My approach to teaching has emerged from several years of teaching college students in varied and often challenging circumstances. Since co-teaching my first college seminar in Spring 2011, I have taught in a wide variety of settings: from community colleges to elite research universities, from a remote field station in the Peruvian Amazon to the education complex at San Quentin State Prison. Out of those varied experiences, I have learned that the most pivotal pedagogical moments are those that engage the widest diversity of minds.

 

From the outset, I want my students to understand three things: that the material before them is meant to be challenging; that I expect them to face that challenge in a spirit of courage and collegiality; and that I take responsibility for equipping them to succeed in every task I set them. My goal is that my classroom students will see me in the same way as my students in the rainforest: I am present as a guide, a resource, and a passionate co-learner, but the focus of each class session is the students and their engagement with a specific set of challenges – challenges designed so that students will experience them as meaningful.

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Of course, students differ in their perceptions of meaning, so it is important that the material have clear relevance from multiple perspectives. This is where my interdisciplinary background becomes helpful. For a given set of anthropological materials, I try to highlight simultaneously their scientific value, their relevance to social issues, and the broader philosophical questions they raise about human subjectivity and the prospects of living with and for others. As an exercise in interdisciplinary framing, I have designed and taught several seminars that apply the skills of biological anthropology to social issues. In Biocultural Approaches to Sex & Gender, for example, students encountered the work of scholars like Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Frans de Waal in a way that prepared them to raise fundamental questions about the social construction of the body while simultaneously pursuing their curiosity about the natural history of baboons and bonobos. By practicing critical engagement with multiple lines of thinking simultaneously, students can begin to draw connections between fields as disparate as behavioral ecology and feminist critical theory. The field of conservation ecology similarly lends itself to interdisciplinary social-biological-political thinking.

 

One of the most powerful techniques that I have found is problem-based learning, which confronts students with a specific, well-defined problem and empowers them to find their own solutions. In Principles of Conservation Biology, I design activities around real-world conservation issues such as overfishing or the mixed blessings of ecotourism, then give students time to work together or independently on practical solutions. Inevitably some groups focus on ecological or biological issues, others on politics and culture, and in many cases a productive debate ensues. By presenting students with a problem, clarifying its constraints, and scaffolding the outlines of possible solutions over the course of several lectures, I empower students to construct their own ideas and challenge the ideas of their peers. In the end, my goal is to cultivate a probing and reflective mindset that will serve them as lifelong learners and thoughtful citizens of the world.

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