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]).

Online Tools for Hybrid and Remote Teaching

Online Tools for Hybrid and Remote Teaching

Welcome to the world in a new abnormal—a world filled with Zoom burn-out (Cauterucci 2020) and new struggles to engage students. Spring 2020 was, for most, a ti... More

Syllabus Archive: Critical Ethnographies

Syllabus Archive: Critical Ethnographies

What is ethnography, and how do we teach about ethnography/ethnographies so that students understand the complexity of analysis? There have been many scholars w... More

Syllabus Archive Project: An Introduction

Syllabus Archive Project: An Introduction

As someone newly immersed in a university teaching environment after shedding my role as a graduate student, I was excited, yet unsure of how to approach design... More

Teaching Theory in Graduate Education: A Conversation with Elizabeth Emma Ferry

Teaching Theory in Graduate Education: A Conversation with Elizabeth Emma Ferry

We’ve all been there: you find yourself at a conference panel or in conversation with another scholar and, before you know it, you are drowning in a sea of theo... More

Teaching Ethnography in the Heart of Government

Teaching Ethnography in the Heart of Government

From the point of view of the governed—citizens and non-citizens alike—the way government operates can seem like a black box. Despite talk of transparency, the ... More

Teaching Ethnography through Theater

Teaching Ethnography through Theater

Anthropologists often distinguish ethnography from other methods through the role of the researcher. In ethnography, the researcher’s social position, embodied ... More

"Pervasive, yet Fractured": A Roundtable on Centering Indigenous Critiques and Teaching Settler Colonialism

"Pervasive, yet Fractured": A Roundtable on Centering Indigenous Critiques and Teaching Settler Colonialism

As I write, Kanaka Maoli kia‘i are assembling to protect Mauna Kea against the threat of the Thirty Meter Telescope; Diné and Pueblo peoples are collaborating t... More

Teaching Infrastructures: A Conversation with Gabrielle Hecht

Teaching Infrastructures: A Conversation with Gabrielle Hecht

This post presents a conversation with Gabrielle Hecht, Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security, Professor of History, and Professor (by courtesy... More

Teaching Storytelling and Financial Crisis

Teaching Storytelling and Financial Crisis

Summary Each author in the Openings and Retrospectives collection, "After 2008," published in the November 2008 issue of Cultural Anthropology tells a particula... More

Playful Pedagogy: Teaching Culture with the Small-Penis Emoji

Playful Pedagogy: Teaching Culture with the Small-Penis Emoji

Sitting down to write my first lecture for an interdisciplinary first-year course I'd been assigned, I stare blankly at its title—Cultures and Diversity—trying ... More