Paper short abstract:

How do we make Anthropology more approachable for future students? – Conducting qualitative interviews and seeking solutions

Paper long abstract:

As members of the student council for social and cultural anthropology at the University of Münster, our task and goal are to represent the students’ interests and requests. However, the engagement in class and the satisfaction with our curriculum and methods of teaching appear to be declining, creating organizational issues for our lecturers and complicating communal studying, which has been an ongoing problem for several semesters. Our goal with this paper is to present qualitative data from first and second semester students about the general satisfaction with the model of our bachelor’s degree program. We intend to carry out interviews and aim to include our students’ perspectives for a more approachable degree, shedding light on both the arising challenges and inspiring aspects of studying anthropology at our university. Furthermore, we seek to point out ideas and concepts that could pose a solution to the aforementioned issues with engagement in classes and that could additionally ease the cooperation between students and the institute for Ethnology itself.