Anthony Kwame Harrison
January 28, 2015
Teaching introductory anthropology gives us the opportunity to introduce a broad range of students, with vastly different interests and anticipated career trajectories, to the distinct perspectives and approaches in our field. A handful of these student will go on to take more anthropology courses or, possibly, pursue it as a career. Yet even those students who don’t, can come out of an Introduction to Anthropology class with their worldviews expanded and/or with the critical firepower to support the just causes they’ll encounter in their lives. As instructors a key aspect of this involves reaching our students in meaningful ways—making the class more than just a way of earning three credits, meeting a requirement, or filling a schedule. On the first day of the first anthropology course I ever took at the University of Massachusetts, I was delighted to see a familiar face in the front of the lecture hall. Richard Holmes was a doctoral student who, five years earlier, had taught social studies at a small independent school I attended in Historic Deerfield. Seeing “Mr. Holmes” again, I was immediately on board with the class—personally invested in making it a great experience. The rest is history.
Having taught anthropology now, off-and-on, for eighteen years, this emphasis on getting and keeping students on board has become central to how I approach introductory courses. The process is often more intuitive than prescriptive. Yet one effort towards this goal involves developing an early understanding of who my students are (collectively moreso than individually), what brought them to the class, and what expectations they have for it.
This information is particularly pertinent at my current institution, which has no anthropology department. For as long as I have been teaching at Virginia Tech, on the first day of class I’ve asked my students to fill out notecards detailing information about their major, year-in-school, interests, and, most relevant here, why they are taking the course. I recently went through notecards from the six times I have taught “Introduction to Social Anthropology” over the past dozen years. While many of the results are what you might expect, the process of going over them has enhanced my understanding of what draws students to anthropology at a school that has no department, major, or (for now) minor.
Although not a scientifically valid study, I nevertheless provide categorical percentages for the 260 notecards I’ve accumulated. A handful of students (8%) simply said that they were drawn to the class because I was teaching it. The majority of students emphasized that they took the class for a requirement (19%)