Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze our experiences with teaching anthropology to liberal arts students. We will explore how to teach the values of our discipline to a new generation of students with broad interests, who may not have chosen to study society from an anthropological perspective.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on our experiences teaching a course on identity, diversity and related issues in a recently established Liberal Arts College in the Netherlands. Our course was mandatory for all students and part of their core curriculum. After four attempts and making various alterations to the course curriculum and teaching methods, we are still confronted with resistance and 'passive aggression' from a number of students. In this paper we attempt to analyze our experiences and we will try to answer the following question: How can we teach the value of our discipline to a new generation of students with broad interests who may not have chosen to study society from an anthropological perspective? In this paper we will firstly describe the scientific and institutional contexts in which we teach the course and we will try to unravel the elements which contributed to an unsafe teaching and learning environment. Second, we will attempt to analyze and explain the personal resistance that many students felt while attending our course and while dealing with sensitive and personal issues such as identity, diversity, reflexivity, and subjectivity. Finally we will describe a number of basic requirements for successful teaching and we will try to develop new (pedagogic) strategies to teach a new and often critical public.