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.

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Questions and proposals for guest posts can be sent to section editor, Dana McLachlin ([email protected]).

Circling Up—In the Classroom

Circling Up—In the Classroom

This post considers what anthropological educators committed to abolition can learn from a community-based liberatory curriculum called Telpochcalli. Telpochcal... More

Abolitionist Pedagogies: Introduction to the Series

Abolitionist Pedagogies: Introduction to the Series

This week, just after International Prisoners’ Justice Day, we take this opportunity to introduce a series that will be coming out over the course of the 2024–2... More

The Environmental Wayfarer Project: Problem Solving with an Eco-Anxious Generation

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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