Inside the Teachers Studio: Brave New World Ethnography Project

One of the best assets of a college with a culture of writing? Instructors in all disciplines are encouraged to spend time creating unique and productive learning experiences for their students.  

The sharing of such assignments has been a staple of Longview's WAC Workshops.  Seeing what other instructors have designed always serves to point up the incredible diversity of writing projects that can be offered and also illustrates the rich array of learning experiences Longview provides for students.

This semester the blog will feature some of these innovative assignments, large and small, which invite students to develop as thinkers and writers through a thoughtfully designed learning experience.

MELISSA EATON, Anthropology

Melissa contributes here a dynamic and provocative assignment based on Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.  Melissa used the novel as one of the texts in her Cultural Anthropology course in Fall of 2010.  

Read her guest blog post below to learn about her design decisions and how this comprehensive project came to life within her course.  Then look at the assignment itself in the Innovative Assignments section. 

Good news: You will be able to view student projects in response to this assignment at Imagination Longview on May 4!  Learn more about Melissa by reading her WAC Profile.

An introduction to the Brave New World (BNW) Ethnography Project

THE IDEA

I first daydreamed about this assignment during the summer of 2010 as I was reading Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World for the first time and contemplating the possibilities of using it in my courses.

Cultural anthropology instructors have long lamented the lack of an introduction to doing ethnography in most introductory level courses, especially since it is recommended that budding anthropologists should first study a culture outside of their own. Huxley’s dystopia seemed the perfect opportunity to practice ethnographic observations and interpreting cultures without having to worry about travel budgets, grant writing, informed consent, and a human subjects review board.

THE DESIGN

Designing the BNW project took some time as I grappled with the complexity of the project. I wanted students to develop skills of observation, cultural relativity, reflexivity, ethnographic note taking, ethnographic writing, peer review, and the outside application of anthropological knowledge. 

Finding ways to split up these tasks into manageable units, learning how to manage (and teach) a wiki to house the information, and writing thorough instructions to communicate what I wanted for the students proved to be the most daunting tasks. Writing the instruction sheets took the most time since I was designing every element of this assignment from scratch. I included several examples in order to make it clear what I wanted students to produce, including several note-taking methods used in anthropology and two examples of ethnographic description by Horace Miner and Clifford Geertz that are classics in cultural anthropology.

I realized quickly that in order to ensure students participated fully, I needed to make the assignment worth a significant portion of the class, which ended up being 25% of the overall course grade. The BNW project also replaced three papers that I usually assign for this particular course.

Of course, I quickly determined that I wanted to give students an opportunity to practice these skills and improve their performance. So, I designed the project to be accomplished twice. The student’s first effort would take place during the first half of the book (before the characters go to the Savage Reservation) and a second effort would observe more complex interactions of culture shock in the second half of the book. 

STUDENT RESPONSE

Overall, students responded well to this assignment. We spent a large amount of time during class discussing the instructions and the examples. However, there was a large learning curve for some. As expected, dealing with ethnocentrism was a major challenge for some students. For others, the barrier was the fact that this was a complex assignment with many parts. I made sure to break the assignment into steps and designed a checklist for students to review to ensure that all steps were completed.

Some students battled with the technology of uploading their documentation to the class wiki. For some students, I provided additional help and even uploaded (or created links) to make sure that the information was available for their peer reviewer. 

For many, however, the largest impediment was creativity. In order to facilitate the necessary skill of reflexivity, I asked students to create an anthropologist’s persona who was following the characters in the book around. The purpose of this part of the exercise is for students to really think about the biases and the impact that their persona is making on the process of note taking and in the interpretation of the BNW culture. 

Additionally, as the last step in the BNW project, I wanted each student to take the ethnographic knowledge produced by another student and apply it in a creative format (like a poster, a synopsis for a film, or a commercial or a product). Both of these elements caused the most pressure and anxiety for the students, perhaps because of the creativity required of the assignment or the lack of familiarity with assignments that permit creativity. After making it through the process of the first BNW ethnography, the students who were anxious the first time seemed much more comfortable the second time around.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, I was pleased with the products generated by the students for this BNW ethnography. One of the strengths of the assignment design is that students had to read the text in a new way, and that standard reviews and summaries of Huxley’s classic would be useless in completing the assignment. 

As a result, many students became very involved in the project and some thoroughly enjoyed the creativity allowed in its execution. In fact, I recommended two students’ work to be included into the Imagination Longview showcase of student work this spring. 

Although some students chose not to complete the assignment, as happens in every course, I certainly feel that the it not only accomplished the course objectives, but also taught the students valuable skills that can be used in the observation of daily life. I am not certain if I would ever have the opportunity to use this assignment in my cultural anthropology class in the future, I hope that I could modify it for other common reading project novels used at Longview.

 ---Melissa