Deborah A. Thomas

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, we had been talking in our undergraduate committee meetings about how to introduce students to a field that is largely unfamiliar to them, while also getting them to think about how knowledge is created and how that knowledge is both solidified and challenged over time. Because most students arrive to universities from high school without any formal background in the discipline, they often don’t have a sense of what anthropology is. And those undergraduates who have had some contact with anthropology often understand the field as the study of “other” people. However, as part of broader decolonizing initiatives, we decided that I would rework my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” course in a way that reflects how I have always taught the course. In other words, I have always read and taught against our “canon” in ways that expose the colonial underpinnings of our discipline, even while teaching the classics. The new course, Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World, would be explicit about its critical inquiry. What I ultimately wanted them to take away from the course was a sense that anthropology should be oriented toward generating a better understanding of how power has worked in the past and the present, and how this power is related both to what we know and how we know what we know. On top of this, I wanted to design the course as a project-based learning experience.

The goals of the class were as follows: 1) students would come to understand the foundations of capitalist modernity (Indigenous dispossession and genocide, and African dispossession and slavery), and would be asked to think about how these foundations shape our knowledge of human difference, as well as the political mechanisms through which inequalities are produced, reproduced, and challenged; 2) students were to learn the various approaches anthropologists have had toward the concept of race, and how these have developed over time; 3) students were to come to an understanding of the issues involved for museums in terms of collecting, exhibiting, and research in relation to objects acquired through, and as a result of, native dispossession and imperialism, and would learn about how people in a range of museum and academic contexts have worked toward repair and repatriation; and, 4) students would research, develop, and construct the website for the conference Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Problem of Decolonizing Museums, which will take place at the Penn Museum in October 2021. This conference is designed to bring together the North American conversations about native dispossession and the European conversations about imperialism in order to think through the particular and conjoined legacies of these historical (and contemporary) processes.

Things were starting to shape up nicely, and then the pandemic started. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with a project-based course in a virtual, mostly non-synchronous world. In a panic, I reached out to one of my kids’ former middle school teachers, Noelle Kellich, an expert in project-based learning. Noelle’s support, in conjunction with the mini-course offered over the summer by the Center for Teaching and Learning, helped me to devise ways to create a sense of community for students that would build over the semester as they worked in teams on the website project, and to help them to track their own progress toward our learning objectives.

I worked with three fantastic TAs (Chrislyn Laurore, Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo, and Chris Green) to divide our class of sixty students into twenty groups of three, who would work on the five discussion posts I assigned throughout the course of the semester. These posts were tied to readings, but not in instrumental ways. In other words, I wasn’t asking them to mine their class assignments for the “right” answer to a set of questions, but instead offered the opportunity for them to think creatively from the readings in order to imagine how the knowledge they gained from them might be applicable to problem-solving more generally. For example, after reading about the fraught history of collection and representation within ethnographic museums, and about the monuments that had been so contested over the summer in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I wanted students to think about what repair could look like. I asked them to describe a monument they would develop (either materially or ephemerally) that would take a reparative stance on a particular location, event, or process. I asked them where it would be, what it would be made of, who it would be for, and how they would want people to react to it. The “monuments” students developed were incredible! One group decided to replace the faces on Mount Rushmore to build a Black Hills Memorial to represent the Native Americans who owned the land before the U.S. government broke its treaty with the Sioux tribe to build the national monument. Another decided to memorialize two victims of unethical medical research: Henrietta Lacks, the African American woman whose cells were used without consent to research not only the cervical cancer with which she was diagnosed, but also the development of drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease, polio, and leukemia; and the African-American Tuskegee airmen who went untreated for syphilis as doctors studied its progression in their bodies. For Lacks, they would plant a living garden of flowering dogwoods, the Virginia state tree, to represent her hometown of Roanoake, and for the airmen they would plant a field of longleaf pines, the Alabama state tree, which would represent the victims from Macon County. Another chose to change the faces on American paper currency in order to represent Native American, LGBTQ, and African-American leaders.

Because the course was asking students to probe more deeply into the things they took for granted as social goods (the Enlightenment, capitalism, development), I wanted them also to articulate what they were learning on a weekly basis so they could track their change over time. Noelle suggested students write a weekly short “message” in the following format: “I used to think _____, but now I know ______.” These were addressed to their TAs, but I would also look at them from time to time to get a better sense of the topics that were capturing their attention and turning on their lightbulbs. Because they were working on a group project, Noelle also recommended a weekly self-evaluation in which they considered whether in any given week they felt they did more, less, or about the same amount of work than their colleagues.

For the final project, groups were joined together to work on the website in teams. Some were in charge of developing annotated bibliographies for panelists, some did a podcast with the keynote speaker, some developed a timeline about the Penn Museum (its acquisitions and repatriations), and some developed resource lists (they themselves came up with the idea of a conference playlist, and a video playlist!). I also asked them to individually produce a final assessment in a form of their choice (a paper, a short film, an audio recording, a series of drawings, etc.), in which they reflected on the process of the course, on their own working and learning styles, on their group’s collaborative process, and on history and the production of knowledge about people around the world. One of the students, Lily Coady, expressed her new understanding in a short film, one that is simultaneously hysterical and poignant, and that encapsulates the creativity and critical thinking I hoped they would unleash.

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Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the department of anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching.

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.