Tag: Education

Advice for PhD students approaching the examination process in Aotearoa New Zealand (or other contexts featuring external examination of theses), by Dr April K. Henderson

I am delighted to share this invaluable resource from my friend and colleague, Dr. April K Henderson. April has written the most thoughtful and practical advice I’ve seen on navigating the PhD examination process, which involves a viva/oral defence here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her advice is grounded in years of supervisory experience in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and exemplifies her generous mentorship. If you or someone you know is approaching a thesis examination in Aotearoa New Zealand, this is essential reading.

Approaching examiners’ reports

Your first and lasting response to examiners’ reports—even the one with the toughest-to-take criticism—should be gratitude for the detailed engagement with your work they provide. Let’s face it: reading a thesis, even a beautifully written one, is a bit of a slog, but these three people read yours, re-read it, thought deeply about, formulated opinions and crafted several (or five, or sometimes even eight) pages of detailed discussion and advice. No one else, apart from your supervisors, will read your work this closely.

Examiners are people, and just like other people we know (friends, relatives) some examiners are better at wording their critiques in a generous and supportive way, while others may be more blunt. Some critiques you may easily see the truth of, others you may reject. But no matter how they sound, examiners’ comments are always (at least in my experience) intended well and meant to improve your thesis. Therefore, the first note you should sound in the oral exam is gratitude that these esteemed, busy people have given so much time and attention to your work.

In your oral exam, you will need to be prepared to address critiques in your reports. Here’s some strategies for preparing to do that.

So you have your examiners’ reports—what to do now? 

I advise students to work your way methodically through all the reports, developing a list of every critique/request made and who made it. More specifically, I suggest developing a spreadsheet with three columns.

In the left column of the spreadsheet, enter each critique/request in a new row.

In the middle column, write a statement about whether the critique was echoed or contradicted in the other two reports. Why this middle column is important:

  1. It will help identify the key areas of agreement across all three reports, and these will most likely feed into predictable questions in the oral exam and possibly revisions you will be asked to make;
  2. It will help you to have perspective on the reports when taken as a whole. Otherwise, our natural human negativity bias means that we will obsess about the most critical bits in the reports, losing sight of the big picture—including that some examiners may have loved the exact same aspect of the thesis that another hated. So Professor X thought you did a really poor job elaborating [key concept] in your thesis. But Professor Y and Dr Z thought you did a great job and said so! This middle column can help your fragile scholarly ego maintain perspective. It also can suggest positive strategies for approaching the stinging bits of critique in the oral exam: if examiners’ responses were contradictory on a particular point, it can be useful to gently (and non-defensively!) work a reference to the positive commendations of other examiners into your considered response to the critique (a suggestion for doing this below). Which brings me to the final column…

In the right column, put your carefully considered response to the critique and what (if anything) you are willing to do to address it, including practical changes you might make to the final thesis. Also note for yourself if/how you might (implicitly or more directly) work a reference to the critique in your opening fifteen minute presentation. (More about how you will use and draw on this column is at the end of “The Oral Exam” section).

Here is an example of a table of examiners’ comments and student responses. (Note: this is an anonymised, generalised composite, not a particular student’s exact spreadsheet).

CRITIQUECONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE in REPORTS?MY RESPONSE
1. One examiner said thesis invokes divergent conceptions of [key concept] from multiple theorists and “the way in which [key concept] is being used as expounded in Chapter 2 and especially in later descriptions and analysis could have been clearer” (Professor X  p2)Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports, who write approvingly of thesis’s use of [key concept]:
“[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.		Two examiners were very satisfied with my treatment of [key concept]. I can offer an implicit response to Professor X’s critique in my opening 15-minute presentation in the oral exam; As part of narrating the thesis’s key original contributions, I can say something like: “I agree with examiners that the concept of [key concept] is critical to the thesis. It underpinned my analysis of x and y and allowed me to see z. Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.”
 
If Professor X raises a specific question later in the exam, I am prepared to restate/elaborate clearly on the thesis’s use of [key concept], making reference to particular passages in the thesis that I feel address Professor X’s questions.
Ways to do this non-defensively: open the response by agreeing with X that clarity is important. After pointing to specific passages that I hope address X’s critique, close by welcoming suggestions X may have for bringing further clarity.
2. “Textual descriptions of x and y are rather hard going” (Professor X  p2)Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports. Both of these other examiners are trained in [specifically relevant field] and write of the thesis’s textual descriptions in very positive terms: “[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.Professor X’s critique seems a bit pointed here—it’s very specific and not shared by the other examiners who have more expertise in [relevant field]. I don’t think I need to pick up on it in my opening presentation.
 
If it comes up later in the exam, I could discuss why I chose to describe x and y in the level of detail I did, the relationship of these descriptions to my analysis, and end by acknowledging with gratitude Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of my descriptions in their reports.
3. “The Conclusion [was short]. I craved more. What I expected here was a greater connection between the research questions posed at the start, the subtle exposition of complex theories, the graphic depictions of [thesis content], the lived realities of [thesis participants] than is presented in these short, final paragraphs. This was a profound disappointment and I can only presume that the author ran out of time or energy. This deficiency might be redressed in the final version.”
 (Professor X  p7)		While phrased more generously, the other examiners agreed:
 
“The thesis concludes with a short chapter that briefly summarises [xxx], reiterates the central argument, and sketches some preliminary ideas for future research.” (Dr Z p4)
 
“[The student] might well want, in any future revision, to expand and amplify the thoughts indexed in their concluding chapter.” (Professor Y)		This critique was shared across all reports and is likely to come up in oral exam. I agree with examiners that my Conclusion was too short. It was not a matter of running out of time or energy, though—just running out of word limit.

I think there’s a way to acknowledge this shortcoming of the thesis towards the end of my opening 15-minute presentation, and to do it in a way that explains this shortcoming as an unfortunate by-product of what examiners appreciated as the strengths of the thesis: all of the rich detail in the substantive chapters meant that the thesis was at the maximum word limit.
 
In terms of practical steps to address what we all agree was a shortcoming in the thesis: prior to the oral, I will gain clarity from FGR on whether the revised, final (post-exam) thesis can exceed the 100,00 word limit – if so, I will readily offer to expand the Conclusion. If not, I will explain the word constraints to examiners and seek their advice on parts of the thesis they think could be sacrificed to make space for an expanded Conclusion.

Once you’ve got a draft of this spreadsheet, circulate it to your supervisors in advance of your preparing-for-the-oral-exam meeting. When you meet, supervisors can help you go through the list and provide additional guidance on ways to approach responses to critiques in the oral.

Note that this table is a tool for you to help make sense of the examiners’ reports and prepare in the lead up to the oral exam. More about how to use this table is at the end of the next section.

The oral exam

Your opening 15-minute presentation

At the start of the oral exam, after the chair has welcomed everyone and discussed the general process, you will be invited to make your opening remarks (at our university, these are usually limited to fifteen minutes). In your opening remarks, what you want to do is: 1) thank the examiners for their careful consideration, 2) tell them the story of your thesis (how it came to be what it is, what it accomplishes, and why it matters), and then 3) end by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work.

Discussing each of these, in turn:

First, re-read the opening lines of “Approaching examiners’ reports…”, above. Gratitude should be the opening note you sound in the oral exam. You will never again in your life have this many people focused solely on you and your work (even if you write a book, you’ll just get peer review reports—not the additional benefit of getting to talk to those people for 2–3 hours about your work in person and explain why you wrote what you wrote). Even if you disagree with some of their comments/critiques; even if you think one or two of them don’t “get” your work, express gratitude for their careful consideration of your work—they really do intend well (in my experience).

Second, I usually advise students to think of this opening presentation as a chance to tell the story of your thesis. Of course you will want to ensure clear statements about the thesis’s key arguments and original contributions to knowledge, and especially why it matters, but this is also a chance to contextualise the thesis. This is a chance to narrate why and how the work they’ve all read came to be what it is. It’s quite common for examiners to simply be curious about some things that may not be explained in the thesis: they’ll have questions about certain decisions you made to zig instead of zag, why you went here and not there, or how you ended up in this research area in the first place.

Of course, there are endlessly different ways to tell a story, including the story of your thesis. Take your cue for what parts to emphasise by what’s in the reports. For example:

  1. If a common question or critique emerged across the examiners’ reports about an aspect of the thesis (for instance something in the research design: where you went, who you talked to, how you talked to them, what theoretical concept was centred, what archives you consulted; or some key consideration that they thought was missing; or even why the thesis was structured like it was), and you can work an explanation of this into “the story of your thesis,” do it! I’ve seen examiners’ concerns about something melt away when they hear the backstory of why the student chose to do it like they did. Just hearing that the decisions were carefully considered and that the student had good reasoning behind them can sometimes appease examiners, such that things they raised as big concerns in their reports are no longer concerns (or even mentioned) in the recommendations for final revisions.
  2. Sometimes, if it’s not clear in the thesis, examiners will want to know more about you and how you came to do this research (at least in my field of Pacific Studies, people’s personal stakes in the work usually matter). I recall two of my past PhD students who both produced theoretically nuanced, ethnographically rich, and immaculately written theses, but both chose, for various reasons, to give minimal details about themselves in their theses. In both cases, multiple examiners came back asking them for more discussion of their relationship to the research topic. Partially this was about ethically disclosing their positionality, but partially it was also curiosity: how did someone who appears, on the surface, to be so different from this research context come to be studying this specific thing? So when one of these students crafted his opening presentation, he devoted some time to telling his coming-to-the-thesis backstory (aspects of which I’d never even heard, as his supervisor) and examiners seemed delighted to hear it: it was like, Ahhh, I get it now! And in the end, they didn’t even ask him to add any of that extra biographical detail into the final thesis—they were just curious and wanted to know.
  3. In contrast to #2 just above, many of my other supervisees include quite a lot about their personal biography and relationship to the research in their theses (I’ve had at least two that incorporate auto-ethnography as a specific method). In these cases, examiners probably aren’t going to ask for more about you and your relationship to the project, but they will be curious about other aspects of how the thesis came to be what it is. Look for questions in the reports that you might be able to address (in a positive, implicit, way) in your opening narration of why and how the thesis came to be what it is.

The important thing in this opening 15-minute presentation is to keep the focus on what you did do in the thesis. The most effective opening presentations tell that story of what the thesis did accomplish, and why and how it came to be in the form it is, in a way that implicitly answers some of the examiners’ questions. Narrating the decisions you made, and why, will implicitly explain why you chose not to research or write the thesis in another way. Where relevant, feel free to lightly work in explicit acknowledgement of things the examiners said they liked into this story (c.f. Row 1 Column 3 of the spreadsheet above, where it says “Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.”)

You can weave more explicit mentions of examiners’ critiques into your opening presentation as well, but keep the main thrust of your presentation to the positive work you did, and see if there’s ways to frame (what examiners’ identified as) shortcomings or gaps in the thesis as by-products of some of its strengths, or the result of decisions that were well-considered and necessary. For instance, see Row 3 Column 3 in the example spreadsheet table above: in that example, all of the examiners (and the student) agreed that the thesis conclusion was too short. The student’s opening presentation foregrounded the rich, original contributions made in the thesis’s substantive chapters and thanked examiners for their commendations of those chapters (e.g. leading with the positive story of what the thesis did do well), and then acknowledged that the rich substantive chapters strained the word limit and regrettably left little space for a Conclusion.

I strongly advise rehearsing your opening presentation with supervisors to get both substance and tone right. What you don’t want to do in this 15 minutes is foreground examiners’ critiques first and then respond to them point-by-point with an explanation. It’s common for students to think that’s what they should do in their oral exam or oral defence presentation, but don’t do that: it sounds defensive and sets a combative tone for the oral exam. (So don’t go down your spreadsheet point-by-point! That spreadsheet was to help you process the reports and plan effective responses).

Finally, be sure to end your presentation by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work. This last bit is key: by inviting their critiques, you actually retain more power in this situation. Examiners will visibly relax and feel more comfortable about raising questions, and the tone is more likely to feel like an engaged scholarly conversation rather than an inquisition. That’s what you want. 🙂

Some final reflection on examiners

You may be wondering, how the heck did these people come to sit in the seat of judgement on my work?

Examiners are ultimately nominated by supervisors. Your supervisors usually consult each other and will have varying degrees of responsibility for the final examiners. I can’t speak for all supervisors, but everyone I’ve ever co-supervised with has sought the same qualities in examiners: people with some expertise relevant to the thesis who will be rigourous and kind. We want them to hold students to a high standard and help ensure that the student’s final published thesis can withstand scholarly scrutiny anywhere, but we also hope that their criticisms will be voiced in a generous and supportive way. In Pacific Studies we’ve been fortunate to have many rigourous and kind examiners over the years, but occasionally we’ll see an examination report that surprises us.

Pacific Studies is a pretty small field (big ocean, tiny field), so we often know the “Pacific Studies” examiners personally and have expectations of what kind of examiner they will be. However, sometimes a colleague we think we know well surprises us when they put their “examiner hat” on. At other times, the student’s topic or the unavailability of people we initially ask necessitates that we get an examiner who supervisors don’t know personally and/or don’t have a sense of as an examiner—in these cases we always hold our breath a bit and hope that they turn out to be great, rigourous, kind examiners.

So, if the ideal type of examiner (and, I assure you, the vast majority of past examiners of PASI theses are this way) is rigourous, engaged deeply with the thesis, and able to relay comments and critique in a kind and generous (but firm) manner…what are the other types? Here’s some characters I’ve encountered:

The off-in-some-other-field examiner: this is the “one of these things is not like the others” examiner—their report bears little relationship to the other two, and in your (and your supervisors’) opinion bears little relationship to your work. Parts of their report might seem downright wacky, like huh? What the…?

  1. If this person is the overseas examiner, YAY! This is the best case scenario for an oddball examiner because the overseas examiner does not attend the exam and the examiners who are there (internal and NZ examiner) have discretion over how they incorporate the overseas examiners’ questions and whether to include any of the overseas examiner’s requests into the final required revisions. If the overseas examiner’s report was really wacky, trust that everyone present at your exam (the internal and NZ examiners, the chair, your supervisors) are aware of it. They will have to be diplomatic and professional in their comments about it, but they know. The examiners who are present will still have to pose some of the overseas examiner’s questions (they are required to), so do your best to remain poised and professional also as you generously and diplomatically address the irrelevance of the overseas examiner’s questions to the work you did.
  2. If this person is the internal examiner, take a deep breath and know that you will get through this. The internal examiner wields a greater amount of power over the very last stage of the thesis process because they are usually the person responsible for overseeing and approving the final (post-exam) revisions (your revised thesis will not go back out to the overseas and NZ examiner). Again, remain poised, professional, and diplomatic in the exam, and be prepared to do whatever is the minimum required to appease this person if their requests get included in your final required revisions. For instance, they might want you to include a new section that the other examiners (and you, and your supervisors) think is totally unnecessary, but they’ve managed to get this included in the list of required revisions. Unfortunately, you’ve just got to suck it up and do enough to satisfy them. Remember, the thesis is a means to an end goal (your PhD). If oddball examiner is gonna throw up this one last hurdle for you at the end of your marathon, take a deep breath and do what you need to do to get yourself over it.
  3. If this person is the NZ examiner, be professional, poised, and diplomatic when responding to their comments in the exam. See what, if any, of their odd requests get included in the final required revisions. If some of them do get included, you will need to do something to show the internal examiner that you diligently attended to their requests, but you may not need to do as much as you would if the oddball requests were coming from the internal examiner themself.

    The I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-having-a-bad-day (or) I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-just-too-tired-to-write-kindly examiner. This is the examiner that buries some stinging little comments in a report that otherwise mostly contains praise for the thesis (see Professor X in the example spreadsheet, above). Developing a spreadsheet (as advised above) will help put this examiner’s comments in perspective. Try your best to look past their little barbs: those ouchy bits may not be representative of examiners’ comments as a whole, and (funnily enough) they may not even accurately represent this particular examiner’s overall estimation of your thesis. I’ve encountered variations of this type of examiner several times: students dwell on the stinging critiques in the report and assume the examiner hates their thesis, and then are shocked when the same examiner sums up the thesis as excellent and is totally pleasant and encouraging in the actual exam. Sometimes people are tired, or annoyed about something when they write their reports, and things come out more harshly than they intend or realize. Or, due to time pressure, they had to send the first draft of their report rather than the draft they would’ve sent if they had time to sleep on it, go back in, and soften their language.  Focus on crafting well-considered responses to the useful and productive elements of examiners’ critiques, and try not to focus on the stinging or ungenerous ways the critiques may have been delivered.

    The Your-thesis-makes-me-think-about-all-these-things-I’m-interested-in-in-my own-work-that-I’m-about-to-tell-you-about examiner. This type seems to be less interested in engaging your work on its own terms and discussing what your thesis actually did, and rather more interested in using your work as a jumping off point to talk about their own scholarly interests. There’s a couple variations of this type:

    1. The easier-to-handle variation will talk a lot about their own research interests in their report, and want to talk more about them in the oral exam, but will not insist that you do a lot of revisions to make your final thesis more like their work. This type might be annoying (if you are actually wanting them to focus on your thesis for two hours), but they are ultimately benign because they aren’t going to put up additional hurdles at the end of your marathon. In some ways, this type of examiner’s response is a form of flattery: they are reading your work like they might read an exciting new book in their field, and it’s sparking off all these ideas for their own work that they are keen to talk about. They are treating this examination as a chance to have a stimulating scholarly conversation. Be diplomatic and pleasant, engage with them, gently guide the conversation back to your thesis in your responses if you need to, and trust the chair to do this as well.
    2. The more difficult version of this is an examiner who then insists on revisions that will align your thesis more with the project they would’ve done, or are doing, rather than respecting your thesis on its own terms. The extent of the challenge this examiner poses may depend on whether this person is the overseas, NZ, or internal examiner. See points 1, 2, and 3 from the off-in-some-other-field examiner above.

    The This-is-my-first-examiner’s role-and-I-think-I’m-supposed-to-treat-the-thesis-like-the-articles-we-savaged-in-my-graduate-seminars examiner. This person may think their job is to be a finely-honed machine for dispensing incisive, exhaustive critique that tears apart what someone else has built, rather than approaching examination as an opportunity to support and strengthen another person’s scholarship. Many competitive graduate programmes in the US, for instance, foster an ethos where tearing apart someone else’s work is equated with competence. If an examiner has only recently emerged from that type of environment, and not yet had a lot of experience publishing their work and supervising postgrads (both of which tend to make you a bit more generous towards imperfect texts, I think), they may think that “doing a good job” means being as relentlessly critical as possible. This is enough of a “thing” that some supervisors deliberately avoid asking very junior academics to serve as examiners. But sometimes the niche subject matter of the thesis, combined with the unavailability of the one or two more senior scholars with relevant expertise, means that your supervisors do approach a first-time examiner and hope for the best. If you do receive a report that offers unrelenting critique of all the thesis’s faults without attentiveness also to its strengths, it may just be that the examiner mistakenly thinks this is what is expected of them. Your supervisors (and the middle column of the table strategy I suggest above) can help you to keep some perspective on this report.

    I’m sure there are other less-than-ideal types out there, but these are the ones I’ve encountered. But as I said before, by far the vast majority of examiners I’ve experienced are the kind we hope for: rigourous but kind, deeply engaged in the work of the thesis, and intent on helping you make the final published thesis as strong as it can be.

    Best wishes for your preparation!

    Dr. April K Henderson
    Pacific Studies
    Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

    Ethnographic writing intensive: Five activities for the fieldwork-to-writing transition

    Recently I have been thinking about how I learnt to transition from fieldwork to writing. Like many graduate students, mid-way through my thesis research I found myself with a stack of notebooks and detailed fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and hundreds of photos (among other things), but I wasn’t sure how to transform this material into ethnographic writing. The shift from gathering data to crafting compelling stories requires a different set of skills that aren’t always explicitly taught in methods courses.

    Over the years, as I have supervised graduate students and taught courses on ethnographic methods, I have noticed others struggling with this fieldwork-to-writing transition. In this post I share five activities I have developed to help with that transition. The activities are modelled after the best writing course I have ever done (“Unstuck: The Art of Productivity” with Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In) and draw on prompts in Kirin Narayan’s excellent book Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012) as well as my lecture notes from courses I have taught (including ANTH 312 Creative Ethnographic Practices).

    These activities form an ethnographic writing intensive designed to strengthen your ethnographic writing practice. They address common challenges I see students facing: how to separate your thoughts from your writing; how to structure a piece of work; how to start with participant perspectives, how to write yourself into the narrative, how to write an ethnographic story.

    Activity One: Investigate your thoughts with The Professor Is In

    I recommend starting here, with a blog post by writing coach Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In, because I have found it helpful in dealing with negative thoughts (hello imposter syndrome, my old friend!) in my own writing. This approach has helped me separate my thoughts from my writing process.

    Tasks:

    • Read this blog post: https://theprofessorisin.com/2022/06/07/just-one-thing-investigate-your-thoughts/
    • The blog post suggests that writers sometimes have thoughts that feel completely true but actually interfere with making progress. As Kel writes, “The issue is not whether or not we have unhelpful thoughts; the issue is what we do with thoughts” (Weinhold, 2022)
    • See if any of the examples in the post resonate with your own writing experiences
    • If so, work through the investigative process in Kel’s blog post

    Reflective question:

    What, if anything, did you find useful in this approach that you might carry forward in your own writing practice?

    Activity Two: Reverse outline a model piece of writing

    I first learnt about reverse outlines through “Unstuck” and since then have recommended doing them to just about all of my graduate students.

    For this activity, you are going to create a reverse outline of a model of the kind of writing you are currently working on (e.g. a MA thesis chapter, a journal article). This is a technique I regularly use myself. Usually people create reverse outlines of their own work, but I like to do it with examples of other peoples’ work so I can get a feel for how the piece of writing is structured and what each paragraph does for their argument and overall flow of the writing.

    Tasks:

    • Read this blog post on reverse outlines: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/reverseoutlines/
    • Read another blog post on reverse outlines: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/reverse_outlining.html
    • Choose a model piece of writing to work with (e.g. a chapter from a thesis your supervisor recommends, or an article from the journal you want to write for)
    • Sit down and read the piece from start to finish. Just read it; don’t take notes or do any highlighting
    • Read the piece again with a pen. Number each paragraph as you re-read
    • On a fresh piece of paper, write down the number of each paragraph and a sentence or phrase that describes what the author is accomplishing in that paragraph (e.g. this paragraph introduces and defines key concepts; explains the purpose of the chapter; lists the central research questions; situates the chapter in relation to other literature; etc)
    • Optional: add a star next to the paragraph numbers that you think are doing especially important work, or that you particularly like
    • Then, look at a draft you are currently working on to see where you might use elements of the model piece in your own work (e.g. ‘I need to have a paragraph that explains how this chapter contributes to my overall thesis argument’)

    Reflective question:

    What was useful about this activity? Might you use the reverse outline process on your own writing?

    Activity Three: Starting on the ground

    “The term “ethnography” has its roots in the Greek words ethnos (folk, the people) and grapho (to write). Ethnography is to write about people, society, and/or culture, but it is much more than writing. It is also a method and a theory. As a method, ethnography is an embodied, empirical, and experiential field-based way of knowing centered around participant observation. Ethnographic research requires participation, not just observation. It is to participate in rather than just observe the daily life, logics, rhythms, and contradictions of a cultural group or society. As such, it requires discipline and commitment beyond what is visible to someone not trained in ethnographic methods. As a theory, ethnography is to start on the ground, with the concepts that ground people’s lives, worldviews, actions, and words in particular ways to that community.”

    McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. Callan, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2262

    This activity takes its cue from the first lecture I give in my Creative Ethnographic Practices class. In it, I discuss Carole McGranahan’s point that theory, in ethnography, means to start “on the ground”, with what your participants have to say. Rather than starting with theories developed by others, ethnographic writing tends to ask: what’s going on here? What are my participants telling me about how their world works?

    Tasks:

    • Choose a paragraph from a draft you are working on
    • What does the paragraph start with? If it starts with someone else’s theory, can you see a way to rewrite it so your participant’s words and explanations guide your analysis?
    • Note that not every single paragraph needs to do this; the activity prompts you to show how you are building understanding inductively, starting “on the ground” with what your participants said

    Reflective question:

    What did you notice about the difference between starting with other people’s theories versus starting with participant explanations? How might this approach change the way you build arguments in your writing?

    Activity Four: Writing yourself into the text

    This activity is drawn from two sources. The first is a lecture I give on autoethnography (a methodology many of our students are drawn to), where I discuss Leon Anderson’s argument that analytic autoethnography requires “narrative visibility of the researcher’s self” (2006, 378).[1] Autoethnographic writing requires you to be visible as a researcher while being in conversation with your participants. Ethnographic writing, too, often includes the presence of the researcher to show how their knowledge was produced. Since dialogue can be a generative way of illustrating key insights from your research while showing the relational nature of knowledge-production, the second source I have drawn on is Kirin Narayan’s chapter “Voice” from Alive in the Writing. This chapter has an excellent discussion of how to “build texts from conversations” (page 69 Kindle edition), and in my course on Creative Ethnographic Methods I ended each lecture with in-class writing prompts (like the ones below) based on Narayan’s work.

    [1] Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–95.

    Tasks:

    • Read “Chapter Four: Voice” from Narayan’s Alive in the Writing
    • Writing activity 1: Locate a quote from one of your participants on the issue you’re writing about and experiment with working just a line or two into an introduction (adapted from the prompt on page 73)
    • Writing activity 2: Write an extended conversation in which one of your participants explains a concept to you. Include your questions in the dialogue (adapted from the prompt on page 75)
    • Writing activity 3: Revisit one of your interview transcriptions, using different colour pens to highlight (a) the main questions you asked, (b) your subsidiary questions, and (c) your participant’s answers (adapted from the prompt on page 77)
    • Writing activity 4: Draw on the interview transcript you looked at for the previous activity to create a 2-page dialogue between you and a participant that reveals information or insights central to your project. Pay attention to the textures, cadences, and intonations of voices, including your own (adapted from the prompt on page 92)

    Reflective question:

    After experimenting with these different ways of writing yourself in to your work via dialogue, what did you notice about how the presence of your questions and responses changes the way insights emerge in your writing? How might dialogue work differently than summary or analysis for revealing what you learned in interviews?

    Activity Five: Ethnographic storytelling

    “Focusing on stories that have been co-created enables me to work on the ethnographic narrative and its process of coming into life through storytelling. In starting with the creation of ethnographic stories and story lines I am following an argument by Soyini D. Madison; she has criticised the tendency to avoid transparency in oneʼs own ethnographic storytelling techniques by hiding behind the writing of others and showing off (with the theory of others) in order to give more weight to oneʼs own ethnography while hiding possible flaws. She observes that rather than taking guidance from and trusting the stories, instead “the researcher becomes so enamored with […] impressing colleagues that honoring the narrative becomes less important than acrobatics of abstraction and theoretical word play” (Madison 2014, 394)”.

    Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. 2018. “Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narrative Out of Narratives.” Fabula 59 (1-2): 8–26. Page 12.

    This activity is based on a lecture I give on ethnographic storytelling. I begin that lecture by talking about a blog post Carole McGranahan wrote in 2015, where she writes: “What is defective is how we miss the power of stories and storytellers even as well tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point” (my emphasis added). McGranahan puts forward an argument similar to the one that Madison makes in the quote from Bönisch-Brednich’s article cited above (which I also discuss in that lecture): that we use our participant’s voices to make our own theoretical arguments (often drawing on the theory of others) rather than letting their stories carry the weight of ethnographic insight.

    Tasks:

    • Choose a story that one of your participants shared with you that you found especially memorable (perhaps one you are working with in a current piece of writing). You will work with this story in three ways
    • Writing activity 1: write the story as if you are reporting it for a newspaper, using the journalistic who-what-when-where-why-how questions and describing the basic sequence of events
    • Writing activity 2: write the story as your participant might (see the ethnographic vignette that Bönisch-Brednich shares on pages 12-13 of her article for an example)
    • Writing activity 3: Following Bönisch-Brednich’s article or McGranahan’s blog post, write the story for your draft, discussing what it shows about broader patterns in your research and connecting it with relevant theory. This is how it becomes ethnographic storytelling

    Reflective question:

    After writing the same story three different ways, what did you notice about how each approach revealed different aspects of the experience? How did writing activity 3 differ from simply adding analysis to writing activity 1?

    I designed these activities with individual work in mind, but they might also be useful starting points for a ‘shut up and write‘ session with peers. If you try one or more of them, please let me know your thoughts in the comments – I would love to hear from you!

    Using GenAI to think critically about grading in a Cultural Anthropology class

    In 2019, my friend and colleague Grant Otsuki started experimenting with Generative AI (GenAI) – GPT-2 by OpenAI – to see how well it did at writing an essay for a first year Cultural Anthropology class he taught. As he wrote in a 2020 article for The Conversation, he trained GPT-2 on actual essays his students had written in response to the essay prompt, then worked with it to generate its own essay. I remember reading the work generated by GPT-2 and thinking that although I wouldn’t have awarded it a passing grade (for reasons Grant writes about in his 2020 article), it had potential and that a student could have turned it into a C-grade essay in less than 10 minutes. I also remember thinking that if Grant hadn’t told me it was generated by GPT-2, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that it hadn’t been written by a student.

    It is no exaggeration to say that GenAI technology and use has exploded since Grant wrote his article, where he argued that we should be teaching students how to work with GenAI tools rather than ignore or try to ban them. Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, where I work, recently developed a policy on Student use of artificial intelligence tools to help write assignments that directs students to check in with their instructors about whether they can use GenAI:

    Take time to understand expectations around the use of AI

    Expectations may vary from course to course or even from assignment to assignment. This may include rules around how you can or can’t use AI, and what kinds of AI it is acceptable to use. For example, it might be ok to use translation software, but not generative AI like Chat GPT. Your course coordinators should make it clear when you can and cannot use AI and if there are any limitations on how you use it.  If you’re not sure, just ask.
    (https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/students/study/exams/academic-integrity/student-use-of-artificial-intelligence, accessed 24 November 2024)

    This policy offers teaching staff a lot of flexibility and accommodates people like me, who want to bring GenAI into our classrooms so students can learn how to use it while discussing some of the concerns around its use (including its environmental impact and the looming issue of reliable information only being available to those who can afford it).

    Class activity: Grade a mini-essay generated by ChatGPT

    Earlier this year, I decided to adapt Grant’s activity for my undergraduate course Anthropology, Education, and Social Change. The first assignment for that course asked students to write two mini-essays of 500-600 words about different concepts and/or theories that were discussed in lectures and assigned reading material. I asked ChatGPT (version 2, by OpenAI) to generate a 500-word mini-essay on the topic of “grades” for a course on anthropology of education, that drew on and cited Susan Blum’s book “I Love Learning; I hate School” An Anthropology of College, which we read and discussed in class. I also asked ChatGPT to adhere to the assignment instructions (below) and spent a bit of time editing the mini-essay it generated.

    ANTH215_MiniEssayInformationDownload

    In Week 4 of our course, I brought printed copies of the mini-essay that ChatGPT generated to class and asked students to read it and assign it a grade using the marking guide for this assignment. I had two goals in mind with this activity: 1) to encourage students to think critically about GenAI use in the classroom; and 2) to encourage students to engage with the marking criteria that I was going to use to assess their work.

    We began the activity by discussing the following:

    • how they can use GenAI in my class (e.g. to refine their ideas or fix errors with spelling, grammar, and referencing)
    • the University’s policy on using AI to help write assignments
    • the limitations of using GenAI (e.g. hallucinations)
    • some of the ethical, environmental, and privacy considerations involved in working with GenAI
    • how to acknowledge their use of GenAI by including an Acknowledgement Statement at the start of their work (our Library provides information about how to cite AI use)

    After that, I handed out Chat-GPT’s essay (below) and asked students to give it marks and written feedback. They had the option of doing this individually or in pairs/small groups, and I invited them to share their marks and feedback to our class Miro board.

    Mini Essay class exerciseDownload

    After about half an hour to mark the mini-essay, we shared our marks and comments with one another. The students – who, for the most part, failed the mini-essay with very critical feedback – were surprised to learn that I had given it a C- grade, which prompted a constructive conversation about the kinds of grading-related issues that Blum writes about in her book and that we had discussed in earlier lectures. It also provided a good entry point for me to discuss why and how I had designed their second assignment using task-based grading (the term I now use to describe my version of labour-based grading). Finally, several students said that they appreciated the opportunity to grade an assignment like this because it helped them better understand the marking criteria.

    This activity achieved my goals and I was pleased to see students acknowledging and citing their use of GenAI in later assignments. I also noticed a slightly higher grade distribution for Assignment 1 compared with the previous year. While this approached worked well in my classroom, I know there are many other innovative and meaningful ways to integrate GenAI tools into teaching and assessment practices. If you are working in this space, I am keen to hear about your experiences!

    East Side Orchestras: Music and Social Change

    I am currently working on a research project that looks at the social impacts of Arohanui Strings, Porirua Soundscapes, and Virtuoso Strings. These groups provide free, Sistema-inspired orchestral music education programmes in low decile schools in Hutt Valley and Porirua. This project is funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund.

    Music colour
    Photo: Lorena Gibson

    El Sistema is a Venezuelan music and social development initiative that began in 1975 and is today one of the world’s largest and most famous orchestral music education programmes. Sistema-inspired programmes operate in over 60 countries worldwide, including Aotearoa New Zealand, providing musical and social opportunities to underprivileged children with the aim of transforming their lives, their families’ lives, and their wider communities (Booth & Turnstall 2014, 2016; Sistema Global: Friends of El Sistema Worldwide 2015).

    In the last decade, scholars have paid increasing attention to how Sistema-inspired programmes operate in different cultural contexts, reporting positive outcomes in musical and educational attainment, development of children’s personal and social skills (including discipline, positive attitudes towards school, and raised aspirations) and family engagement (Creech et al 2016; Osborne et al 2015; Trinick & McNaughton 2013). Fewer studies have focused on the wider social development aims of Sistema-inspired programmes, however, such as community wellbeing and socioeconomic impacts (Allan 2010; Burns & Bewick 2015; Uy 2012), and a growing number of researchers are critiquing orchestral music education programmes for promoting middle-class Western ideologies and for unintentionally reproducing rather than challenging structural inequalities (e.g., Baker 2014; Bull 2016). This is where my project comes in. I want to look beyond educational achievement to learn more about the social effects that Arohanui Strings, Virtuoso Strings, and Porirua Soundscapes have on the young people who participate in music classes, as well as their families and their wider communities. My aim is to understand how these groups transform young people’s lives through music.

    GuitarGoPro b&w
    Photo: Lorena Gibson

    I am using a range of ethnographic methods in this project, including interviews, participant-observation (attending rehearsals, concerts, holiday programmes, and other events), photography, and participatory video. This involves inviting some of the young people involved in these organisations to use video cameras to document their experiences, and collaborate with me on making a short ethnographic film – for example, by working with me to decide what should be in the film, shooting footage for it, and advising me during the editing process.

    As well as making an ethnographic film showing how young people experience the relationship between music and social change, I will produce reports for Arohanui Strings, Virtuoso Strings, and Porirua Soundscapes. I will write academic journal articles and book chapters, and give a public talk at the end of the project (early 2020), and will upload published material here to this blog.

    This research has been approved by the Victoria University of Wellington Human Ethics Committee, application reference 24293. If you have any questions about it, or are interested in becoming involved, please contact me.

     

    References

    Allan, J. 2010. Arts and the inclusive imagination: Socially engaged arts practices and Sistema Scotland. Journal of Social Inclusion, 1(2): 111-122.

    Baker, G. 2014. El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s youth. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Booth, E., & Tunstall, T. 2014. Five encounters with “El Sistema” International: A Venezuelan marvel becomes a global movement. Teaching Artist Journal, 12(2): 69-81.

    Booth, E., & Tunstall, T. 2016. Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change Through Music. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

    Bull, A. 2016. El Sistema as a bourgeois social project: Class, gender, and Victorian values. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 15(1), 120-53.

    Burns, S., & Bewick, P. 2015. In Harmony Liverpool Year 5 Evaluation: Health and Well- Being Report. https://issuu.com/liverpoolphilharmonic/docs/in_harmony_liverpool_year_5_evaluat

    Creech, A., Gonzales-Moreno, P., Lorenzino, L., Waitman, G., Bates, L., Swan, A., de Jesus Carillo Mendez, R., Hernandes, D.N.C., & Gonzales, P. C. 2016. El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes: A literature review of research, evaluation, and critical debates (2nd ed.). San Diego, California: Sistema Global.

    Osborne, M. S., McPherson, G. E., Faulkner, R., Davidson, J. W., & Barrett, M. S. 2015. Exploring the academic and psychosocial impact of El Sistema-inspired music programs within two low socio-economic schools. Music Education Research, 18(2), 156-175.

    Trinick, Robyn and Stuart McNaughton. 2013. Independent evaluation of the music learning outcomes in the Sistema Aotearoa Programme. Report prepared for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Faculty of Education, the University of Auckland.

    Uy, M. S. 2012. Venezuela’s national music education program El Sistema: Its interactions with society and its participants’ engagement in praxis. Music and Arts in Action, 4(1): 5-2.

     

     

    Survey participants wanted: Music education in Porirua Schools

    Do you know any young people who attend school in Porirua? I would like to invite them to participate in a survey about music education in Porirua schools.

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently started a new research project looking at the social impacts of three Sistema-inspired orchestral music education programmes operating in low decile schools in urban Wellington. El Sistema is a Venezuelan music and social development initiative that began in 1975 and is today one of the world’s largest and most famous orchestral music education programmes. Sistema-inspired programmes operate in over 60 countries and there are at three here in Wellington: Arohanui Strings, Porirua Soundscapes, and Virtuoso Strings.

    My new project looks at the social impacts of these three charitable organisations, which run music education programmes in low decile schools in Porirua and Hutt Valley. This is an independent project funded by Victoria University of Wellington.

    As part of my research I am conducting an anonymous survey of young people attending school in Porirua. The goals of this survey are:

    • to find out how interested young people are in music education;
    • to see if there are any barriers that might prevent young people from taking part in music education.

    If you know of a young person who attends school in Porirua I would appreciate it if you would consider asking them (or their parents or caregivers) if they would like to take part in this survey. The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete and is suitable for young people aged 10 and over. The link to the survey is below.

    Music education in Porirua Schools survey

    I would be happy to send you a copy of the survey if you would like to see the questions, and you can contact me here. The survey is available now and will close on Sunday 11 December.

    Thanks!

    How I use social media in teaching III: In the classroom

    In this final post in a series on how I use social media in teaching I focus on what I do in the classroom. I’ll begin with a summary of my learning and teaching philosophy, which I include in course outlines:

    This course combines lectures and films with interactive tutorials in a format designed to guide students through the major topic areas and encourage discussion. The emphasis is on collaborative learning through dialogue and active participation rather than passively listening to lectures. Lectures will utilise various forms of technology (Blackboard, Twitter) in order to encourage in-class participation so students are welcome to bring smartphones, iPads, netbooks or laptops to class.

    In future this will be followed with a caveat based on recent research carried out by Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas Cepeda (2013) which found that in-class use of laptops hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. I will still encourage people to bring technologies to class but recommend that they read this article and try to stay off Facebook and other distractions during class (unless I have specifically asked them to look at something online).

    Like most lecturers, I usually show a relevant YouTube clip or a TED talk (TED-Ed is a great tool for the classroom) during class, which I embed within Blackboard so students can view them again in their own time. I also add extra relevant links (YouTube, blogs, websites) to Blackboard for those students who are really keen on the subject and want to find out more. I do not expect students to watch anything extra that I have not shown in class, but I do want to inspire them to check out interesting anthropological content when they are browsing the web in their own time.

    In large classes (300+ students) I use a ‘virtual lecture hall tool’ on Blackboard. This is what I have called the Course Blog function within Blackboard (although I am sure I could probably come up with a better title for it!). It is a way for students to ask a question without having to raise their hands and speak up in front of everyone, which can be daunting for some. Students can post questions here during lectures and I set aside time to look at the questions – usually when I am showing a YouTube clip or TED talk – and respond to them either straight away or at the beginning of the next lecture.

    When I respond I just address the question; I don’t look for the person who asked it. To start with I tried to engage with students by naming and looking for the authors of questions (students cannot post anonymously to Blackboard) but found that doing so discouraged some from using the tool – they wanted to remain as anonymous as possible. I only answer questions in class and do not post replies or monitor the ‘virtual lecture hall tool’ outside of the lecture situation.

    I use other social media (such as Facebook) as objects of study. Facebook is a great topic with which to explore anthropological concepts and one which resonates with students. However I do not use Facebook as a vehicle to communicate with students. I have found that students usually create their own group Facebook pages for courses, which I do not participate in or view. I think it is good for students to have a space to ask one another questions and discuss course content that is not monitored by lecturers or tutors – kind of like a virtual library corner.

    I would be interested to hear from others  – teachers and students – about experiences with social media in teaching. I’m sure I could learn a lot from your practices!

    How I use social media in teaching Part II: Wikis on Blackboard

    As I mentioned in my first post on using social media in teaching, I use Twitter (and all social media tools) within Victoria University’s Blackboard learning system. This is because students all have access to Blackboard, to campus computers, and to the internet on campus. I don’t expect students to sign up to platforms such as Twitter just for my courses. Also, while many of them do own smartphones, iPads, and laptops, I do not assume that they can all afford (or want) to. Blackboard has a clunky interface and is not the sexist learning environment out there – and student feedback indicates that they don’t particularly like it – but keeping everything ‘in house’ for me is a way of ensuring ease of access.

    Tutorial Group Wikis on Blackboard

    I teach a large introductory anthropology course and this year adopted a new learning approach to tutorials inspired by Mike Wesch’s World Simulation. I like students to be active participants in tutorials, which I believe should be distinct from lectures in style and content. Rather than summarising set readings or reviewing the lectures, during tutorials each I have each group engage in a collaborative task to help students learn to use the concepts presented and to prepare for their assessed coursework.

    I assign each tutorial group to an area on a map of the world and students collectively research and become experts on a real-world cultural group (such as the Trobriand Islanders). Each student chooses a particular aspect of culture to research (e.g., religion or systems of trade and exchange – the list of aspects they choose from aligns with my weekly lecture topics) and works with one or two others to learn all they can about that aspect as it relates to their cultural group. In this way, tutorial groups build a full ethnographic description of the cultures they are assigned. Each student then writes an ethnographic essay based on their aspect of culture which is individually assessed – this is not a form of group assessment.

    Wikis are an important part of this collaborative tutorial task for two reasons:

    1. Wikis contain a crowdsourced list of relevant references.
    This is a research exercise and students are expected to find at least one unique academic resource on their aspect of culture. I encourage them to share relevant resources (by listing the full reference and providing a brief summary of its contents) on their group’s Wiki on Blackboard. When everyone in the tutorial group does this, they build a collective repository of approximately 20 resources they can draw on for their ethnographic essays and other coursework.

    2. Wikis become a valuable resource for their coursework.
    Part of the essay requires students to discuss how the particular aspect of culture they are focusing on is integrated with the other aspects of their cultural group (e.g., the role of religion in systems of trade and exchange). They do this by participating in tutorials on a weekly basis. The Wiki lets them continue these conversations and work on their essays outside of the classroom setting. When everyone shares their research findings on the Wiki, they collectively build a full ethnographic description of the cultural group they are studying. The Wiki becomes their first ‘go-to’ place when they write their individual essays and prepare for other assignments.

    2013 was the first year our class worked with Wikis and I received some wonderfully critical and constructive feedback from students about how to ‘tweak’ the exercise for next year. I am currently processing this feedback and rewriting the collaborative tutorial group instructions for 2014.

    Do you (as a student or teacher) work with Wikis on Blackboard? What have your experiences been? What might you do differently (or keep the same) in the future?

    How I use social media in teaching Part I: Twitter

    In an earlier post I discussed why I use social media in teaching: as a pedagogical tool, and for my own professional development. In this post (the first in a series on how I use social media in teaching) I focus on how I use Twitter.

    Until recently, I have not had much luck in using Twitter as a teaching tool within the classroom. In 2011 I experimented with Twitter as a backchannel for students in a small 300-level (third year) anthropology class. I set up a class account, which I used, and embedded the Twitter stream in Blackboard for everyone to see. I tweeted during lectures to show them the difference between thick and thin tweets (as David Silver describes it) and encouraged them to set up their own Twitter accounts. I designed in-class activities that involved composing 140-character questions and tweeting them to the authors of the films and articles we were watching and reading at the time. (The authors were all anthropologists I followed on Twitter, and I checked with them beforehand to make sure they were happy to receive and respond to student tweets.) I also monitored the class account and class hashtag during and outside lectures so I could respond to any student queries or comments.

    Despite my efforts, it did not take off. The students just weren’t into it. As one student put it, they felt that Twitter was for “old people” like me.

    Today I still embed my Twitter stream in Blackboard (using my own account rather than a class account) but I don’t encourage students to set up their own accounts or tweet questions to me during class. Instead, I talk about Twitter during lectures and draw their attention to my Twitter stream to model how I use this form of social media as an anthropologist. Most of the time they are astonished to find that I follow hundreds of anthropologists on Twitter and that we tweet about things other than what we had for lunch.

    I have had more success with Twitter at Honours level. As I mentioned in a recent post, students live-tweeted from our recent Anthropology and Agency Honours Student Conference. They seemed to enjoy the experience and the interested generated within the wider academic community about their research (which they are keen to collate into a journal and make publicly available later this year).

    For me, Twitter is most useful as a way to find out about current research, to engage in conversations about teaching practice, and to source new lecture material. In future I might try using Twitter to “co-construct” lecture content (an approach described by Daniela Retelny, Jeremy Birnholtz and Jeffrey Hancock), but based on my past experiences I think this would be best suited to a smaller, 300-level or above class.

    There is quite a bit of information available on teaching with Twitter (e.g., Teaching with Twitter by Stephanie Hedge on Inside Higher Ed, and this guide on Web 2.0/3.0 Teaching from Dartmouth College Library). I am keen to hear how others – especially students – use Twitter in a university setting. What has worked for you? What hasn’t worked?

    Related articles

    Why I use social media in teaching

    I used social media a lot while I was working on my PhD. I visited blogs dedicated to the joys and pains of thesis writing (such as The Thesis Whisperer), used the Twitter chat channel #PhDchat to connect with others working off-campus most of the time like I was, and surfed YouTube channels looking for interesting videos related to anthropology. I came across a short video called A vision of students today by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch which revolutionised the way I thought about social media and why I should use it as a teacher.

    I sought Wesch out on other social media platforms and was struck by his approach to new media and philosophy of anti-teaching:

    “Anti-teaching is about inspiring good questions. Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it struck me that if we are ultimately trying to create “active lifelong learners” with “critical thinking skills” and an ability to “think outside the box” it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions.”

    Wesch goes on to note that many students – especially those in large introductory classes – rarely ask ‘good’ questions and instead ask questions like ‘what do I need to know for this test?’ I have heard this a lot and it always makes my heart sink a little. I know studying is hard, especially when you have to juggle full-time study with work and family committments, but to me this question feels like another way of saying ‘I want to make sure I don’t accidentally learn too much so please tell me exactly what you want to see in my work.’ Wesch’s strategies for encouraging ‘good’ questions – especially his World Simulation for first year cultural anthropology students – resonated with my own teaching philosophy, which is based on educationalist Paulo Freire’s approach.

    Today social media is an important part of my teaching practice. I use social media as a pedagogical tool to take learning beyond the classroom, teach transferable skills, encourage reflexivity and critical thinking (by having them look at how and why they use platforms like Facebook), and to model how anthropologists can use social media. (I’ll talk about how I use social media in another post.)

    I also use social media for my own professional development. It is a great way to learn about what other anthropologists are doing in the classroom, to source new ideas and teaching materials, and to engage in online conversations about teaching anthropology. It is particularly good for networking and I have had conversations with Mike Wesch about adapting his World Simulation for the large first-year cultural anthropology class I teach at Victoria University.

    I am curious about the reasons why others use social media in teaching. Why do you use it? Why don’t you use it? I’m sure I could learn a lot from your practices!

    VUW Anthropology Honours Student Conference 2013

    I am currently coordinating one of the Honours courses in VUW’s Cultural Anthropology Programme. In it, the students design and carry out an independent research project on a topic of their choice. Part of the assessment involves them giving a seminar about their work. This year the students will present papers based on their research in a 1-day Anthropology and Agency Honours Student Conference.

    Why a conference?

    In other courses the students make hour-long presentations (often in pairs) to one another on various aspects of their work. Since they will become quite proficient in making long presentations by the end of the year, I decided to see if they wanted to do something a little different and run a conference instead.

    I love going to conferences and have also spoken about my research at less formal events (such as Rotary and Save the Children meetings). I believe that it is important for anthropologists to be able to speak about their work in a range of public settings and thought it would be fun for the students to get involved in organising their own conference.

    My teaching goals for this conference are:

    • to complement the oral presentation skills they are developing in other courses
    • to provide them with further career training
    • to provide them with an opportunity to try out their ideas and gain feedback on their work in a constructive forum
    • to showcase what our Cultural Anthropology Honours students are doing to other students and staff.

    How we organised it

    I pitched my conference idea to them after the mid-year break. Everyone seemed keen so in July we decided on a date, time, and conference theme. Although no two research projects are the same, we had noticed in earlier class discussions that a number of people were addressing the concept of agency in some form, so this seemed like a good theme to loosely link the papers.

    Students will present 15-minute papers in panels of three followed by a 15 minute panel discussion where the audience will ask questions of the presenters. This format seemed less scary for first-time presenters, and panel discussions can be a good way to draw out connections and links between the papers.

    The students all sent me abstracts which I collated into a booklet to distribute at the conference: Anthropology and Agency Honours Student Conference Abstract Booklet. Some also volunteered to take on the role of session chair, which involves making sure everyone keeps within their allotted time and facilitating the discussion. Through this conference students will gain experience in:

    • writing abstracts
    • conference organisation
    • writing and presenting short papers
    • answering questions ‘on their feet’
    • asking thoughtful, constructive, critical questions of their fellow presenters
    • tweeting updates with the #AAHSC hashtag (for those so inclined)

    The VUW Anthropology Society has organised a post-conference gathering at Hunter Lounge. (The VUW Anthropology Society is also on Facebook.)