Teaching Tools is dedicated to the intersections between pedagogy, ethnography, and anthropology. The section is a growing resource for instructors, teaching assistants, and students, with everything from discussion guides and in-class activities to critically minded reflections on the practice, politics, and poetics of teaching anthropology, whether inside the academy or in alternative settings.
Disruptive Discomforts and Irreparable Returns: Reflexive Accounts on Ethnographic Guilt, Power, and Powerlessness
"What transforms the process of ethnography endowing it with its thing-like, modal character as an ethnography? What is the ethnographic case expected to achiev... More
Teaching Anthropology Under Oath: Establishing Expertise in Asylum Hearings through Anthropological Training, Research, and Publications
“Most people refer to me as Doctor Billingsley,” I stated. “Oh, I am sorry, Doctor Billingsley,” the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security replied. T... More
What I Wish Someone Taught Me When I Applied to My PhD: Considerations for Professors of Incoming (International) Students
Fall is here and the new academic year has started. Three years ago, this coincided with my first active steps towards applying to a doctoral program in sociocu... More
Teaching Anthropological Theory: Reflections on Course Design and Pedagogy
Reflections on Learning Theory I have served as an anthropology lecturer at Chapman University in Orange, California, since 2013. During that time, I have had t... More
Teaching Ethnographic Methods with Progressive Dystopia
Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia presents an ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a San Francisco school distinctive for its explicit espousal of a soc... More
Teaching SAPIENS: Centering Access and Relevance in Anthropological Education
Founded in January 2016, SAPIENS is a public anthropology magazine. Originally, SAPIENS was conceived as a repository, portal, and digital blog space to give fo... More
Ethnographic Experiments for Undergraduates: Reflections from The Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto
Watching and analyzing TikTok viral videos, walking and engaging with students on campus, and attending meetings of a particular social movement are examples of... More
What Does It Mean to Teach Anthropology? An Invitation
What do we mean when we talk about teaching anthropology? More often than not, we refer specifically to university contexts, lecture halls, discussion sections,... More
Plantation Worlds
There is no such thing as ‘the plantation.’ Although a recent surge in scholarship purports to address that very category, the term belies its own claim to univ... More
Teaching as Performance: On Scripts, Preparing for Classes, and Teaching with Passion
When I first started teaching as an adjunct faculty member at the American University in Cairo in 2018, I ran to one of my favorite mentors to share the excitin... More