It's normal to be nervous before the first day of classes, especially if it's your first time teaching at a particular institution. It's especially normal to be anxious if it's your first time teaching that particular subject. While I took several anthropology classes as an undergraduate, I ultimately majored in economics, obtained a graduate degree in economics and public policy, and spent a decade as an economist in the field. Then I came back to graduate school to become an anthropologist and was assigned to teach the popular “Introduction to Anthropology” course on campus. I was definitely a little nervous.

It was not my first time teaching. I have taught several courses at the undergraduate and graduate level before; however, they were all economics courses. Teaching economics is more familiar to me. I know the material well, which mostly comprises of a basic history of political economy, the assumptions of market economies, and all of the corresponding formulas, equations, and graphs that I practiced as a student countless times. While teaching an “Introduction to Economics” course, I made my classes interactive and applied, experimenting with unique examples, bringing in popular media to show how the economy “really works,” and learning things from my students too (like the time I taught them about income inequality). Teaching graduate level students about international development and global inequality further developed my pedagogical skills by expanding the ways I explain complex concepts and building my confidence with a wide range of students in the classroom.

As I prepared to teach ”Intro to Anthro,” I was nervous but excited to think about teaching in a new discipline and at a new institution. It made me reflect on my own experience as a student taking classes in both economics and anthropology. Keeping up with both disciplines was demanding. If I had struggled to reconcile the two as a student, how was I supposed to do so as a teacher to help other students learn?

The differences seemed insurmountable. First, economics and anthropology take different approaches to knowledge production. While the former is deductive, based on assumptions and principles from which observations are made, anthropology is inductive and tends to begin with ethnographic insight. In the classroom, this difference plays out in the way theory and evidence are explained. In an “Intro to Econ” course, I would begin class by outlining the theory behind a model. For example, we assume that in a “perfectly competitive market,” all new firms can easily enter and exit the market. In contrast, in “Intro to Anthro,” we would begin by identifying the particular and empirical experience of firms that try to enter or exit the market, and from there we might conceptualize features of the market. In my “Intro to Anthro” class, many of the students are freshmen or sophomores majoring in fields across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We are learning about knowledge production in anthropology and its affordances and limitations together.

Second, the starting point for many discussions in economics is the assumptions behind a model. These universal assumptions are the point of departure for the analytical choices economists make. In anthropology, the starting point is often history and a genealogy of anthropological thought. To anthropologists, it is important to know what came before to contextualize and understand what is today. This requires a lot of critical and comparative reading. Third, and relatedly, teaching economics involves teaching a lot of math, mostly advanced algebra and statistics. In the anthropology classroom, equations are generally absent, but the chalkboard is instead an equally complicated web of words and concepts. I found myself enjoying the spontaneous and meandering lines of thought with my students, but I also miss the familiarity and predictability of the economic equations that simplify our understanding of the world.

While these differences were discernible and valid, I found that as the weeks progressed, there were more things in common between teaching the two subjects than I initially thought possible. These underlying similarities reassured my confidence in the classroom and likely also helped me better support my students' learning journeys.

Humility in Not Knowing, Because It Might Not Be Knowable

Early in the semester, I knew going into class one day that the students were excited to learn more about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the ways in which language and culture are intertwined. I had cued up an illustrative TED talk by Lera Boroditsky because it contains several examples that drive the point home. After watching it in class together, we started talking about different languages that the students themselves speak and how, if at all, those languages are associated with different ways of experiencing and interpreting the world.

After a small-group breakout discussion on the same topic, one group of students asked how to measure difference in language. “Does it have to be mutually unintelligible to count as different? Does it mean speaking the same language but in a different tone or register? What about speaking the same language between a native speaker and a second-language-learner of that language? How much 'difference' needs to exist to count it as a difference?”

For class that day, we read Lévi-Strauss (1952, 8–15), who in 1952 asked a version of the same question as he wondered if there can be an “optimum degree of diversity” between cultures. To begin thinking about these questions, he looked at geographical and spatial separation between cultures as a driver behind diversity. In class, the students came up with several ways to consider what “difference” in language means, and how they would each interpret it as anthropologists. Unsurprisingly, the only consensus was that “it depends.”

It depends! That is something every economist I know also says. Coming to the conclusion that not every question has a straight-forward answer and that it truly does depend is something that many disciplines have in common with each other. I realized that I, too, didn't know a precise answer to the students' questions about differences in language. I didn't know because, to some degree, it is not fully knowable, and these are questions that are ripe for continuous scholarly exploration.

Co-learning with Your Students when You Both Don't Know

By the end of each week, students have to post to an online discussion board about a concept or a question that is interesting to them from the week's material. It is an open-ended task, which elicits varied responses. Each week, however, there is guaranteed to be a question about eliminating anthropologists' bias while doing fieldwork and writing ethnography. One week, a student wondered how anthropologists avoid letting our experiences “interfere” too much in how we understand various cultures.

In the next class session, I asked students to imagine a scenario where participant observation can occur completely devoid of bias. Students thought about other classes they're taking in other disciplines and immediately offered technical and reasonable responses about being “objective” and “fair” in interpreting data. One student finally asked, “wait, should we even be trying to remove the researcher's bias?”

As the facilitator of the discussion in the room, I was impressed by the journey the class took to get to this point in the debate. I would not have been able to predict beforehand how we would arrive at the point that we did. I had planned to bring up this topic, but as the students questioned their biases about bias, I learned how teaching anthropology means that you might not know what you as the teacher will learn in class that day. Just like people and culture dialectically make each other, the students and I were co-constructing anthropological concepts together.

Teaching in any subject area is a learning experience, and no two class sessions are identical. Even teaching the same material multiple times over in economics, I was always invigorated by the unique and novel ways in which different students think about the same issues. Be it economics or anthropology, I am constantly learning with my students.

Critical Thinking is More Important Than a Right Answer

During the week that we were scheduled to learn about ethics in ethnographic fieldwork and research, I brainstormed different activities to make the concept more relevant to early-career students who might not have tangible fieldwork experience to relate to. I designed several mock scenarios of anthropological fieldwork and applications based on my own cohort of graduate student peers' dissertation research. I tweaked various elements, described the historical and political stakes, and ended each with a prompt to think about the ethical choices students would consider in each scenario.

Since these are ongoing projects by current graduate students, I told them there are no right or wrong answers, but that they should explain their reasoning and choices. In groups, they spent much of the class time preparing their collective response to share. I smiled as the volume in the room turned up and students were animatedly writing out ideas, questioning their prior assumptions, and engaging with their classmates' suggestions. It was that cherished moment of collective effervescence that delights teachers everywhere.

It brought me back to the time I taught a graduate class about what governments in low-income countries could do to boost socioeconomic prosperity. We looked at case studies of countries around the world and analyzed what worked and what didn't. In the room were students who were from many of these places. Many of them had in fact served in government roles working on those same issues. They became the teachers that day, not only to me and their peers but also to each other. They disagreed with each other but found common ground in sharing what motivated them to do this work.

Facilitating open-ended learning is what college is about, so teaching students to be critical, reflective, and respectful is arguably as important as teaching them the concepts, theories, and methods that they use as tools to solve problems.

Ultimately, teaching across disciplines, or even teaching interdisciplinarily, is challenging. It requires attention, patience, and an open mind. It also requires staying with the inevitable friction that arises and using it as a teaching moment in itself. While I initially thought the differences between teaching economics and anthropology were too wide to bridge, I went back to the fundamentals and found more commonalities than differences. I hope my experience is helpful to others teaching anthropology from a different discipline, or even to boost the confidence of anthropologists who find themselves teaching in other fields. More important than amplifying the disciplinary differences is keeping in mind your commitment to teaching and learning, which can triumph over disciplinary idiosyncrasies.