PI: Samuel Martínez, Associate Professor, Department of
Anthropology, UConn Storrs
Co-PI: Kathryn Libal, Assistant Professor in Residence,
Women’s Studies Program and Department of Anthropology, UConn Storrs; Email:
samuel.martinez@uconn.edu & kathryn.libal@uconn.edu
Proposed
course title: Anthropology through Film (ANTH 1XY)
Goals: We will develop an introductory-level course in
cultural anthropology, based largely on in-class film screenings, discussion
and writing, rather than lecture. In-class and WebCT-based discussion, journal
writing and structured in-class and take-home writing assignments will
challenge the students to emulate varied styles of ethnographic note taking and
reportage.
Course
objectives: As in other
introductory-level courses in cultural anthropology, students in this course
will
·
Learn certain
basic concepts and methods by which cultural anthropologists study the beliefs,
behavior, and ways of life of people in other human groups
·
Gain an
understanding of the range of variability of human societies, through case
studies of other people’s life-ways, social arrangements, and belief systems
·
By learning about
human groups in other times and places, and comparing these to the
Additionally, Anthropology
through Film will
·
Engage students
in more active learning than is common in lecture-focused courses
·
Develop students’
writing and critical-thinking skills
·
Develop students’
ability to view film with a critical awareness of the filmmaker’s approach,
perspective, and narrative techniques.
Course
format: Two meetings per week for
lecture, films, in-class writing and discussion, and one meeting per week of
discussion section; 10 to 20 sections of 19 students each.
Rationale: For some years, we have independently supplemented
our introductory-level course lectures with PowerPoint slides, still images,
and perhaps one or two film clips each class meeting. Student evaluations
consistently indicate the films are considered particularly thought provoking.
While it is evident our students like the ethnographic film clips, they
generally relate to these solely at the level of content and gain little by way
of analytic and critical-thinking skills from viewing the films. Much more
could be gained – in student interest, active learning, and writing and
analytic experience – by taking time to ask the students to make an active
engagement with the films’ content and form.
Numerous introductory-level anthropology courses
around the country are taught through the medium of film. Libal was a teaching
assistant in such a course and took a graduate-level seminar on visual
anthropology at the
Using writing to promote thinking is an approach that fits naturally
with the cultural anthropologist’s professional practice, in which a range of
writing and note-taking styles are widely used, including journals, field
notes, surveys, genealogies, letters, article abstracts, book reviews, and
formal reports of findings. Anthropology
through Film will require students to write in each of these styles,
developing skills of accurate description and the ability to suspend premature
explanation, while also noting their own emotional reactions to other people’s
often strange-seeming ways.
Pertinence to the new General Education requirements: Anthropology
through Film may gain approval as a Group One (Arts and Humanities) and
Group Four (Diversity and Multiculturalism) course, as well as possibly
qualifying for fulfillment of the Writing Competency requirement.
·
Group One
criteria: Anthropology through Film will
both examine the historical and cultural variety of human experience and aim to
enhance students’ understanding and appreciation of modes of visual and textual
representation.
·
Group Four
criteria: The course’s main organizing problem will be understanding how we can
cross borders of language, culture and human difference, to gain knowledge of
other people’s perspectives on belief and behavior. This approach is grounded
in empirical study and comparison of different human groups’ distinctive
histories, ideas, values, and creative expressions, hallmarks of the
ethnographic field method and of ethnological theory.
·
Writing
competency criteria: The course will approach writing as a means of enabling
learning, by challenging its students to recognize and emulate the
characteristic techniques and sensibility of ethnographic representation.
Rather than pretending to graft a “W” onto an existing large-enrolment lecture
course, the task of developing a Writing Competency component will be
facilitated by the shift in this course from lecture-focused to primarily
active-learning classroom approaches.
Relation
to existing departmental course offerings: ANTH 100 has recently gained approval to be offered as a “W” but
insufficient attention has been given to how its instructors may surmount the
difficulties of teaching writing in a large-enrolment class. We hope that our
project will provide a model, in its course material, teaching methods, and
ways of providing guidance and supervision to the TAs, applicable to the
challenge of developing other large-enrolment introductory-level “W” courses.
Project
activities: We will begin selecting
films in May 2005. Many of the films we will evaluate for course use are
currently either in Babbidge or the collections of other nearby college
libraries. Sufficient funds to purchase a small number of films should be
available from the library acquisitions budgets of the Department of
Anthropology and various area studies programs.
During the fall semester, we will continue to work on course
development tasks, with a target date of Spring 2006 for teaching a
small-enrolment pilot of this course. The large-enrolment course will debut in
Fall 2006. A one-course teaching reduction during Fall 2005 would permit us to
do background reading on film theory and approaches to teaching film literacy,
while also developing course material (e.g., film reactions worksheets and
thought questions for each film; in-class and take-home writing assignments,
with grading protocols for my TAs; weekly writing tips and FAQ sheets;
questions for weekly WebCT self-quizzes and for the mid-term and final exams;
selection of readings; and preparation of lectures and PowerPoint slides).
Professor Norma Bouchard, director of the Film Studies Minor, has kindly
offered to provide guidance on the scholarly literature on film form and
approaches to teaching “film literacy.” Anticipating that adequate support and
oversight of the TAs’ work will be crucial to success in developing the writing
competency component of this course, we also plan to seek guidance from the
director of the
Evaluation: Entry and exit surveys will be developed with the
assistance of experts in the Institute for Teaching and Learning, to measure
before-and-after change in the students’ cross-cultural knowledge and
attitudes. A mid-term questionnaire will solicit their assessments of the value
of each major course component.
Department
Head: Professor W. Penn Handwerker
has reviewed this proposal and kindly agreed to provide resources for offering
the course at least once per year, beginning 2006/07, if the project is funded
and completed.
Dear GEOC:
Thank you for your tentative approval of our Gen Ed
Course Development Grant proposal for ANTH 1XY, "Anthropology Through
Film."
We write to respond to the following two questions
posed by the Committee.
1.
Explain the allocation of the grant funds, as they appear to be
insufficient to provide course release for two faculty in the fall semester.
PI, Samuel Martínez, will have a
one-course release in fall 2005. We request that the remaining project funds be
held for summer salary for co-PI, Kathryn Libal. With this support, we
anticipate being able to present a proposal for approval of this course to the
Senate and CLAS C&C Committees in the fall of 2005.
2. Provide greater detail on the new model for
guidance and supervision of TAs.
One clarification may be in order concerning what is
“new” about the model for guidance and supervision of the TAs that we propose
to develop in Anthropology Through Film. While a course fulfilling the Writing
Competency (W) requirement at the 100-level would be new to the Anthropology
Department, the English Department has decades of experience overseeing the
teaching of writing courses by graduate students. The staff of the
This said, working with our Anthropology TAs presents
particular challenges, which must be surmounted if we are to succeed in
developing a Writing Competency component in this class. Unlike in the English
Department, our graduate students do not all begin with the supposition that
writing is a major constitutive dimension of their own professional identities.
Secondly, existing pressures on our TAs’ time will also be worsened by adding
the demands of evaluating and providing guidance on writing to their existing
responsibilities for clarifying and reviewing anthropological course content.
Recognizing that our TAs also have less experience in teaching writing than
English grad students have, we will also likely face a greater challenge in
maintaining a minimum of consistency with regard to the content and level of
evaluation and support that each TA provides to his/her students.
The specifics of our model for guidance and
supervision of the TAs largely remain to be developed but certain general goals
and approaches can be identified. Ideally, the TAs for this class will be
selected from our students with the best writing skills. It will also be
important to secure TA assignments for this course far enough in advance to
permit the TAs to benefit from instructors’ workshops through the
Finally, it bears noting that our approaches will be
tested in the small-enrolment pilot of this course that will be taught in
Spring 2006.
sincerely,
Samuel Martinez and Kathryn Libal
[1] Heider, Karl, Seeing Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology Through Film, 3rd ed. (2004, Allyn & Bacon).