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.
The Case for Paying it Backward: Thanking the Teachers Who Leave Imprints
When I wrote an email thanking my mentor for her guidance as I applied to graduate school, she replied with a note of acknowledgement, but ended with the reques... More
Teaching Ecological Distress
This collection is compiled by the Ecological Distress Collective, hosted at SOAS Anthropology. Introduction In recent years, the medical and psychological scie... More
What Teaching Economics Taught Me about Teaching Anthropology
It's normal to be nervous before the first day of classes, especially if it's your first time teaching at a particular institution. It's especially normal to be... More
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
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