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.
Abolitionist Pedagogies
What might it mean to seriously prioritize anti-carceral liberation from within anthropology classrooms? This is the question that inspired our “Abolitionist Pe... More
Detention, In Frame
For a piece on abolition, it might seem counterintuitive to start with a “frame.” A frame typically binds our view of something, rigidly limiting our attention ... More
The Environmental Wayfarer Project: Problem Solving with an Eco-Anxious Generation
Many environmental problems in the twenty-first century seem practically unsolvable—pollution, corporate monopolies, climate change. Part of our responsibility,... More
Learning to Teach
With my first teaching appointment in 2017, I moved to Richmond, a new town where I didn’t know anyone. Almost as soon as I got there, I enrolled in the YMCA sw... More
Pedagogies for a Particular Time
As a teaching assistant and a resident advisor (RA) in an undergraduate dorm, many of my conversations on campus have focused on how students and educators are ... More
“Decanonization” as a Spiral: Collectively Constructing a “History of Anthropological Thought” Syllabus
The authors of this piece together compose the Brandeis “History of Anthropological Thought” Syllabus Collective. * * * “We say the Earth has a circular orb... More
The Political Statement: Thinking Beyond the End-of-Term Paper
This past Fall, while serving as faculty instructor (Alyssa) and graduate student instructor (Felipe) for an introductory course in socio-cultural anthropology,... More
Editorializing the Classroom: Teaching Collaboratively in the Digital Age
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, educators and students were faced with the precarity of a post-Covid, post-Zoom classroom and are now tasked with answering the... More
Decolonizing Ethnography: A Reimagined Framework for Teaching Radical Ethnography
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all... More
Giving Students Feedback that Inspires
During one failed attempt to empty my university email inbox, I came across a few emails dating back to 2014, the year in which I changed my undergraduate major... More