Intro Cultural Ethnographies?

[Matthew Bernius]

For what it's worth (and I'm speaking from my experiences both teaching a
ethnography themed 101 course and from recent TA experiences), I have become
increasingly disenchanted with using full books/ethnographies for teaching
intro level courses. I think it often limited the flexibility of the
professor (or at least it did for me... granted I'm in training) and based
on my TA experiences, I think they can often overwhelm students (especially
depending on the reading/writing expectations).

While it can take more time, I've found that a syllabus composed of
tactically chosen articles and book sections -- which can be effectively
unpacked either in the class (or if you're designing for it, in sections) --
to be far more productive for intro students.

To that point, perhaps you could give a framework of what you meant by an
"ethnography" based course? Is the goals to construct ethnographic
assignments for the students to conduct? Or was it more that you were hoping
to teach fundamental/101 concepts about Anthropology via engagements with
ethnographic data?

One path suggests one set of texts, the other suggests different ones.

- Matt


-----------------------------
Matthew Bernius
PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
http://anthropology.cornell.edu
Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu
mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.mattbernius.com | @mattBernius
My calendar: http://bit.ly/hNWEII


On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Leila Monaghan <leila.monaghan at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi, I am thinking of changing over my intro to cultural anthropology to an
> ethnography based course.
>