Short Abstract:

Much ostensibly research-led teaching in Anthropology, despite acknowledging variation in students’ ways of thinking and knowing, ends up reproducing established disciplinary paradigms. Yet this runs counter to Anthropology’s declared aim, to take other ways seriously. To break the cycle of paradigmatic reproduction means recognising that every student is different. As a discipline, Anthropology calls for self-awareness of one’s own singular approach to things. For students, developing this awareness is a research endeavour in itself. It cannot however be taught. Anthropological educators can only tell of how it was for them. This student-led studio will ask what possibilities arise from rethinking student-teacher relations along these lines.

Description:

In this studio we welcome ideas that trouble the maieutic relations that often structure relations between teachers and learners in higher education. Contexts explicitly identified as ‘research-led’ can miss something foundational to anthropological research: the capacity for one’s ideas and practices to be altered by those of others. Such contexts can, indeed, mask the perpetuation of the very kind of teaching that aims to bring paradigmatic ideas to student consciousness. Even if anthropological educators are ready to acknowledge different ways of thinking among their students, their own knowledge may remain untroubled or unaltered by them. The result is to produce sameness out of otherness.

For a discipline like Anthropology, for which exposure to the unfamiliar is key to learning, this outcome is counterintuitive. It is not that we have to accept all and any ideas from novice students, but we do need to think seriously about the consequences of the reproduction of sameness. With universities as they are, students might find themselves in much the same position as the marginalised, whose differences are registered, even accommodated, but never permitted to change anything. The result is no less than the theft of the future. One way to avoid such an outcome is by recognising the unique way in which every student comes to know what they do. This uniqueness is especially important in Anthropology, since what is so distinctive about anthropological work is that the person herself, and not some external apparatus, is the principal means by which material is gathered and analysed. It is important, therefore, that the student should become aware of, and reveal, her particular biases, situations and connections, allowing the recipients of her work both to interpret her account and to respond to it in their own ways. Since Anthropology is about coming to know the familiar world anew, it is critical to be able to show how it is known. Becoming aware of the processes of learning and understanding embedded in one’s own anthropological practice – its philosophy if you will – is a genuine research endeavour. In this, we are all in the same boat. We cannot, as teachers, instruct students in this particular aspect of practice, or expect them to replicate our ways of doing things. We can only tell them about how it was for us, and then be prepared to compare, to be surprised by, challenged by and learn from, how they each did it.

What other possibilities become available when we rethink the relations between students and teachers? What urgencies, anxieties and concerns provoke us to rethink them? What consequences might follow? For whom, or for what? This studio not only invites participants to respond to these questions with proposals, provocations, solutions and interjections of their own; it also welcomes them into a context in which the studio’s student co-conveners will take the lead, alongside seasoned anthropologists, in addressing them. What will they make of what they encounter in the studio, and what negotiations, conversations and disputations might ensue that could trouble the reproduction of paradigmatic disciplinary expertise in the classroom? What can this exercise teach us about student-teacher relations?