Pearson Techonology Group - Strategies in Teaching Anthropology

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Anthropology

Strategies in Teaching Anthropology 2/e

Patricia C. Rice
David McCurdy
Published September 2001 by Prentice Hall
Copyright 2002, 204 pp., Paper
ISBN: 0-13-034070-7

List Price:
$36.20
Inventory Status:
In-Stock

Preface

Summary

The first of its kind to focus on the “how” of teaching anthropology across all of its sub-fields (Cultural-Social, Biological, Archaeology, and Linguistics), this unique reference tool features over 30 hands-on, experiential strategies and teaching “tricks of the trade” from some of today's most seasoned anthropology instructors. KEY TOPICS: Provides a wide array of associated learning outcomes, team work strategies, and activities that have proven successful in the classroom, and shows how to clearly explain anthropological perspectives that contradict everyday experience and establish social categories, such as the social construction of race. Part I: General contains articles of tried-and-true strategies that are particularly appropriate for students' first exposure to anthropology and college classrooms in general; Part II: Biological Anthropology and Archaeology contains teaching tips to help students understand the complex issues through activities and props very familiar to them—e.g., “'First Steps' in Hominid Evolution: A Lesson on Walking” encourages development of critical thinking skills around the deceptively simple art of walking, which actually turns out to be an extremely complex phenomenon; Part III: Cultural Anthropology contains strategies that involve a series of activities that challenge the familiar and reveal that which is masked or often covert—e.g., explores gender differences in a very visual way by using children's television commercials to analyze gender enculturation. Devotes four articles to ethnography teaching strategies. MARKET: For anthropology instructors.

Features

NEW - 30 new articles.
- Gives instructors insight into techniques that work, those that don't, those that are effective with undergraduates, graduate students, and with both.

NEW - Teamwork strategies—e.g., joint writing projects. Gives instructors a broad range of teamwork strategies that are traditional in archaeology and biological anthropology—and a challenge to the lone ethnographer model of cultural anthropology. Such projects, especially those involving teams of two students who are allowed to choose their own partner, enhance the quality of presentation. They require students to get their points across to each other before trying to explain them to the instructor.
- Better, clearer writing, and higher grades result, along with a sense that even cultural anthropologists can team to work in teams.

NEW - Tricks for making comprehensible several of anthropology's “esoteric” topics— e.g., ranging from the potlatch, and economic exchange theory to cross-cousin marriage and moiety organization.
- Provides instructors with special strategies for parts of the introductory course that students find particularly challenging, such as genetics and kinship.

NEW - Strategies for demonstrating anthropological perspectives that contradict everyday experience and establish social categories— e.g., teaching about the social construction of race.

NEW - Teaching tricks ranging from specific to very general applicability.
- Strategies involving interviewing, hypothesis testing, field trips, museum visits, and ethnographic film viewing, can be applied in a variety of courses.

NEW - Techniques that use the familiar to illustrate the novel.
- Students appreciate American culture examples, whether studying about kinship, genetics, race, gender, rituals, or values.

NEW - Four articles that directly teach ethnography—“How to Teach Self-Ethnography,” “Pre-Class Fieldwork: Ethnographic Introductions,” “Introductory Fieldwork: The Meaning of the Gift,” and “Fieldwork and the Observer's Gaze: Teaching the Ups and Downs of Ethnographic Observation.”