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: 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

The Poetics of Deep Reading: A Field Guide to Getting Lost in a Book

The Poetics of Deep Reading: A Field Guide to Getting Lost in a Book

When was the last time you read a book without checking your phone? Two years ago, we posed this question to our undergraduate students in political anthropol... More

Distribute2020: An Invitation to Use, Reuse, Recombine, Cite, Relate, and Teach!

Distribute2020: An Invitation to Use, Reuse, Recombine, Cite, Relate, and Teach!

Welcome to the Teaching Tools series inspired by Distribute2020, the biannual multimodal conference presented by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) and... More

Ethnography, Journalism, and the Politics of Representation

Ethnography, Journalism, and the Politics of Representation

Qualitative research paradigms are often set in contrast to quantitative paradigms. And, in a lower-division anthropology class, students may only have familiar... More