on here, and you, just read through some of the comments, and
you get a sense of all, the wide variety of
challenges different students have, and of course, if you're already teaching your class, and you've already, like,
talk to your students, maybe you know specifically
in your case, what what they're facing, and you're adapting to that, but if you're still in that
space of like not really knowing yet, because you're
transforming your class, and you haven't heard from all your students,
it might be worth just going on there, and
reminding yourself of all the possibilities
and all the different types of challenges students are going to have at this moment. So.
So.
ANGELA: Yeah. We highlighted last time that flexibility is really going to be the key
right now, as much flexibility as you can have in your course,
and that might be even giving through these multiple options for assignments,
like choose one of these, whichever one just works for you right now.
The flexibility in grading, exactly what- what Mike was talking about, where there's either,
yes, you get a hundred percent credit or you get partial credit,
but you have the option to do this over again or not do it over
again, if partial credit is just what you need to like, MIKE: Yeah. ANGELA: this class right now, like that is also fine.
NELL: Yeah. ANGELA: So providing as much flexibility as we can. NELL: And an alternative to that is, if
too many assignments is also too much for you,
considering providing students option to
identify what they want to put more weight on for assignments.
So creating three or four separate grading plans
and saying, "I can't provide more assignments. I can't provide more options.
I don't have the space, because I'm also human, to do this right now,
but I can say,
"You're allowed to put 50 percent of your weight on this assignment, and then split the rest between this.""
Or whatever else and however else you want to split it up,
and I know one of the resources in the bit.ly/AAAtips
page is a link to
inclusive teaching in a large-enrollment course, and so that
article provides some examples of also what are inclusive teaching tips, and they're not just specific to online courses,
but they can be adapted to online courses, including provide an
option for how a student weighs their grade, if you cannot provide multiple options for what you grade.
ANGELA: And I think those are all of the resources and materials we wanted to share right now,
but I think we still have extra time, if anyone has questions or their own resources
they want to share or particular situations you're trying to navigate.
There's about 60 people. There's a lot of
collective wisdom
online right now. JEFF: If I could,
if Mike, if you would go back to, there were a couple of questions about your TAs,
and you mentioned they're rockstars
in helping you prepare and give your courses. How- how do you help them prepare, and what kind of
assignments do you give them beforehand? How do you- how do you get them to be superstars?
MIKE: So, I mean it's basically a se- second class more or less. So they enroll in a whole other class
that's basically about teaching anthropology,
and it's a massive undertaking. It was like 450 students, and we have ten TAs
for those students, and so I teach a weekly class to the TAs about how to teach,
and there's that piece of it, and then
for the online TAs, a lot of them are graduates of my digital ethnography class,
which is an upper-level video production class, and so that allows them to produce like short-form videos
for their students in the online class. So I don't know if that that answers it, and
all that said, it's still a ton of work for the professor,
both myself and Brian Klataske and Trevor Durbin, who we all three of us pitch in at different points to
do this. So it's it's a lot of work.
JEFF: Okay
I don't see, I think, once again, we did such a great job of answering all the questions in the chat.
Does anyone have anything else they'd like to add? Or I think we've covered it pretty thoroughly.
MIKE: I just want to say I learned a lot from Nell and Angela throughout this whole process. So I loved being,
working with you guys, and I thought it was a great team.
NELL: Yeah, same here. Thank you. ANGELA: Yeah, thank you, me too.
And from- from everybody who's doing- we shared a number of these like crowdsourced Google documents.
MIKE: Oh yeah, it's amazing.
ANGELA: Yes, somebody should study that, when this is over, like that. [background laughter]
and I've seen a lot of others
floating around, and there are some we linked to last time that you can still see in the- the bitly document,
but thank you to all of those who've been focused on that, also and just been- been contributing
materials and information and expertise that they have. JEFF: It's perfect. Thanks, Angela. That also brings me to,
for all those that are still on right now,
again, go to the AAA website, and check out our COVID-19 resources page, and
we will be posting, again, a recording of this webinar on there, and we'll also
be posting the chat
stream dialog. So you'll get to see a lot of
what they were talking about, and the links that Angela just mentioned.
One last thing also. Stay tuned for
our next webinar, which will be next Thursday, April 2nd at 1:00 p.m
Eastern Daylight Time, and it is going to be responses from around the globe.
We have biomedical anthropologists reporting from Italy, which could take up the hour alone
listening to that person and also the Philippines
and Croatia.
So we'll have a number of reports from on the ground around the globe. So look for that next Thursday, April 2nd at 1:00 p.m
Eastern Daylight Time. Other than that, thank you all for joining us here at the American Anthropological
Association.
Stay tuned. We'll be in touch. Thanks, everyone.
NELL: Have a great day everyone, bye, thank you. ANGELA: Thank you. MIKE:  All right, bye.
JEFF: It's funny to see the chat go down as people get off or the participants rather.
NELL: It is interesting to observe,
participant observation.
MIKE: Yeah. JEFF: Yeah. MIKE: It's like people are leaving the room, you know, like.
NELL: The- the awkward moment of do I leave now? Do I wait? Do I- do I listen in? What- what do I-
