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]).

Teaching as Performance: On Scripts, Preparing for Classes, and Teaching with Passion

Teaching as Performance: On Scripts, Preparing for Classes, and Teaching with Passion

When I first started teaching as an adjunct faculty member at the American University in Cairo in 2018, I ran to one of my favorite mentors to share the excitin... More

The Syllabus is Political

The Syllabus is Political

Around the end of October, in the lead up to Halloween, I like to assign my introduction to cultural anthropology course a Jean and John Comaroff article about ... More

Relata Revisited

Relata Revisited

In a previous post on the SCA website, Relata is described as an experimental tool for collaborative indexing and exploratory search that seeks to map conversat... More

Syllabus Archive: Diverse Approaches to Transnationalism

Syllabus Archive: Diverse Approaches to Transnationalism

Transnationalism is broadly understood as the interconnection and movement of humans, objects, ideas, ideologies, and processes that “transcend” nation-state bo... More

Love and Collaboration in Practice: Perspectives on Co-teaching a Graduate Seminar during a Pandemic

Love and Collaboration in Practice: Perspectives on Co-teaching a Graduate Seminar during a Pandemic

In this turbulent yet potentially transformative time marked by a global pandemic and urgent calls for racial justice and equity in society, we find it imperati... More

The Anthropology of Time: A Reading List In-the-Making

The Anthropology of Time: A Reading List In-the-Making

Introductions, Invitations Given the renewed scholarly attention to time and temporality, we present a reading list on the anthropology of time. This list is an... More

Syllabus Archive: Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods

Syllabus Archive: Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods

How do we actually do fieldwork? This is a question that we seek to help our students of all levels discover in our courses, but even in graduate school curricu... More

Teaching Cultural Anthropology as a Community-Building MOOC-Style Course

Teaching Cultural Anthropology as a Community-Building MOOC-Style Course

This post highlights the introductory cultural anthropology syllabus prepared by Rebecca Howes-Mischel and Megan Tracy, which they organized in similar style to... More

Creating Community in an Asynchronous Online Class

Creating Community in an Asynchronous Online Class

In the summer of 2020, we faced a challenge (one of many collectively shared): what to do with our general education Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class... More

A Complement to the Syllabus Archive: Primiano, Krishnan, and Sangaramoorthy's “Plagues, Pathogens, and Pedagogical Decolonization”

A Complement to the Syllabus Archive: Primiano, Krishnan, and Sangaramoorthy's “Plagues, Pathogens, and Pedagogical Decolonization”

Through the Syllabus Archive on Teaching Tools, we have worked to put together different opportunities for people to share their approaches to emergent topics i... More