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.

Contact Us

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

Syllabus Archive: Black Anthropology

Syllabus Archive: Black Anthropology

This syllabus archive brings together a range of syllabi concerned with race and anthropology, with a particular focus on Blackness. Blackness is fundamental to... More

Writing Op-Eds in Anthropology Courses

Writing Op-Eds in Anthropology Courses

In their guide to writing an op-ed, the Washington Post lists the goals that inform their decisions about which opinion pieces to publish. The last four bullet ... More

Writing and Teaching Life and Death: A Conversation with Anne Allison

Writing and Teaching Life and Death: A Conversation with Anne Allison

In this conversation, Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and Society for Cultural Anthropology past president, reflects on the ... More

The Text as Teacher: Against Reading as a Resource Relation

The Text as Teacher: Against Reading as a Resource Relation

What can a text about anti-colonial science teach us about teaching anthropology? We started thinking together in early 2022 about how Max Liboiron’s book Poll... More

Active Pedagogy, Collaborative Research, and Zine Making

Active Pedagogy, Collaborative Research, and Zine Making

In a 2020 post, Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe reflected on the fragmentation, precariousness, and new ways of being that unfolded during the pand... More

Musings on Teaching Social Science to Art and Design Students

Musings on Teaching Social Science to Art and Design Students

I am a sociologist by training, and I have been on the faculty of an art and design college in the southern part of India since 2017. My doctoral research sough... More

“Without Professor Microphones”: A Reminder to Have More Fun

“Without Professor Microphones”: A Reminder to Have More Fun

Palestinian cyclists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem claim their right to exist and move freely through their occupied homeland by riding their bikes. They ... More

Disruptive Discomforts and Irreparable Returns: Reflexive Accounts on Ethnographic Guilt, Power, and Powerlessness

Disruptive Discomforts and Irreparable Returns: Reflexive Accounts on Ethnographic Guilt, Power, and Powerlessness

"What transforms the process of ethnography endowing it with its thing-like, modal character as an ethnography? What is the ethnographic case expected to achiev... More

Teaching Anthropology Under Oath: Establishing Expertise in Asylum Hearings through Anthropological Training, Research, and Publications

Teaching Anthropology Under Oath: Establishing Expertise in Asylum Hearings through Anthropological Training, Research, and Publications

“Most people refer to me as Doctor Billingsley,” I stated. “Oh, I am sorry, Doctor Billingsley,” the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security replied. T... More

What I Wish Someone Taught Me When I Applied to My PhD: Considerations for Professors of Incoming (International) Students

What I Wish Someone Taught Me When I Applied to My PhD: Considerations for Professors of Incoming (International) Students

Fall is here and the new academic year has started. Three years ago, this coincided with my first active steps towards applying to a doctoral program in sociocu... More