with President Gutmann


Creating a Learning Community
My teaching philosophy is simple: to transform each section that I lead into a learning community. In such an environment the students understand that not only are their individual opinions valuable to everyone else in class, but that they can learn just as much from their fellow classmates as from me, and most importantly, that I have just as much to learn from them.

Critical Thinking
As a high school student I was trained to be successful on standardized exams; instructors taught to these tests. Unfortunately, I do not believe that much has changed in the past ten years. Students today are often not taught to think critically, but rather, to memorize and regurgitate information. Of course I want students to be interested in what we know, but even more importantly, I want them to inquire how and why we know what we know. As a graduate student teaching assistant I believe that my responsibility is not to prepare students for a final exam or term paper, but for the future, for whatever avenue they choose to pursue, and critical thinking is a crucial skill that these students can utilize for the rest of their lives. One way in which I try to foster critical thinking, is through tying all lessons back to contemporary issues, where anthropology becomes less a corpus of specific knowledge, but a different conceptual lens through which students can experience their world.

Teaching How to Learn
If I were to operationalize my pedagogical ontology, it would consist of four components: theory, discussion, practice, and understanding. It is through these four themes that I attempt to create this community of learners, assisting my students in the process of engaging with new ideas and perspectives. I will illustrate this process using an example from a recitation that I conducted earlier this semester for Anthropology 001: Introduction to Archaeology.

Several weeks ago I found myself with a dilemma: how to introduce the feminist critique of archaeology to my students without provoking the knee-jerk reactions based on stereotypes from popular media on what feminism is all about. I wanted to avoid the often polarizing responses that many have to feminism so that all of the student could, for at least one hour, see things from another, different perspective. This, I believe, is the utility of learning; not convincing students to think a particular way, but to offer them many perspectives to consider as they struggle to find their own voice in their years as an undergraduate.

To introduce the theory component of this lesson, I assigned the students a challenging reading written by two predominant feminist archaeologists, Margaret Conkey and Joan Gero. Of course, there is much more facile literature that I could have used, summary sections of archaeological theory texts, for instance, but I believe that it is important to challenge students with primary material. However, leaving a student to struggle through a difficult reading fosters frustration and inhibits learning. As a solution to this problem, I have found that providing students with a list of guided reading questions is a key pedagogical tool that helps them to tease out the main arguments set forth in literature that may seem impenetrable to some.

When we convened for recitation I rooted the discussion in the list of reading questions as a springboard from which we, as a group, could flesh out the details of this theory and its implications for archaeology. It is only through such dialogue that learning becomes possible. If one lectures at students, they will forget that information by the day’s end. For these students to truly internalize the message that feminist theory was sending they had to do more than just read an article, and furthermore, they should not be treated as passive instruments of information acquisition; this is where practice comes in. I created a PowerPoint slide presentation with a dozen images from National Geographic, The New York Times, and their very own textbook. I asked the students to apply the feminist critique that we had discussed to these images. Not only was it an enjoyable exercise, but an effective one. The students were able to engage with the images and made the connections to the many arguments set forth in the article that they had been assigned. A dialogue was created between the students and literature, but between each other as well.

Finally, I presented the students an image from the Daily Pennsylvanian. I wanted them to realize that this theory is neither irrelevant to the present day, nor merely an academic concern, but exists in their world. And this is the final component of my pedagogical epistemology: understanding. To weave the feminist critique of archaeology – or any topic, no matter how idiosyncratically anthropological it may at first be presented – back into their reality. Ensuring their understanding of any theoretical topic that I introduce, means that I have given these students an analytical tool to use in any facet of their life. Of course, it is important not to forget that in this classroom community teaching and learning are multi-directional. Through their reactions to the feminist critique of archaeology, and our ensuing discussion, the students taught me new ways that I might present this material in the future, but more importantly, they taught me what feminism means to the youth of today.