Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores a four-year project in teaching collaboratively with undergraduate students, asking how the creation of spaces that highlight mutuality, autonomy, and responsibility might reshape anthropological approaches to learning.

Paper long abstract:

This Pecha Kucha presentation explores a four-year program in collaborative teaching with undergraduate students at the University of Louisville (Kentucky, U.S) that is predicated upon seeing students as responsible actors within their own learning processes (Weimer 2013) and as co-creators of learning spaces and curricula (Cook-Sather 2019; Lubicz-Nawrocka 2019). The Peer Educator program brings together students who have successfully completed an introductory cultural anthropology course and who elect to join a subsequent class focused on pedagogy, lesson planning, and facilitation. Peer Educators create and coordinate lessons for peers in general education courses, offering a chance for students to hear explanations of concepts and apply learning to case studies within a non-hierarchical space. Peer Educators report expanded skills in facilitation, public speaking, and problem-solving; improved content knowledge; and new perspectives on their wider courses. They also develop a sense of solidarity and mutual aid within the small, collaborative classes, which results in feelings of validation, support, and growth. This presentation explains the foundations of the program, the impacts on student learning, and the possibilities of collaborative pedagogies for re-imagining anthropological praxis around teaching and learning. Building from this case study, I ask what it might mean to radically reframe teaching practice within the neoliberal academy (Nosterman & Pusey 2012) and to identify anthropological pedagogies of alterity.