From the May 2004 Anthropology News

Bringing Digital Media Into Anthropology Classrooms

Stacy Lathrop
AN Editor

Can digital technology improve the teaching of anthropology? Last year the anthropology departments at Columbia University and the London School of Economics were awarded a $2 million grant by the NSF and a similar organization in England, the Joint Information Systems Committee, to fund a project that hopes to show how it might.

This collaborative Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching (DART) project “has really only got underway in the last nine months or so,” reported anthropologist Charles Stafford, one of the principal instigators of the project at LSE. At Columbia two postdoctoral fellows, Gustav Pebbles and Rashmi Sadana, have been hired to serve as liaisons between the anthropology department and the editors of the digital anthropology publication. At LSE two more postdoctoral fellows, Luke Freeman and Jerome Lewis, have developed and implemented digital resources in their classes this year. The Columbia fellows plan to do so come fall 2004.

“ At this stage the research fellows are primarily developing resources specific to the teaching needs of the two institutions,” said Stafford. At the LSE, for example, our research fellows have been developing interactive tools that help explain to first year undergraduates how cumulative fieldwork experiences are transformed, eventually, into ethnographic analyses.”

Questioning Conventional Teaching
In thinking about how the DART project can improve anthropology teaching, the LSE fellows note: “The majority of digital applications exploit the storage and retrieval potential of digital media.” Going beyond this, they are focusing “on developing an approach to teaching which enables the incorporation of a whole range of interactive strategies of which digital tools are just one. The long-term outcome of the project is the promotion of the idea that a wide range of digital media can be harnessed as a means of supporting embodied, experiential learning.”

As Stafford stressed, LSE has “a very strong commitment to face-to-face teaching.” In integrating digital resources, the anthropologists are not replacing such teaching, but they are questioning conventional pedagogy. “Current teaching practice is dominated by a culture which relies heavily on one-way information flows,” said the LSE fellows. “Students’ learning depends on listening a lot, reading a lot and writing a lot. While respecting the useful and necessary aspects of this culture, the research fellows have sought to supplement it in a number of ways.”

“ In order to promote voyages of self-learning rather than dictated knowledge,” the LSE fellows have tried to establish contexts that challenge students’ obvious assumptions. To try and get away from purely textual learning, they have confronted students with memorable images, video observation and music listening exercises. They do not expect students to listen, read and write at the same time, but use questions to guide them to discover for themselves the significance of the topic taught, while emphasizing group and pair work. They also are focusing on variety, spontaneity and engagement by varying the way students report, emphasizing positive feedback relationships between student learning and staff research, and not having students pre-prepare presentations.

Although the Columbia fellows sat in the LSE classrooms where digital resources are being used this spring, and in the classes they will teach next fall, they are not yet fully certain how they will incorporate the digital resources they are developing into their teaching. Yet, Sadana said she hopes that the online resource will help her to introduce undergraduates to the procedure of creating an ethnography: “We want to demystify the process of fieldwork and doing an ethnography,” she said. “Students read ethnographies and take them as finished products. We want to help them understand what it means to interpret a society. Give them a sense of the variables involved in fieldwork.”

Through bi-weekly assignments and class discussion, she said she plans to use the digital resources to make students engage in a variety of cultural materials. “Our goal is not to produce more information, but to create a different and critical understanding of the material and discipline.”

Nicholas Dirks, one of the principal instigators at Columbia stated in a release on the project: “We hope to find innovative ways to use digital technology to advance our teaching program in a number of areas in which we have especially close links with the LSE, including the study of South and East Asia, kinship and gender, and anthropological theories and methods.”

Developing Digital Tools
The LSE fellows have developed three digital tools for their course Reading Other Cultures. A video interpretation tool called “What’s going on?” aims to take the experience of interpretation a step further by introducing the language component and the developmental aspect of understanding. The tool enables students to see that understanding and analysis build up over time, that there are many ways of interpreting the same events, and that an ethnographer can easily be misled. A simulation tool called “Betsileo rice challenge” aims to challenge the students’ understanding of the typical analytical categories used to structure ethnographies. It allows students to experience for themselves the complex series of decisions made by Betsileo farmers, and gives them a sense of the repercussions of those decisions over the long and short term. A low-cost video-conferencing tool called “Meet the Ethnographer” aims to get students to exploit their understanding of the link between fieldwork, ethnography and analysis in framing critical questions to be asked live to the ethnographer in person through a video link.

Sadana’s goal for the course Introduction to South Asian History and Culture is to teach students how and why the themes of religious reform, nationalism, gender, and caste became central to modern Indian identity during British colonial rule, and to relate the issues that arose during that period to contemporary issues and events in South Asia. Students are exposed to political debates about Indian society and culture during the British colonial period through speeches, dialogues, pamphlets, essays, autobiographies, and other primary texts. At Columbia, DART is developing a library of digital assets including interactive maps, timelines, photo essays, and video excerpts, as well as links to South Asian media and other outlets devoted to contemporary issues and controversies.

The Ethnographic Imagination course provides an introduction to the paradigmatic shifts of 20th-century anthropological thought and seeks to develop students’ awareness of the extent to which the description of a culture is always an interpretation of that culture. In the fall, students will work with digital resources through which they can immerse themselves in a single culture and discover the variety of ways it has been represented through history. Focusing on the Sherpas of Nepal, the site will provide excerpts from ethnographic texts as well as music, pictures, video and other gray materials.

“ The DART project has ongoing evaluation streams,” said Stafford, “so we intend to be able to say something concrete about the advantages (and possible disadvantages) of using the technology. I can certainly say that this year our students have responded enthusiastically to the teaching of our two fellows, and to their use of digital resources in the classroom. We’ve learned a lot. But it’s also been an expensive and time-consuming enterprise, which probably wouldn’t have been possible without generous NSF and JISC funding. One challenge for us is to come up with simple, useful ideas for teaching that can then be taken forward by others without enormous cost.”

Following other discipline-focused websites—primarily in international relations, earth and environmental sciences and history—produced by the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), the hope is to make these resources available to others by embedding them in a digital learning environment for wider use. This environment will be a highly stable, flexible, and scalable digital library infrastructure, and it will allow for customized use across the humanities and social sciences. It is expected, said EPIC Director Kate Wittenberg, that at the completion of the three-year grant the project will be self-sustaining, primarily through institutional subscriptions.