A familiar professional experience: You slip into a talk already underway. You missed the opening and a good chunk of the argument or important evidence. The speaker is mid-paper. You open your notebook and begin to listen. As you listen, a version of a familiar concept lands. A critique of another scholar signals a lineage. A new problem is framed in a way that feels recognizable. You do not have the full context, but you have enough. You begin assembling the pieces. You listen for conceptual cues. You map the terrain. Within minutes, you are oriented—not because you fully understand what is being presented and not because everything has been explained, but because you have learned how to situate partial information within a broader intellectual landscape.

Most of us learned this skill gradually—perhaps beginning in graduate school—one conference at a time, one hallway conversation outside our specialization after another. Or—let’s be honest—in PhD seminars when the group discussed one of too many readings we did not manage to finish. We learned to draw on our disciplinary knowledge, connect arguments to prior readings, infer stakes from vocabulary, and place new claims within already-familiar theoretical neighborhoods. We learned to move from momentary disorientation toward provisional coherence.

Our undergraduate students in theory courses, however, rarely get to practice this kind of orientation, not because the opportunity does not exist. In fact, the feeling of being “lost”—so similar to entering a talk midstream—is what students often report when encountering theoretically dense texts. Yet they typically experience that feeling as failure rather than as a normal stage of orientation. The difficulty is real: The style and structure of theoretical writing can be demanding; authors sometimes begin in medias res, assuming familiarity with shared vocabularies or intellectual histories. The feeling of being lost is therefore unsurprising. But instead of treating this initial disorientation as something to work through, we often try to eliminate it quickly for our undergraduates. I have begun to suspect a troubling correlation: The more complex the text, the less firsthand experience of complexity undergraduates are asked to navigate. There are exceptions, of course. As a graduate student, I TA’d for Stuart McLean’s introductory course in cultural anthropology, which assigned substantial portions of Deleuze’s Cinema books. I think of that experience every time I catch myself offering undergraduates a diluted version of complex ideas, reassuring them that this is sufficient for now and that deeper engagement can wait for graduate study. In trying to support their engagement with theory-heavy texts, I may have inadvertently pre-empted the very work that would allow them to develop orientation.

Consider the structure of many undergraduate theory courses: Students are assigned multiple primary texts—often in excerpted form within an anthology or reader. However, instead of being asked to figure out what is at stake in those primary texts—much as we do when entering a panel midstream—they encounter arguments that have already been framed for them, either through lecture or through introductions written by editors or through the textbooks supplementing those readers.

The result is a subtle reversal. The primary texts are meant to be, well, primary. Nevertheless, in practice, it is often the lecture or the editorial introduction to the reader’s section that becomes the most frequently cited authority in class discussion. The framing becomes central; the primary text becomes illustrative. Students treat the introductory summary as the argument and then read the primary text for examples that confirm that frame. In class discussion, they can repeat what the theorist “argues,” but they struggle to show where and how that argument is constructed in the text itself.

So, when colleagues lament that “with gen-AI students no longer read,” I find myself asking, what if the relationship between students and theoretically dense texts has not fundamentally changed, but has simply accelerated? Even before generative AI, many undergraduate students were not engaging primary theoretical texts as sites of argument construction. What we sometimes call “not reading” may be less a rupture than a continuation of an older habit: outsourcing the productive struggle of orientation. Gen-AI makes that outsourcing more accessible, but the underlying practice is familiar. The authority to frame the text shifts from instructor or anthology editor to algorithm, but the structure of the transaction persists. Complexity is bypassed, and the work of orientation is not developed. The problem, then, is not one that a policy response to AI alone can address. It requires rethinking the conditions under which students encounter complex texts.

If orientation is a valuable skill, students need structured opportunities to practice being with theoretical texts rather than merely learning about them. This requires students to sit with the discomfort of not yet knowing: to encounter unfamiliar concepts, to slow down and listen for stakes, and to assemble understanding from the fragments they can initially grasp without immediate framing. The goal is not confusion for its own sake, but guided engagement. Think about it in terms of an apprenticeship in how professionals navigate complexity. When orientation is outsourced, students are relieved of the very practice through which disciplinary fluency develops. As Tim Ingold reminds us, knowledge does not emerge from the provision of information but from learning to attend (Ingold 2013). If we remove the necessity of attending, we remove the conditions for developing judgment. The question, then, is how to create conditions in which students can practice moving through complexity.

Toward a Competency-Based Proficiency

This is the problem I found myself trying to address. In recent years, I have been rethinking what it means to teach theory at the undergraduate level. I am dissatisfied with a model centered on coverage: Assign a text, provide contextual framing, discuss key concepts, move on. Students could identify and define terms, but when faced with a novel situation their orientation faltered. What I wanted instead was competency-based proficiency: not simply familiarity with ideas, but the demonstrated ability to use conceptual tools in contexts like professionals experience. This means, for example, being able to listen to an unfamiliar idea and ask: What is at stake here? What tradition does this draw on? What assumptions are being made? How does this connect to other conversations I know?

Proficiency, in this sense, is revealed through action. But how do we create opportunities for students to practice that action? One way to think about this shift is as a move from teaching about theory to helping students learn how to orient themselves within it. Orientation is not something we can hand over. It is something students grow into through practice.

Drop-In Dialogue: Practicing Orientation

One structure and an open digital tool I have developed in response to this problem is called Drop-In Dialogues. Its premise is simple: If orientation is a valuable skill, then entering a real argument already in motion is a good place to practice it. The design mirrors the familiar professional experience described above, but deliberately and with scaffolding. Students begin not with framing, but with a short, carefully curated one- to three-minute segment from the middle of a publicly available talk. The segment is selected because it contains a conceptual hinge: a moment where a problem is articulated, a critique signals lineage, an example performs theoretical work, or a key term is mobilized in a revealing way.

Students are not given a summary of the talk. They are simply asked to start with watching the short segment as many times as they like and take notes on what they find significant (Step 1: Watch). They then respond to a series of tailored questions about the segment designed to help them orient themselves (Step 2: Analyze). These questions move intentionally from description to interpretation. The idea is to prepare them to understand the talk in its entirety. This is why after this initial orientation, students watch the full lecture (Step 3: Connect).

This sequencing matters. The short segment does not replace the whole; it helps students better understand it. They still need to watch the whole talk. Unlike excerpted readings in anthologies, which often stand in for complete arguments, the drop-in segment functions as a doorway. Students experience partiality temporarily, but they are not left there. The full argumentative arc follows. They witness how claims are developed, how examples accumulate, how genealogies are invoked, and—importantly—how speakers respond to audience questions, if available. Theory becomes visible as practice, not simply as position. In this sense, Drop-In Dialogues addresses two limitations common to the anthology/reader model: Framing does not precede engagement, and the full argumentative arc is preserved rather than excerpted.

After engaging the full talk, in the same third step, students formulate a question they would pose to the speaker. This shifts their stance from passive reception to participation (even if from afar and asynchronously). They are no longer decoding a summary; they are entering a dialogue. Finally, the talk is paired with a short reading that places it in conversation with another thinker working in a “neighboring” conceptual space (Step 4: Read). Students identify resonances and divergences. The exercise thus moves from orientation to comprehension to comparison to conversation. Drop-In Dialogues is not merely a new format; it is a recalibration of sequencing and can be applied to written texts as well.

Explore the Drop-In Dialogues tool here 

An example may help illustrate this in practice. In one Drop-In Dialogue, students enter the middle of a talk by Stefania Pandolfo. In the selected two-minute segment, Pandolfo distinguishes between two modes of imagination in the writings of the 12th-century Sufi thinker Ibn ‘Arabi: one familiar to modern psychology, where imagination belongs to the human subject as a faculty of perception, and another in which imagination exists autonomously as a “cosmic reality,” independent of any individual viewer. Students first watch this short segment and note what seems conceptually significant. The guiding questions then help them articulate the distinction Pandolfo is making and to reflect on what happens to familiar distinctions between subject and object when “seeing” becomes what Ibn ‘Arabi calls witnessing. After this initial orientation, students watch the full talk, connect it to other readings they may already be familiar with, and formulate a question they would pose to the speaker. In the final step, the talk is paired with a short reading from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, which Pandolfo herself draws on in her writing. The pairing helps students see how Pandolfo’s discussion of imaginal witnessing resonates with Rilke’s description of a world that does not depend on the cultural categories of human subjects. The aim is not for students to master the concepts immediately, but to experience how a difficult theoretical claim begins to take shape through attentive listening and comparison.

From Coverage to Proficiency

The first few times I ran the exercise, I was struck by how little students needed to be told once they had attempted orientation on their own. The guiding questions in Step 2 were doing less scaffolding work than I expected—not because the material was easy, but because students had already begun the work of making it cohere during their initial encounter with the segment. The difference in class discussion was noticeable as well. Students engaged the material with a kind of alertness that stood out; they were already tracking the movement of an argument rather than waiting to be told what it meant. One student described the experience in a way that has stayed with me: “I felt like I was catching up, not falling behind.”

Proficiency here does not mean fluency in terminology alone. It means being able to encounter an unfamiliar argument and begin understanding it by identifying stakes, situating genealogies, connecting it to prior knowledge, and asking generative questions. In classroom discussion, this shift becomes visible. Students reference how arguments are constructed rather than repeating prefatory summaries. They point to moments where claims are reframed or examples complicate assumptions. They anticipate conceptual moves. They compare thinkers without waiting for explicit prompts.

The difference is subtle but consequential. Theory becomes less about memorizing positions and more about recognizing argumentative moves. The initial feeling of disorientation does not disappear. It becomes normalized. Students begin to understand that partial understanding is not failure but the beginning of inquiry. Complexity becomes something to navigate rather than avoid.

Scaffolded, Not Random

Beginning “in the middle” is still scaffolded, but in a different order. The entry segments are carefully curated. The questions guide attention rather than demand abstraction. Context is introduced—by the speaker, by the text in Step 4, and by the instructor—but only after students have attempted reconstruction. Disorientation is a pedagogical tool, not abandonment. The goal is not to make theory harder, but to make orientation deliberate. It is not, on the other hand, an attempt to reduce the complexity of theory by simplifying it. The use of actual academic talks—instead of the more frequently used TED-style presentations—is intentional. If apprenticeship is the goal, then exposure to the complex, sometimes slow-moving (“boring”) conversations is essential.

Openness and Adaptability

While this protocol can be applied to written text or audio, the use of video-recorded lectures is intentional. These publicly available videos constitute a vast, underused archive of disciplinary thought.  By drawing on open-access materials, the platform remains adaptable and accessible. The project itself is open. It is very easy to curate customized collections according to class needs and the topic (as simple as completing a structured spreadsheet with the YouTube link, entry-point timestamps, guiding questions, and so on.)

Create your own customizable Drop-In Dialogues dataset here

Also, because it is a fully open project, emerging debates can be incorporated quickly, without waiting for revised print editions. Some instructors may choose to use it weekly; others strategically; still others as assessment. The core principle remains consistent: Practice orientation before supplying comprehensive framing.

Orientation as Disciplinary Apprenticeship

Drop-In Dialogues is a modest recalibration of scaffolding aimed at addressing the problem of outsourced orientation. Anthropological knowledge circulates through conversations already in motion. If we want undergraduates to participate fluently in that intellectual world, we must create conditions in which they practice entering it. Orientation cannot be handed over through summaries—whether written by editors, instructors, or algorithms. It develops through repeated engagement with arguments in motion.

The slogan for the digital tool is “Jump in! Figure it out!” But I have come to hear that invitation in the spirit Anand Pandian (2019, 64) attributes to Jane Guyer’s teaching: Slow down, think, listen—configure it. In this sense, “figuring it out” is not the opposite of scaffolding; it is what scaffolding makes possible. It asks students to remain with the unknown long enough to be shaped by it—and, in the process, to shape it into something they can think with.