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]).

Detention, In Frame

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

Circling Up—In the Classroom

Circling Up—In the Classroom

Desiree Rosas is a Program Coordinator at MILPA; George Villa is a Program and Research Manager at MILPA; and Megan Raschig is an Associate Professor at Sacrame... 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