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

Keeping Up While Winding Down

image by Idea go

As another semester comes to a close, instructors necessarily turn much of their attention to evaluating and grading student work. Preliminary drafts of projects have been completed and revised by students---or not, the coaching offered and counsel issued by instructors has been heeded---or not, and the final versions of projects students turn in to instructors as evidence of their best work may successfully reflect just that—or not.

At this point, it’s possible for teachers to feel relieved, tired, frustrated, exhilarated, exhausted, ecstatic, or disappointed. In fact, it’s entirely possible for them to cycle through all of these emotions in the space of a single afternoon, especially if the afternoon was spent grading.

To combat grading fatigue, consider these tips:

• Pace yourself so you are not overwhelmed by an entire set of papers or exams at one sitting.  Get up and move around or take a walk after a set number of papers, especially if you realize that you are struggling to focus.  For those who can tolerate it, caffeine may offer some modest health benefits in addition to stimulating your brain temporarily and helping you maintain focus (The Mayo Clinic). 
• Harder to do at this late date, but schedule more time than you think you need for your grading sessions.
• Remember that the grade you assign to a final project is an evaluation of a single performance.  You needn't assume a defensive posture as you respond, just provide the necessary assessment and offer brief remarks that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the project.
• Though you won't be seeing another draft of this piece, it is still legitimate to pose questions to the student. Students can always benefit from your specific questions about their intended meaning or writing choices.
• Recall that less is more; studies have shown that a few salient comments (or questions) have greater impact on future student performance than a page of detailed instructor comments.
• Devise and use a scoring guide of some kind (holistic or primary trait) to help communicate your evaluation clearly and efficiently.
• Conduct research: note and record consistent patterns of problems that students exhibit as a group.  It might be harder to remember these when you want to revise your instructions next semester or next fall if you don't jot them down now. 
• Talk to colleagues; share your utter joy and bitter disappointment as they happen.
• Call me if you need assistance with any of these tips!

Connections Unbound

Connecting people to ideas related to writing and through writing have been critical dimensions of the WAC Program from the start.  In fact, one of the first across-the-curriculum events sponsored by WAC and some other new initiatives in the late 1980s was a large-scale reading of Kurt Vonnegut's futuristic novel, Galapagos.

Common reading projects are a great way to engage students in a larger consideration of ideas than a single classroom experience can typically provide and, of course, are a great way to integrate relevant writing opportunities into courses to any degree an instructor desires. 

Faculty who've participated in recent common reading projects at Longview, such as The Plague and Affluenza, can attest to the value of having students read a book and connect it to what they are studying.  Many are already planning to incorporate Huxley's Brave New World into their courses next semester.

With Here Comes Everybody, we took a slightly different approach by informally inviting everybody at LV to check out some of Shirky's ideas and just play with them. Reactions to the book have been varied: some are struck by Shirky's analysis of social patterns, some feel they already had a grasp of the ideas he explores, others regard his ideas as ground-breaking and transformative, and a few don't agree fully with the way Shirky accounts for some of the social changes we've seen in the last two decades.

What matters is that people were considering these ideas about social media, social networks, and human behavior, probing the relationships between them, talking about them with others, and trying to put them into a broader phenomenological context.  Getting these important perspectives into circulation was really the point since not everyone's schedule could accommodate participation in the meet-ups.

Something else interesting happened with the read-along: Honors students discovered it and joined in the discussions.  As it turns out, the major theme for Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) this year is the "Democratization of Information," coincidentally a rather perfect fit with the book we chose to feature in this new way of engaging our Longview community.  (Although after reading Shirky's take on the six degrees of separation and social networking, I'm reluctantly beginning to doubt the existence of coincidence since he makes such a good case for how principles of probability rule.  And can I just say I think the notion of coincidence, while considerably less scientific, is way more fun?)

Keet Kopecky, LV Honors Program director and LV WAC Cadre member, explains how PTK and the Honors Program are connected: "MCC-Longview's Honors Program and the national honor society Phi Theta Kappa both require students to achieve and maintain a 3.5 GPA in order to join. Participants in both programs benefit from enhanced engagement in the classroom and through campus and community involvement."

Keet added that generous scholarships are available for active members of the Honors Program during their time at MCC-Longview and that there are significant scholarship opportunities for active members of PTK upon graduation and transfer to a 4-year university. Keet says that there is a large overlap between the membership of the Honors Program and PTK at Longview, so many of his honors seminar students are also members of PTK.

Keet is facilitating two honors seminar this semester, both entitled "Democratization of Information," since that is the 2010-2011 national PTK theme.  Keet said, "I always involve the students in designing my seminars, and when I mentioned Shirky's book, they enthusiastically embraced discussing it as part of the seminars."

He notes that students brought "generational and life-experience perspectives different from those of most Longview employees, making our monthly book meet-ups involving honors students, faculty, and staff quite rich and insightful."

At last week's seminars, Keet said his students "offered unsolicited comments in strong support of the faculty/staff/student book discussions and hoped that the college understood how much they liked the engagement with employees and hoped it would be repeated in the future."

I certainly can't speak for everyone at LV, but the WAC Program is definitely up for another read-along after our last meet-up for Here Comes Everybody this Friday, Nov. 12, at 2:00, at Next Door Pizza.  As always, you are more than welcome to join us!

In Their Own Words

Clips of Selected Interviews from WAC Digital Archives

(video compiled by Clay Bussey)

From its inception, the WAC Program at MCC-Longview was carefully researched and thoughtfully designed, which has unquestionably contributed to its longevity.  But the only way a program like this can thrive for 25 years is because people have taken its ideas to heart in their teaching and support of learning. 

WAC comes to life in classroom after classroom, semester after semester, year after year, because people like those featured in this selection of clips from interviews (conducted five years ago on our 20th anniversary) strongly believe writing is a unique and powerful mode of learning.  You see much evidence of it in the way they teach their courses.  But don't take my word for it; click on the video link and hear what those involved in WAC have to say. 

Why WI?

Over the past 12 years that Writing Intensive (WI) courses have been offered at MCC-Longview, people have occasionally wondered why we named it Writing Intensive.  Isn't the term "intensive" somewhat daunting and doesn't it suggest that students will do more work than they would otherwise?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answers are "no" and "no."  The running joke in the WAC Program is that we could have named the experience "Writing Euphoria" and students would still shy away because the word striking fear in their hearts is actually "writing" rather than "intensive."

We know this because during the earliest years of General Education writing assessment, we discovered that students were waiting until their last semester at MCC-Longview to take a composition course.  We also found that the more composition courses students had taken, the better they performed on the writing assessment.  Needless to say, this finding speaks well of the composition experiences orchestrated by English faculty. 

However, we all agreed that the kind of knowledge and writing experience recieved through composition courses would serve students much better if the courses were taken sooner rather than later. So the Writing Intensive requirement works, in part, as a powerful lever, steering students into the prerequisite, English 101, much earlier in their academic careers than they would elect to take it if left to their own devices.

What happens next is that faculty in other disciplines can build on that English 101 knowledge and experience by their embrace of the writing process and carefully designed assignments marked by thoughtful use of drafts and feedback meant to develop further the critical thinking abilities of their students.

The irony is that a Writing Intensive course is not more work for the students who take it, but, rather, for the faculty member who teaches it.  For students, such courses offer interesting and unique writing projects just as many MCC-Longview courses do. 

In Jim Pratt's Intro to Microcomputer Applications, for instance, students create a business plan for a hypothetical business they invent.  In the Math-English learning community, Bridget Gold and Becky Foster have students do an array of writing projects, including letters explaining math concepts, similar to the kind featured in the book they read, Letters to a Young Mathmetician. 

Matthew Westra encourages his Adolescent Psychology students to develop their own assignment by investigating an aspect of the field which particularly interests them. Those going into teaching can devise a curriculum pertinent to adolescent development while others choose to examine the historical, social, or medical dimensions of this stage.

Anne Nienhueser's WI project in her online course invites students to design a green home by researching ecological and economical sources and applying the concepts they've learned in Foundations of Physics.

For instructors, these courses reflect an emphasis on revision and an obligation to provide considered feedback to each student on a project draft so that the student can re-think some of the writing choices he or she has made.  Students then have the opportunity to fully consider the impact and effectiveness of their writing and make changes to strengthen the project by revising it before turning it in for final evaluation by the instructor.

Once students take a WI course, they typically are quite sold on its value.  In fact, it is not at all unusual for students who have transferred to 4-year colleges to report back on how valuable these WI courses were in preparing them for their coursework at the next level and even for employment beyond that. 

The LV WAC Cadre ultimately settled on the name "Writing Intensive" because they knew that most of the 4-year schools to which our students transfer use this identifier. For better or worse, it seemed logical and appropriate to call the experience by its most recognizable name.

Check out MCC-Longview's Spring 2012 WI offerings and please direct your students to them!  The instructors you'll find listed there are quite willing to discuss the nature of the projects and course work with interested students.

Power Tools

When I first came to Longview, you could open up a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica on the reference shelves in the front room of the library to the term "technology" and find a lengthy entry written by one of my former professors and mentor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Dr. Robert F.G. Spier, Anthropology professor emeritus, is a premier authority on technology of an ancient kind: tools of other times by which people hunted and gathered and generally made their lives and survival easier.

It's startling to think how swiftly the word "technology" has been sharpened into a far more narrow meaning and one that is mostly computer-related.

Looking at an online encyclopedia today is a far different and more complex experience than flipping through a printed volume.  Search terms lead you to more search terms and and you quickly realize that a single screen is rife with research possibilities: lists of related articles, names of contributors, and sample APA and MLA citations.  It can be daunting even when you know where you are headed.

Which may help explain the popular appeal of Wikipedia. It seems like only yesterday that the mere term invoked incredulousness and cynicism in the minds of college professors and, well, me.  An encyclopedia that was instantly revisable and composed of collaboratively written entries and without the veracity of a refereed publication or peer-reviewed journal? Who would buy such an idea?  Almost everyone, it turns out, albeit ten years later.

In late 2010, we find ourselves teaching a generation of students for whom Wikipedia is the "go-to" source. Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  I now use it as a starting point for looking up things or people I know absolutely nothing about, like a band I recently heard on the radio called the Magnetic Zeroes or a term that I'd like a bit more explanation of than a dictionary will offer.  It would be an unlikely starting point for my own professional research, however.

For students who are novice researchers, especially on topics new to them as so many of those they will study in the Gen Ed curriculum are, Wikipedia might, for now, appear slightly less frenetic than an online traditional encyclopedia.  It can provide an informal way to get a general sense of a topic before pursuing more comprehensive coverage of it in academic or other sources located through databases.

Whether you love or hate Wikipedia, providing some context for it and counsel on how to approach it in regard to your assignment is probably time well spent. Chances are good that when it comes to investigating a topic, Wikipedia is the research power tool of choice for many students.

FYI: Clay Shirky discusses extensively the evolution of Wikipedia and its emergent features in Chapter 5 ( p.108-142) of Here Comes Everybody.

Do you encourage students to use Wikipedia?  If so, what are your expectations of it?  Do you establish parameters for its use?  Do you overtly discourage it?  Tell all.

Poetry in Motion

When explaining that writing is a performance-based activity, I often use a sports analogy to illustrate that point. Writing is like playing a sport: you have to engage in it to improve.

Although we tend to think of it as strictly a cerebral process, writing is also very much a kinesthetic one, whether fingers are clicking against a keyboard or wrapped around a pen moving across paper.

Reading about writing or grammar does little to change the actual performance, just as reading about basketball wouldn't have much impact on one's ability to shoot hoops, though such reading could have value for myriad other reasons. 

What improves writing is, well, writing, which gives us yet another good reason for striving to incorporate many writing opportunities for our students throughout their time at Longview.

Watching the Longview volleyball coach give counsel to some young volleyball players recently reminded me of other dimensions of the writing-athletics analogy. The coach masterfully instructed the players on discrete parts of the game and patiently illustrated moves to make subsequent game play more effective.

This session wasn’t a game, so the stakes were lower, allowing much instruction and practice to be accomplished without game-time pressure. Understated sessions like these, which encourage concentrated focus, are arguably the building blocks of high-intensity play.

Not a minute was wasted and players were absorbed into the moment, without distractions, guided to more advantageous spatial orientation by the elegant movement and succinct communication of an expert.

At his urging and after watching him effortlessly model specific moves, the players stretched their arms above their heads and with their open hands formed triangle shapes in the air, their fingertips repeatedly lifting the ball and pressing it into flight.

The take-away message here? When it comes to student writing, teachers are very much operating as coaches, offering critical and timely feedback and pinpointing the areas of performance that need improvement or that could benefit from another approach.

The mix of low-stakes and high-stakes assignments found in various courses throughout our General Education curriculum, the foundational writing instruction provided in composition courses, and the required Writing Intensive experience all serve to ensure that our students get plenty of writing time and performance-enhancing counsel while at Longview.

If you’re searching for fresh ideas for your own classroom coaching or just want to see pure poetry in motion, think about catching a Longview Lakers volleyball game before season's end.

Other sports analogies?  Share them in the comments section.