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]).

What is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine

What is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine

Arrivals As a college professor, I consider the classroom to be a site of engagement, activism, and learning, not just for my students, but also for myself. Ove... More

Decolonizing the Classroom: A Conversation with Girish Daswani

Decolonizing the Classroom: A Conversation with Girish Daswani

This Teaching Tools post features an interview with Girish Daswani, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Scarboro... More

Teaching India: A Conversation with Tulasi Srinivas

Teaching India: A Conversation with Tulasi Srinivas

This past fall, I taught a course on Indian Culture and Society to undergraduate and graduate students in Hong Kong. In preparing for the course, I browsed the ... More

Teaching Electronic Life Histories

Teaching Electronic Life Histories

Recent works on the anthropology of waste, rubbish, and discard abound. Many focus on the destructive capacities of capitalist accumulation and the unrecounted ... More

Citation Matters: An Updated Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology

Citation Matters: An Updated Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology

Scholarship in environmental anthropology has historically asked questions about how humans relate to the interconnected biophysical and cultural processes unfo... More

Teaching about Rape in Troubled Times

Teaching about Rape in Troubled Times

In the fall of 2016, we taught an introductory undergraduate anthropology course titled “Culture, Gender, and Violence” at the University of Virginia (UVA). Ric... More

Pedagogical Soundings: Hunter-Gatherer Studies

Pedagogical Soundings: Hunter-Gatherer Studies

This installment of Pedagogical Soundings is a collaboration between the AnthroPod and Teaching Tools sections of the Cultural Anthropology website. It suppleme... More

Envisioning Theory: An Anthropological Teaching Experiment, Part Two

Envisioning Theory: An Anthropological Teaching Experiment, Part Two

My previous post introduced “Envisioning Theory,” a teaching experiment in which students produced visualizations of scholarly texts. My co-teacher and I pursue... More

Envisioning Theory: An Anthropological Teaching Experiment, Part One

Envisioning Theory: An Anthropological Teaching Experiment, Part One

The idea for a learning and teaching experiment in envisioning theory came to me when I began to select texts for a theory seminar on the anthropology of the bo... More

Teaching Race with Lisa Anderson-Levy: Intersectionality, Paradigm Shifts, and the Ubiquity of Whiteness

Teaching Race with Lisa Anderson-Levy: Intersectionality, Paradigm Shifts, and the Ubiquity of Whiteness

The word race doesn’t even matter. What we’re talking about are the relationships of power. So if that’s what we’re talking about, okay, so use culture or use e... More