Somewhat Off-Topic: Teaching Anthro in Large Sections

[Kenneth Ehrensal]

In the Fall I am teaching Intro to Cultural for the first time in my ... year teaching career (new experience #1) and I am doing two sections in rooms that hold 80 students (new experience # 2 -- I know that many of you will not think that 80 is large, and we also do classes of 150 -- but we have no TAs/GAs here at Kutztown) and I am beginning to think about how I am going to do this.

In my former life in the B-School I/we frequently used clips from popular movies and TV shows to illustrate a point (I personally have the complete Star Trek: Next Generation on DVD because everything my students needed to learn about managing and leading they could learn from Jean-Luc Picard and what they couldn't learn from Jean-Luc they could learn from the 'Dreaded Pirate Roberts' and some classic Monty Python sketches).

So I have been thinking about shows and movies that I could use.  Certainly Mork and Mindy (yes, I am that old) and 3rd Rock from the Sun come to mind.  More subtly, there is Seinfeld. the Simpsons, the Family Guy, South Park; and I recently found a very good condition (and cheap) copy of Krippendorf's Tribe (I am not sure how I will use this, but for $2, I wasn't going to leave it in the bin).

Believing that 1) imitation is the highest form of flattery and 2) that GOOGLE is my friend, I have been searching for examples of how others use film/tv in intro to anthro courses.  While I have found lots of examples where people are using clips of films and tv shows, these all seem to be 'real' ethnographic films, or pieces of or whole shows from PBS and National Geographic.  But I can not find any examples of people using the kinds of movies/tv that I was thinking of.  Am I just looking in the wrong places?  Does anyone out there either do what I am thinking of doing or know anyone who is?  I can not believe that the B-school faculty actually had an original idea (parse that utterance any way you like).



______________________
Kenneth Ehrensal
Associate Professor
Anthropology/Sociology Department
Kutztown University 
k.ehrensal at mac.com