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- Convenors:
-
Benjamin Theobald
(UCL)
Juan Forero Duarte (UCL)
Katarzyna Buzanska (University of Cambridge)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Senate Room
- Sessions:
- Friday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore notions of motivation to assess how the interaction of ideals and desires shapes teaching practices and initiates education projects. Contributions will compare motivation as a thing-in-the-world to be studied and motivation as a critical aspect of teaching anthropology.
Long Abstract:
Education is often about wrangling motivation. Learners and educators are motivated by personal and societal aspirations and entangled in broader educational projects with their own particular motivations. Anthropologists have shown how the interaction and production of diverse modes of education is shaped by ideological contingencies of a cultural, ethical, and political nature. Motivations may be multivalent, fluctuating, and subject to variation across time and place. This panel will seek to unravel a portion of these motivations, exploring educational contexts to assess the interaction of ideals and desires shaping teaching practices and initiating education projects. The panel invites contributors who are interested in drawing on ethnographic sources and/or teaching experience to explore the ways modes of education are transformed by variations in motivation. Our aim here is to both contribute to an anthropological understanding of educational settings and see how local concepts and experiences might inform the way we think about teaching anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 28 June, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will recount experiences teaching community-based rehabilitation workers in Bhutan to assist stroke survivors. It will speculate on the adaptation of future courses, focusing on how motivation may differ between the trainees and the stroke survivors.
Paper long abstract:
Working with stroke survivors requires an open understanding from the trainee community-based rehabilitation (CBR) worker to place them at the center of the interaction, usually termed 'person-centered care.' Developing this perspective is often a challenge to the trainee. Taught and developed by an experienced clinician educator and anthropologist, this course in Bhutan was implemented to bring the trainees away from a strictly biomedical gaze in their decision-making process toward treatment approaches guided by the stroke survivor and their lived experiences within the sociocultural context. Despite not having medical backgrounds, often, the well-meaning trainees in the past courses were deterred from the impact of sociocultural aspects of the stroke survivors' lives and instead emphasized the medical pathology post-stroke. This paper will explore how these trainees' motivations may have developed using an informed anthropological approach to seek changes to future courses. Future work may be structured within a more collaborative framework based on an iterative process of listening more openly to stroke survivors' narratives regarding their needs within the community and the family networks in which they live.
Paper short abstract:
As a green tiger, Singapore's focus on green urbanism has been an undeniable success. Less said is how these complexities are taught, and where ideologies of conservation and futurism collide in climate education; especially in inculcating regimes of care in its citizens for their wild neighbours.
Paper long abstract:
Singapore has – not undeservedly – a reputation as something of a ‘green tiger’ in Southeast Asia. With an increasing focus on green urbanism, the city has grown into what many consider to be a model that many developed states seek to emulate. Less said, however, are the ways in which Singaporeans themselves mediate with the rapid interdigitations between the urban and wild, and how this has in some part become a pedagogical issue. In a city where otters rack up hundreds of thousands in property damage per annum, and the threat of hornbill attacks become a question of when and not if, it has rapidly become the role of government and civilian educators to teach the public on how to coexist with their ‘wild neighbours.’
Yet these dialogics are themselves riddled with complexity, especially in how they embody ideas of both conservation and futurism; of interdigitating man and nature, and keeping the environment safe and segregated. Using a mix of my MPhil fieldwork and autoethnographic data, I aim to present how these come to the fore in the educational practices surrounding multispecies interfaces (Fuentes 2010; Barua 2023), which index particular forms of care that function by – effectively – avoiding nonhuman species. Indeed, when educators encourage fascination and care for the wild and feral, while simultaneously moralising which forms of care are legitimate in a wider ‘green’ regime, one glosses over the multivalent raisons d'etre for why citizens become activists in the first place.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the motivations underlying education systems by considering assessment as a primary indicator of educational values. It draws on ethnographic evidence collected in 2021 as part of a study on Buddhist monastic schooling in northern Thailand.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore the motivations underlying education systems by considering assessment as a primary indicator of educational values. Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected in 2021 as part of a study on Buddhist monastic schooling in northern Thailand, the paper will discuss the ways discourse on examinations helped to shape how education was valued by students and staff within the institution. Of particular interest are the competing modes of discourse that hold currency at the monastic school. On the one hand, staff at the school were engaged in a process of constructing an image of their school as a modern institution in line with national directives on the form and value of education. On the other, the monastic school is a fundamentally religious institution. As such, the students - all boys who have ordained as novice monks for the duration of their secondary schooling - are expected to develop virtues and abilities in line with a Buddhist ideal of comportment. The paper will present ethnographic vignettes demonstrating how competing ideals of motivation could cause frictions in how examinations were perceived and carried out.