Paper short abstract:

Using critical reflection, this paper investigates the nature of teaching and learning social anthropology in the context of empowering senior students to become excellent tutors. It draws on autobiographical experience, student evaluations, colleagues' opinions and the tertiary teaching literature.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses the tool of critical reflection to analyse my previous five years of working with senior students to enhance the quality of first year tutorials for both my first year students and their tutors (my senior students). As Brookfield (1995) notes, the possible sources of reflection for such a study are fourfold. They are formed from my autobiographical experience and also my student's eyes (through an analysis of five years of feedback forms collected for the last three years after each tutorial). It also includes my colleague's experiences (drawing on the results of targeted quality improvement intervention into tutoring with a selected first year course) and the theoretical literature on tertiary teaching. This large body of data is analysed within the historical context of changing tertiary teaching fashions in New Zealand (Robertson and Bond, 2004). It also considers the nature of social anthropology as a distinctive disciplinary context of anthropological knowledge and how this affects learning outcomes for tutorials. In doing so I take a critical view of Neumann, Parry and Becher's (2002) characterisation of anthropology as a 'soft, pure' knowledge system in their typology of teaching and learning in disciplinary concepts. My findings suggest the importance of including a political economy perspective into any critical reflection on course design, the value of including individual teacher ideologies into any tutorial teaching programme and a summary of the most successful initiatives produced from teaching and learning with my tutors.