Paper short abstract:

This paper explores stories of ethnographic encounter that become classroom narratives used for learning and understanding. Specifically, I discuss successful student-teacher dialogic interactions build around narratives utilized to make issues, often esoteric, tangible to a diverse student body

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores stories of ethnographic encounter that have become classroom narratives used for learning and understanding. Specifically, I discuss successful student-teacher dialogic interactions build around narratives utilized to make issues, often esoteric, tangible to a diverse student body. I argue that anthropology and real life connect powerfully in the classroom, where our best stories give life to ideas and make them stick for an increasingly diverse audience. Through their emotional resonance these moments of retellings establish a bond across which information can be shared, making complex knowledge of different realities accessible to undergraduates, laymen, and academics alike. These stories we tell in the classroom are the stuff of anthropology. They are meant to explain and yet they do much more. They invite an audience in. They create a bond, a connection through which to share information. They are performative experiments designed to entice an ambivalent crowd into hearing and absorbing things we think are important and amount to a possible set of ways to view the world. These stories we tell are, in short, an untapped body of knowledge that deserve a wider audience.