Somewhat Off-Topic: Teaching Anthro in Large Sections

[Kephart, Ronald]

On 5/2/10 9:44 AM, "Kenneth Ehrensal" <k.ehrensal at MAC.COM> wrote:

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).

Ken,

I do use some of the NatGeo things, but not many because I am not, in general, a big fan of NatGeo. I especially like to use their film on the Baka, though. Also, even in cultural, I like to use Hugo van Lawick's film about the Gombe chimps. And there's the segment from Millennium "A Poor Man Shames Us All" that I nearly always use.

This past semester in linguistics I used the Muppet rendition of "Jabberwocky" to illustrate the separation of form and meaning. It and many other tidbits are on Youtube, which means you can just pull them right up on the computer in the classroom (all our classrooms are "smart"- smarter than our students, actually, but that's another post). We usually do a language analysis problem in Klingon and I keep meaning to show them the video short of Mark Ocrand (sp?) explaining how he created Klingon, but I always forget to take the video with me from home (it's on Disc 2 of "The Search for Spock").

As for theater-type films, I haven't used them much. However, this summer I am absolutely determined to use the John Sayles film Matewan in light of the recent coal-mining incidents, to drive home the dysfunctionality of the US cultural value of hyper-independence training, which creates monsters like this Blankenship criminal asshole, which leads to anti-unionism, deregulation, and ultimately the deaths of miners. (If you ask, I'll tell you how I really feel; all my maternal uncles were East Kentucky miners.)

Do you use Blackboard at Kutztown? In classes as large as you're talking about I usually put all assessment online, so they can do tests and quizzes outside of class. This is a self-defense measure: my Intro to Anthropology last fall had 200 students, and like you we have no TA's.

Ron