We are well underway in the Fall semester and my Cultural Anthropology class has been a delight this semester already. Now that it’s October, I have already given the class their first exam and a majority performed well on it. This class is a bit different than previous classes because I am located in a larger lecture hall and I have more students (60) in this class. In fact, I prefer larger classes. With larger classes, they tend to be more diverse so it allows me to experiment with so much more lecture material.
For example with this larger class, I like to add more class exercises in which students have to think differently about the cultural anthropological topics. Early in the semester, I took the class outside to do observational fieldwork of student behavior. Check out a couple of pictures from our visit outside. Even though I had told them that we were going to go outside, they were a bit surprised when I told them that we were going outside. Overall, it was a fun class exercise!
Now that I have been teaching this Cultural Anthropology class for the past 30 years, I still know how to meet the course objectives which are:
1. To provide a comprehensive introduction to the discipline of Cultural Anthropology – its fundamental principles and key concepts.
2. To encourage awareness of cultural and human diversity.
3. To help all students make sense of our increasingly interconnected world and to find their particular place in it.
4. To help students to find out how they can make a difference in our local and global communities.