Teaching anthropological approaches

In the final two years of my PhD, I designed and taught three undergraduate seminars on the anthropology of digital technologies. I developed several projects to help students understand technologies in complex and holistic ways.

For each of the seminars, I began with an auto-ethnographic project. There were several layers to this project. First, it provided students with the most accessible data: their personal experience. Second, the project required that students integrate in their personal narratives concepts that we were learning about in class. While students might have assumed that an auto-ethnographic narrative would be easy to write, it challenged them to become full-fledged theorists about their own experiences.

To develop their projects, I had students submit weekly journals about their experiences, which would serve as the raw material for their papers. This process of writing pushed them to begin writing before having planned their papers, which was designed to replicate the open-endedness and ambiguity of the research process. Students recorded their experiences without yet knowing the direction they would go. Once the journaling process was complete, students then had to figure out how to turn disparate accounts into a single, integrated narrative.

More to come.