Curriculum Design

Having honed my skills as an educator over 5 years of experience in teaching a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate anthropology and interdisciplinary courses at the University of Edinburgh, I have taken three steps to contribute to the curriculum that reflects my vision for a more equal and engaging social anthropology education:

1) Decolonising the Curriculum

In SSPS, I have been participating in RaceEd activities since its recent launch as well as the efforts of the Social Anthropology department to Institutionalise Anti-Racism. I am currently also a member of the Anti-racism Decolonising Working Group, where I have actively participated in discussions about strategies to decolonize our field, ensure that our courses promote equality and centres the voices, perspectives people’s movements, and scholarship from the majority world. We also explored ways to widen participation, what are the current barriers to bringing more BAME students to the University of Edinburgh and to Social Anthropology, what measures and initiatives we could undertake to enable more students from underrepresented groups and from the global south to join our degree program, and what kind of education and support we can offer to already enrolled students so that their inclusion is self-affirmatory for them.

Sharing Good Practice with colleagues and participating in further professional development has been key in transforming our curriculum. Within our Anti-racism Decolonising Working Group we have shared examples of challenges and successes, helpful pedagogical material (e.g. SOAS Decolonising Toolkit), and events (e.g. Moray House Decolonising the Curriculum Seminar series). Most recently, I have enrolled together with several other group members to the University of Bristol online course “Decolonising Education” (www.futurelearn.com/courses/decolonising-education-from-theory-to-practice).

These events and discussions have helped me as an early career scholar to develop an understanding about decolonising the curriculum as a journey that relies on being continuously self-reflective and critical as an educator, and to try to teach students this self-reflexivity.

As a guest lecturer in several courses in Social Anthropology and International Development, I had the opportunity to put what I have learned into practice and include content that fits the department’s decolonising efforts. As I have stated in my previous blog, I have emphasised that if we avoid difficult discussions about race and privilege we will only fail as educators to equip our students with meaningful ways to engage with the topic. Thus, by diversifying the reading lists and including material and in-class discussions on race and racialised bodies in my lectures on “Dance and the Body” and “Work and Labour”, I have tried to push pupils to think critically about these topics. The activities I designed helped my students to learn how to ask the right questions and understand the implicit and explicit forms of racism in dance and labour regimes.

In this endeavour, it has been important to establish a truly inclusive classroom built on friendly rapport and acknowledgement of our embodied intersectionalities, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and the social processes that bestow differentiated privilege both inside and outside the classroom. This involved acknowledging that the classroom is not a place of equals, but through the transformative capacity of HE, we could try to destabilize this structure by learning how to unlearn and unpack our respective privileges and relative marginalities. In order to deliver a learning experience that inspires students to interrogate normative discourses and systems of power it has been essential to first create a learning environment where everyone feels secure and respected despite our differences.

While this approach initially put students in a position that made them feel uncomfortable, the discussions eventually became very lively and stimulating. I take special pride in having been approached after my lectures and tutorials by students who have faced significant barriers to success due to their ethno-racial, religious, or gender identities, to thank me about our discussions and ask for advice about their studies and career plans. However, I also struggled to engage a couple of white male students, who clearly showed resistance to this approach and preferred to ignore the discussion all together. In such situations, I often look for support from my students who are active in the discussions and put them in breakout groups with those that seem resistant, in hopes that teamwork could encourage their engagement. I have also shared this practice with colleagues teaching similar topics and asked for advice about such difficult situations. In the end, it is also important to accept that a small number of students may not be at all interested in getting involved in decolonizing efforts that question both global structures and processes of power as well as our place within them. I do not see that as my failure as their educator, but the product of the wider processes that confer differentially privilege and power. In a way, having such instances in the classroom also provides the rest of the students who participate in the discussion with a real-life example of struggle we must face in establishing communication to collectively explore different positionalities and experiences and bring about social change.  

2) Embedding Sustainable Development Goals

In my teaching just as in my research I strive to widen students’ knowledge and understanding about inequality, ecological risk, and subaltern politics in the global south. My preference for a more hands-on, experiential learning for my students stems from my approach to HE as something that must reflect debates within the wider society and equip students with the necessary skills to navigate the complexities of life, as well as to participate in the struggle to define our collective social and environmental priorities. Over the course of five years, I have found that by integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals in my teaching offers students more tangible ways to approach social responsibility and sustainability issues with an action/solution-oriented approach, and motivates them to pursue research addressing sustainable development challenges.

I have shared these experiences with colleagues and have discussed possible ways to link various courses within the Social Anthropology undergraduate program as well as the International Development Master’s program through the debates they explore in line with a given Sustainable Development Goal (e.g. Goal 15: Life on Land in courses such as Empires; Consumption, Exchange and Technology; Anthropology and Environment; Contemporary Issues in Social Anthropology). Using this as a thread to show the relevance between various courses in social anthropology, I have tried to contribute to the departments’ vision for anthropological education that can speak directly to global challenges issues and is in line with The University of Edinburgh 2030 Strategy. It aims to inspires students to think critically, be curious and brave to question the social structures and norms that make up our world, and promote equity and equality in all spheres of social and political life. In the lectures I have thought in economic anthropology and international development, I have specifically emphasised the links between human-environment relationships, social justice, and sustainable development, and invited students to think about what questions should we be asking and how can we respond to these issues. This proved very helpful for students to conceptualise and approach real world problems and the proposed solutions laid out by international organisations and governments. 

When designing the lecture activities and discussions, I have been careful to remind myself and my colleagues that not all of our students will become anthropologists or pursue research or academic career. That is why, both in my lectures and discussion activities I have tried to show, and asked students to think about, how what we are learning can benefit other fields and the industry. This has been particularly helpful for students who were considering placement programs and dissertation research with industry (e.g. agricultural sector, recycling programs, fabric manufacturing).

3) Ensuring Communication and Collaborative Course Design

My teaching experience at the University of Edinburgh involved contributing to team-teaching for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses through guest lectures, tutorials, and administrative work as senior tutor. This involved collaborating with the course organisers and other lecturers to develop coherent, timely, and inclusive reading lists and design teaching activities that speak directly to the social and environmental challenges we experience today, problematize the geopolitical and economic relationship between the global south and the global north, as well as the lingering structure of coloniality both in education and wider society. As part of our efforts to decolonise our curriculum I have also been involved in giving feedback on new course proposals and revised reading lists (e.g. Empires; Anthropology of the Body; Anthropology of Games and Play; Social Anthropology 1A).

Early on in my teaching, I understood the value of feedback and reflection on one’s practice with colleagues. I initially started to organise small reflection sessions with the other tutors I was working on a given course. Later, as I became more experienced and took on other roles as senior tutor and guest lecturer, I regularly collected feedback from both students and tutors about the course content, teaching strategies, learning outcomes, and areas we could improve delivery and participation, which I then relayed to Course Organisers and the Director of Undergraduate Teaching. For example, by examining and comparing the feedback I saw that there was a gap in team-taught courses, where the course organiser and lecturers did not know about the essential readings covered in the tutorials. This created problems about consistency in tutoring, as well as relaying the key issues about a given week’s topic.

Using the feedback, I arranged a meeting with tutors, course organisers, and lecturers and suggested to organise course handbook designing sessions before each semester where we go over the essential material and main ideas explored by the course. I also suggested to the SPSS UG Teaching Services Officer and the Director of Undergraduate Teaching that this could be integrated into the tutors’ training offered specifically to the subject area.  

While I started these discussions on a course level in 2017, they have picked up over the years, and especially after the establishment of our Anti-racism Decolonisation Group. Recently, the department laid a plan to organise “Reimagining Handbooks: Workshops for Courses” with course organisers, lecturers, and tutors, in order to a) create a dedicated intentional space for conversation and reflection on courses; b) de-atomize process of re-imagining curriculum; c) draw on collective wisdom and experience in the subject area; and d) opportunity to discuss and get feedback on handbook design, reading lists, assessment, and pedagogical approaches. This is a great success, that I am proud to have been and continue to be a part of.  

Finally, I have always incorporated various technologies and software tools (e.g., discussion boards, blogs, collaborative mind maps, polls) to enhance participation and active learning. This proved very helpful when the university moved to online/hybrid teaching with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as I was able to quickly adapt my teaching by recording lectures, delivering online discussions, and using virtual learning platforms. Students’ high attendance and participation in both tutorials and lectures I delivered online even after the university suspended assessment showcases my success in sparking their desire for life-long learning. I was also involved in sharing my experiences of using technology for teaching, and offer practical advice (e.g. managing online discussions, assessment methods) to course organisers for the 2020/2021 academic year at course organisers’ meetings (June 2020). I also helped redesign the delivery of class assignments for Social Development from in-person presentations to video blogging, due to the strike action during Semester 2 in 2020 and the covid-19 pandemic afterwards. This also helped pilot evaluation methods later adapted to the People First: Anthropology of International Development in Semester 1, 2021.