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Teaching with Digital Technologies: Mobilizing Anthropology for Responsible Pedagogical Design and Outreach
keywords:
technology
pedagogy
teaching
Digital technologies increasingly play a prominent role in communication within and outside the classroom. Digital technologies also offer possibilities to facilitate as well as complicate efforts to promote equity and diversity in teaching as well as collaborative/participatory research that works toward decolonizing truth making. Following this year’s AAA Theme, which highlights pedagogy as a "key medium for the communication of anthropological truths," this roundtable features effective strategies for mobilizing digital technologies to support equity and diversity within anthropological pedagogy and student research, to foster equitable collaborations and interactions among our communities and students, and to help students become critical consumers and producers of data. The roundtable discusses the possibilities of digital technologies to address issues of power and inclusion in anthropological pedagogy. It demonstrates how cloud sharing and image-sharing projection software can be used to distribute power from the instructor to students in productive ways and give voice to those who do not feel comfortable participating in class. In addition, it explores how to take online teaching to the next level by effectively mobilizing virtual reality to foster interactivity and virtual co-presence. Not only are such efforts of inclusion important for countering feelings of isolation commonly reported during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they also open up new possibilities for student engagement that may not otherwise be possible. At the same time, presenters illustrate how such software can help students reflect on different subjectivities and how “truths” are constructed; ultimately helping students become critical consumers of information. The roundtable also investigates how digital technologies can be mobilized to help students become responsible co-producers of "truths" through collaborative/participatory research and digital ethnography. From start to finish, presenters illustrate how to help students “enter” into a digital field site, navigate the ethics of engagement in digital ethnography, and coproduce public-facing digital deliverables that foster civically engaged dialogue and align with community members’ objectives. To illustrate this process, the roundtable draws on both long-term and recently established collaborations. Presenters discuss a decade-old community-based collaboration among Jewish and African-American elders in Indianapolis and students in an ethnographic methods course as well as a recently established university engagement with eSports and accompanying digital ethnography project within a qualitative methods course. Considering that responsible pedagogy involves multiple stakeholders, including not just faculty, students, and community members but also administrators and staff, the roundtable also explores how to design and scale up and out an online program originally developed for students to recognize interpersonal and systemic forms of bias. It illustrates how lessons learned can be applied for staff and faculty professional development. It also presents advice on designing online courses and curriculum and mobilizing course management systems to be more inclusive of students from diverse backgrounds. Through featuring work from cultural anthropology and archaeology at public and private universities that serve a wide range of students, this roundtable discusses key “how-to” steps for mobilizing digital technology to reflect on and address the power dynamics and truth making we engage in with our students and our communities. https://www.americananthro.org/AM_Theme