How is theory like spaghetti?

I am not a good cook, so I frequently ask silly questions like, “how long should I boil this?” My family members are not bad cooks, so they have no idea what the box says, and instead give me answers like, “until it’s brown and has the right texture.” But we have found synchrony in the cooking of spaghetti. How do you know when spaghetti is ready to eat? It’s ready when you throw a piece of it against the wall and it sticks.

I am a pretty good anthropologist, so I no longer have questions like, “what counts as theory in my paper?” But my students are still learning, and my thoughts on which models of power are most relevant to their data are about as helpful as the color brown. Luckily, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides this piece of guidance:

“Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems. If they cease being useful with respect to such problems, they tend to stop being used and are more or less abandoned. If they continue being useful, throwing up new understandings, they are further elaborated and go on being used.”

I have fixated on the words, “throwing up new understandings.” Tempting though it is to think of theory like vomit, the spaghetti metaphor probably works better. Take that “related study” and “throw it up” against the wall; if it sticks, if it gives you a “new understanding” – or better yet, a new question – you have found theory.

Foucault, I tell my students, throws up lots of new ways of thinking about the world for me. I introduce my students to Foucault, but I know that they’re still struggling to understand what is meant by a “technology of the self” in relation to a contested chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis. If they throw that idea against the wall, it’s still going to be a slimy noodle. If they need to keep cooking their Foucault, it’s probably not good theory for them yet. But the idea that a diagnosis isn’t a neutral experience for a person with chronic fatigue syndrome might be just right.

What I love best about this definition of theory is that it honors students as real researchers. Of all the things I’ve given them to read, good theory is what stuck.

Group Led Reading Quizzes: a learning process

Quizzes are great retrieval practice. If they’re super short and low-stakes (like a Kahoot!), they can also be a good way of making sure the whole class is on the same page to start the day. But every time I use quizzes to assess student learning, I feel like what I’m really assessing is how much students think like me. And a good quiz takes a long, long time to make. They’re really at their best at supporting students through the “remember” and “understand” parts of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but I’d rather be investing my precious prep-time in helping students move into application, analysis, evaluation, and creation.

So this Spring, in my Anthropology of Aging class, instead of giving my own quizzes, I had students make reading quizzes in small groups. The groups exchanged quizzes and took them. Then I graded them on the quizzes they made rather than the quizzes they took.

There were downsides – students were not always able to identify what was most important about the readings, and they were certainly no better at designing good questions than I am. There was a bit of a learning curve on how much time we spent discussing the quizzes. But there were enough upsides that I’ll definitely be using them again.

The best thing about the quizzes was that good questions really did reinforce key ideas for everyone, and weaker questions worked as really useful class discussion prompts. After they had taken the quizzes and self-graded, I asked students to identify which questions they wanted to have explained, which gave the creating group a chance to talk at more length about what they thought mattered and why, and gave me a chance to redirect anything heading off in the wrong direction. It did the awesome pedagogical thing of really being able to build off of where students are, rather than just gauging how far away they are from me. And it clearly did give students a sense of ownership of the material in a way that made me feel really good.

The icing on the cake is that those questions are a useful gauge to make sure that I’m appropriately scaffolding the concepts I teach.

Next time, here’s how I’ll lay it out:

• 6 question quizzes cover 2-3 readings each, and I tell them ahead of time which readings are best for which categories of question
  • For example, “Keyword questions should come from Bledsoe 2002 or Johnson-Hanks 2006; Writing Techniques questions should come from Johnson-Hanks 2006 or Sokolovsky and Cohen 2009”
• Questions
  • 5 categories of questions: 1 “main point” question, 2 “keyword” questions, 1 “course concept” question, 1 “writing techniques” question*, 1 “comparison between readings” question
    • Questions should pull out the most useful points from each category
  • Multiple Choice (3 answers) or True/False
  • No trick questions
• Group work
  • Each student contributes at least two questions to their group’s Google Doc, and they collaborate there (preferably using the chat feature) to choose and edit the best 6 questions (where I can see version and chat history to confirm everyone posted questions).
  • Each group needs to submit their questions and answers before class so that I can add them to the day’s Powerpoint. Answer keys should include a very short summary of who wrote which question, and who did what administrative (printing, organizing, editing) work.
  • Students are responsible for printing

This time, I included an individual annotation grade as part of the assignment (I walked around the room and checked off that they had annotated the readings covered in the quiz). But I felt like I left in a lot of room for BS, so I’ll probably do annotation checking differently next time.

I did four Group Led Reading Quizzes over 10 weeks this quarter, and I had them all exchange quizzes and take them at the same time. Next time, I think I’d rather have one group lead at a time, but have a quiz every week.

There were plenty of other take-aways at the end of this year (my first full academic year as a professor since completing my PhD!), but this one has the benefit of being easy to replicate, low-prep, and particularly good for new classes (or old classes with a lot of new readings). Hope someone else can get some use out of the idea, too!

* Because I ask students to write ethnographically at the end of the class, I ask them to pay attention to the writing techniques in everything they read and later experiment with applying some of them.

AAA 2017 CfP – A Bad Age for Citizenship: barriers to belonging in the school years

Call for Papers: A Bad Age for Citizenship: barriers to belonging in the school years
American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2017, Washington, D.C., 29 Nov – 3 Dec

Chair/Organizer: Samantha Grace (University of Arizona)
Invited Discussant: Caroline Bledsoe (Northwestern)

Youth and families around the world face a dilemma when school is simultaneously experienced as a site for establishing youth as full citizens and as a site of social differentiation, exclusion, inequality, and danger. Responses to this dilemma are shaped by imagined futures of familial social mobility as well as histories of familial exclusion; these responses are both constrained and made possible by the intersections of local, national, global, and transnational age-based rights and responsibilities (Bledsoe and Sow 2011). Just as the AAA 2017 theme highlights the diversity of anthropological engagements with contemporary crises of inequality, this panel seeks to diagnose the barriers to social justice where they intersect with schooling (arguably the most important hybrid global and local institution for remedying national inequality). In line with that goal, this panel’s discussion revolves around the theme of school-based citizenship as informed by a life course approach. Questions on that theme include (but are not limited to):

• How do concerns about students’ futures guide family’s engagements with schooling in the present?
• How are transnational citizenships shaped by familial constellations of age?
• How do physical/bodily changes in youth and childhood impact expectations of students’ rights and responsibilities? And how do school structures and policies impact the physical bodies of students?
• What can school-based language ideologies tell us about age and belonging? And how do discourses about civic responsibilities differentiate students?
• How do concepts of “risk” shape student roles in their schools, homes, and communities?
• How do school structures produce and constrain dangers to students?
• How do (cultural and national) age identities limit and produce possible solutions to racial, gender, and class inequalities?

This panel seeks papers from the anthropologies of youth, education, and the life course that concern the differentiation of belonging and citizenship. The anthropology of youth has improved the interdisciplinary study of youth citizenship by highlighting the importance of youth cultural practices, and thus centering variation and differentiation over a search for a generically acceptable boundary between youth and adult rights and responsibilities (Bucholtz 2002). The anthropology of education has grounded interrogations of school-based citizenship through ethnographic analyses of how global and national directives are locally implemented and contested (Coe 2005, Koyama 2011). Life course anthropology has highlighted the importance of situating these questions within their temporal, intergenerational, and changing biocultural contexts (e.g., Johnson-Hanks 2006, Danely and Lynch 2013). This panel builds on the methodological strength of anthropological approaches in examining the contested belonging that youth and their families must confront while engaged with schooling.

Please e-mail proposed paper titles and abstracts (max. 250 words) to Samantha Grace (slgrace@email.arizona.edu) by 5pm AEST, 4 April. Please use the subject heading, “AAA 2017” in your e-mail. I will let you know if your abstract will be included in this panel by 10 April. If included, you will be required to upload your individual abstracts to the AAA conference portal and register for the AAA by Friday, 14 April 2017 (5pm EDT).

School Choice vs. Equal Education: why we are talking past each other

With Betsy DeVos up for Secretary of Education, the debate over “school choice” is back.* Both sides of the debate agree that too many public schools suck, and both sides of the debate agree that children have a right to good education. But the conservative** solution proposed is to allow families to hold schools accountable by voting with their feet. The liberal side argues that, because not all families have equal opportunity to choose the “best” option, this sticks low-income families in the same crappy schools but with even fewer resources. Instead, the lefty solution is to minimize school choice in order to maximize community accountability for all schools.

You can argue this in terms of facts and figures, policy details, and assessments of different attempts to implement these systems across the country. But it seems like those arguments only convince the people who are already generally aligned with one side of the political spectrum. In other words, we are talking past each other. But why?

One big reason is that we are talking about rights in two different ways – ways we tend to associate with different age groups. In particular, I think this is (perhaps subtly) being framed as the right of parents to choose the best school versus the right of children to equal education. Or, in other words, the right to equal access and the right to equal remedy.***

The right to equal access is saying something like, you have the right to try and find work wherever you want, and no one can enslave you or make you a serf, and no one can refuse to hire you for irrelevant reasons (like being poor, Native American, old, trans*, etc). But equal access to work does not mean that you can be the president or a CEO or a professor just because you think that would be nice, instead you are accountable for your own specialized training and have to compete with other people on the same grounds of merit.

The right to equal remedy, on the other hand, recognizes that our society is not a level playing field, and is explicitly targeted at fixing that. The hands-down biggest way we have agreed to do that in the modern world is through education: all children have the right to be educated. It doesn’t matter if they have learning disabilities, it doesn’t matter if they refuse to do their homework, and it definitely doesn’t matter if they live too far away from a school. Unlike the right to equal access, equal remedy means that you have the right to go to the best school just because you think that would be nice. This whole idea of equal remedy justifies the (adult) framework of equal access. It’s how we justify to ourselves that our playing field is equal enough for adults to reasonably compete against each other based on merit.

So, back to school choice. It is, essentially, a framework of equal access and not equal remedy. There’s a reason we don’t talk about children “choosing” their schools: it’s because we recognize that is the responsibility of parents and adult guardians. We don’t frame children’s rights as equal access, because we don’t believe that children have the ability to compete based on merit. We already know that it’s adults competing on their children’s behalf.

That’s why, when lefties vociferously argue to protect public education as a right to equal remedy – that all children must have the right to education (in order to create a level playing field as adults) – they aren’t making any headway. Because the right already agrees with that. Instead, the right has reframed the debate to make it about families, not children, fighting for the best opportunities for their children. Just like how a parent, not a child, is responsible for working to keep their kids clothed and fed.

So, how can we start talking to each other? I think the starting place is to acknowledge the place that both ethical frameworks have in our society. Yes, we do think that it is a parents’ responsibility to fight for (and provide for) their children. And yes, we do think that children have the right to education, food, and clothes, even when their parents aren’t able to provide them.****

And from there, I confess, the next step seems obvious: parents should be able to fight for school choice and anything else for their children, but they must do it within a system that ensures children the equal remedy of education. But I’d love someone to argue with me.

—

*Of course, there are plenty of other things people have problems with about Betsy DeVos, but I don’t really have anything new to say about those.
** This debate doesn’t perfectly break down along the lines of left/right, conservative/liberal, Democrat/Republican, but it’s close, so I’m going with it.
*** I secretly think these terms are kind of confusing, but I can’t think of any that are consistently clearer, and these are classics – they are how T. H. Marshall distinguishes between civil and political rights on the one hand and social rights (like education) on the other in his long essay “Citizenship and Social Class“.
**** I could write a whole other essay about how we fail to convince each other of anything when we pretend the “other side” doesn’t agree with either of these propositions.

My baby: the Ancient Goddess (or, why to give creative research assignments)

In ninth grade, my English teacher Del Hayes (who would leave the next year to can fish in Alaska) gave my class an open-ended research assignment and I decided to make my first website. It was, more or less, a Wikipedia page on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, although in 1996 there was no other mention of her online (at least according to AltaVista) and Wikipedia was still a twinkle in someone’s eye. But I threw myself into the basics of HTML so that I could choose just the right shade of Hex Value, and I went to the Library of Congress so that I could learn more about Theodora than my school’s Encyclopedias could offer. It was enormously fun.

The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, by Francois Navez (yes, that’s where we got the word from)

Shortly after, I put my feminist interest in Greek myths into code and started work on the opus that would become the website “paleothea.com” (my attempt to translate “ancient goddess” before I knew Greek). For years, it was the first hit on Google if you typed in “Greek Goddess,” and the work that I poured into it led me to major in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at Oberlin College (I had intended a more practical major in psychology). For more than ten years, I stayed up late into the night, posting pre-Raphaelite and WPA-art deco-mural paintings of goddesses that didn’t make the cut to D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths.

Then, as now, my interests were wide-ranging. My fascination with creating a beautiful database of woman-centered Greek myths waned as I became more academically competent in studying them (and I gave away the site), but the research skills I had learned translated easily. The limitations and merits of interpretation were some of the biggest takeaways. The strength of finding my own voice as a researcher was another. I went to work in my own community in the DC area after graduating, and soon the questions I was asking there drove me to graduate school.

Today, I am an anthropologist who does research in Ecuador on how rights and responsibilities change with age, and my love for retelling Hesiod’s myths of gender transformation almost never comes up. But what I know now, that I could not have known then, is that website was as important to my sense of self then as my anthropological work is now. And then as now, it was because of my personal investment and ownership of the work.

Cybele, by Erika Meriaux (seriously, look up the myths about her and Attis, who is lurking in the background)

So now when I teach, I, too, try to include opportunities for my students to come up with their own research projects. I keep adjusting my guidelines because too much latitude is overwhelming for students who are less excited or less confident. Students benefit from having some control over their learning process, but don’t naturally know the critical skills that come with learning how to research. But at the end of the day, my academic journey began the day I came to know myself as a creative contributor of knowledge, and I can think of no greater gift.

—

tl;dr Inquiry-based learning for the win!

On Civilization (V) and the Academic Job Search

I have a confession: I love the academic job search. I love it for the same reason I love playing Civilization. I like to play on a higher setting than I can usually win on, and whenever I start a new game I like to spend a few hours researching strategy guides for new techniques. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to prioritize using my limited production to the best long term effect. When I finally start the game I look for the land tiles with the resources my civilization needs most and then adjust my strategies as I get to know the competitive field. Looking for a tenure track job as a sociocultural anthropologist focusing on the life course seems to have a lot of overlap.

Although I took anthropology classes as an undergrad, I first really connected to the discipline when I came across the Washington Post’s obituary for Clifford Geertz on November 2, 2006. I was still working as a direct service provider at Identity, Inc, but I was already itching to engage the kinds of big questions that intellectually curious people ask when they regularly encounter systemic social problems. Although I am not the kind of person who clips things out of newspapers, I clipped out Geertz’s obituary and bought the book it mentioned: The Interpretation of Cultures. The second or third time I read it, the margins had started filling with questions, arguments, and emojis. I was already hooked by the time I started reading Abu-Lughod, Capps and Ochs, and Mendoza-Denton.

By the time I finally started graduate school, I knew that the job market was inhospitable but my whole-hearted conversion to anthropology demanded action. I believed in the truth-value of particularity and in the methods for paying attention when a culture “bodies forth and enmeshes you” (Geertz After the Fact 44). I wanted to learn it, but I also knew I wanted to teach it. So, from the beginning, I attended every professionalization workshop and anthropological pedagogy talk I could. I started reading teaching blogs, and following anthropologists on Twitter. For seven years I made preparing for the job search my break-time treat. So now? I am pretty excited.

I am still playing on a higher setting than I can reliably win on; in the current job market, I am a PhD candidate competing against people who have had two or three years to prioritize building their publication records over things like researching and writing a dissertation. But the game has now started, and I am enjoying searching out the few positions best suited for the kind of anthropologist I want to be. I hope, of course, that I will win the game – find the place where I can do the kinds of teaching and research that have motivated my adult life – but in the meantime, I am having a lot of fun just playing.

The Triple Interview: a qualitative life course method

Interview on Liliana’s patio

Sometimes your informants lie to you and sometimes they lie to themselves. Sometimes they are wrong about things, sometimes you are missing the context to understand them properly, and sometimes they just change their minds. When you’re dealing with a vulnerable population – and youth are certainly that – how you work with that unreliability matters. There are plenty of methodological texts dedicated to improving interview techniques, and I have benefited from a number of them. But here is a strategy that I developed for my dissertation fieldwork that I thought worked out very well:

The Triple Interview

Step 1. Interview the kid first

Step 2. Interview the kid with a parent of their choosing

Step 3. Interview the kid and a core network of people that matter to them

Step 1 is easier said than done. Not only does the IRB require parent consent for kids (as they should), a lot of kids themselves want to make sure they have their parents’ approval for something as unusual as an interview. That means scheduling a face to face meeting with a parent and their child to explain what exactly they are consenting to, and then scheduling a second time to meet for the interview (never easy with kids). That’s because I learned that trying to do an interview with a kid after sitting down and plodding through forms with their parent is a great way to undermine rapport, which is the main reason you are doing the interview with the kid first. In an interview with a parent and child dyad, the alignment between parent and (presumably adult) interviewer seems almost automatic. In contrast, if you and the kid have a chance to sit together on your own, you have a shot at creating your own weird category of adult in relation to them. You’re a researcher, not their teacher, not their parent, and you can ask things then that a strong identification with another adult role would make a lot more difficult.

Step 2 isn’t so hard. At the end of your first interview you schedule the second one, and you ask the kid to choose the parent they’d prefer to be interviewed with. Then, when you go into the interview, you and the kid have your own confidential relationship. When parents say things that were expected, students will sometimes laugh and crow, “I told you!” But there are other times when the expected or unexpected thing is understood through a remembered explanation that you do not mention or even risk exchanging glances over.

Step 3 is a pain in the butt to organize, but well worth it. For my study, I wanted to make sure the core networks were broadly multigenerational, and usually ended up with a grandparent, a sibling, a cousin near in age, a parent, and an aunt or uncle. Once or twice, I ended up with friends of the student in the mix, and it had a really different feel.

In each interview, the themes overlapped and a couple of questions were repeated. Sometimes – okay, often – I looked to the kid to help me frame the question I was trying to ask. But it was fascinating and incredibly valuable to see how the kid changed – or didn’t – across the three interviews. Those moments are hard to explain in articles and books, but they spoke volumes about the relationship and expectations between parent and child, and about how the kid fit into a larger network of loved ones. Even more interesting, some of the kids’ answers changed dramatically between interviews. Some were hiding secrets that changed how you understood their world, some reconsidered their positions with their parents’ perspectives. For a life course researcher who includes youth and children among her informants, the triple interview is a valuable addition to methodological toolbox. I know I’ll be using it again.

 

Once upon a time the Nacirema …

I love this book …

I spend a lot of time daydreaming about creative alternatives for assessing your students. Are you shocked reader? I thought not.

Today I am particularly excited about my idea: children’s books as final or midterm projects for intro to anthropology classes. The basic assignment would look like this:

1. Write and illustrate a book introducing one of the main course concepts to children. Include a final 1–2 pages with an “Author’s Note” for parents explaining the concept more clearly. Be as specific or abstract as you want in the children’s part of the book.
2. Length: 9-31 pages long; 60-240 words of children’s narrative; 300-600 words of “Author’s Note” giving additional information about the topic.
3. Illustrations: You do not have to be able to draw: if you want to make a collage or photoshop images together (including images photocopied from the texts you read in this class) go ahead and do that. These projects will not be published or sold and so they do not have to comply with copyright law. If you want to do the illustrations yourself, do whatever you want: paintings, cartoons, photographs, go crazy!
4. Writing: The main narrative of the book should be something my 8 year old niece* would enjoy listening to, but don’t worry about censoring the material, she has very liberal parents. The Author’s Note should include at least two works cited (in Chicago style), and should give a compelling reason why you think this is an important topic to know about, as well as more detail on some of the themes you raised in the main narrative.
5. Format: I want a hard copy to be handed in at the start of class. If you really want me to look at an electronic version, I will, but only IN ADDITION to a good hard copy, not instead. It does not need to be bound, there are no rules on paper size or stock.
6. You will be graded on a) How well you represent the course concept you choose (60%), b) Presentation (30%) and c) Creativity (10%).
7. I will return all of your books with comments on STICKY NOTES so that your masterpieces will be unharmed and yours to reminisce with for years to come.

Secretly, the “course concept” that started me thinking about this was a wish for a children’s books introducing the variation in cross-cultural marriage practices. But don’t you think it would work well for lots of intro to anth concepts?

Has anyone ever tried an assignment like this? I would love to hear how it went … The incredibly dorky fun of coming up with the ideas is reward enough, but talking about them makes it even better, so comment if you have questions or suggestions!

 

*I don’t actually have an 8 year old niece, but do keep your imaginary audience in mind.

 

Guerilla Panels at #AAA2012

A lot of people attended talks at the AAAs, but I think I’m one of the few who got to see a guerilla panel. It was awesome.

As I understood it, when the AAAs got more panels than could fit in their massive program, the AALCIG and AAGE’s* sponsored panels got dropped. But, rather than accept the rejection, they opened their Board Meeting with two new scholars’ papers. Three more senior scholars served as discussants for each. And maybe it was because there were more discussants than papers, and maybe it was just ‘cuz those guys were awesome, but it was massively educational. Apart from learning a great deal about what people who really like to work with “life course” care about, here are some other important lessons:

• the AAAs are an opportunity to do the kind of anthro you care about – you can use other methods to get the word out to people, but take advantage and make it happen, regardless of the institutional support
• champagne and chocolate chip cookies go fast
• silent auctions of stuff that people in the group are interested in is a great thing to have happening in the background of a meeting (and my grad student group should totally do something similar)**

In sum, it was pretty great, and maybe I’ll try to be part of making something like that happen again next year. What were your highlights?

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* the AAA Aging And Lifecourse Interest Group and the Association of Anthropology and Gerontology
** I won a video called My Name is Julius in the silent auction. Exciting because it’s about life course (my interest) and hearing loss (my husband’s interest, because of his company, Acudora).

Networking the AAAs

Robin Reineke, Lucero Radonic, Robin Steiner, Pete Taber and Sam Grace at #AAA2012

I am one of those weird people (at least weird among anthropologists I know) who actually likes the idea of networking. There’s a certain thrill to just showing up and selling yourself to a stranger. A sort of competition with yourself that is made more exciting and somewhat less scary when there are 6,000 opportunities (one number I heard for this year’s attendance at the AAAs).

In the past, the majority of my networking has occurred in hallways and presentation rooms, meeting people I hadn’t ever heard of before – a carefree and emergent approach to adding people to my rolodex. But this year, I decided, I was going to be more targeted. I got a bunch of suggestions from peers on how to go about it:

• go to all the cash bars
• sign up for a lot of workshops
• make a list of valuable people, search for them in the program, and show up where they will be

To these I added my own instinct to work the networks I’ve already got, and so I also:

• showed up to the #AAA2012 #tweetup*
• made sure I went to former peers’ and profs’ talks
• went to an interest group meeting**

This was, overall, a success. But I think I’ve still got room for improvement. What say you people (anthro or other conference goers)? What are your networking strategies at conferences? Is there anything that makes you suck at it?

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* Rex coordinated it via @savageminds, and then I actually got to meet him, which was definitely my celebrity squee of the conference. The motivation to attend the tweetup (read: meet up of AAA attending Twitter users) was definitely augmented by the exhausting attempt to livetweet the talks I attended – but that’s another post.
** Turns out, the Aging and the Life Course Interest Group + Association for Anthropology and Gerontology Board Meeeting was secretly a guerilla panel that was the highlight of my conference – but that, too, is another post …