Teaching.IU

Context

I want students to actively engage in my course, because if they do, they will learn better. To make this happen, I have to build active engagement in from the very first class. The benefit of this strategy is that it also allows me to creatively launch into my first lecture rather than spending time going over the syllabus.

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Distribute sheets of plain white paper and pens/pencils as needed.
2. Instruct students as follows: I’d like you to draw an anthropologist [your discipline] on your sheet of paper. Include any tools or other items you think would be appropriate. Feel free to add some details about the setting if that helps.
3. Give people 10 minutes to rough out something. If you hear groans about people not being artists, tell them they won’t be judged on their drawing technique. Stick figures are fine. Resist if students ask for an example—the whole point to this exercise is to capture their thinking.
4. Students share their drawings. If the class is small, have everyone hold their drawing up and explain briefly why they drew what they did. If class is large, ask 5-10 students to show their drawings and talk about them; alternatively have students share them in groups or 2 or 4 and then have groups report out to the class. Note common themes down on the board to help guide discussion later.
5. Use the results to form a discussion. When students do this in anthropology classes, you get a lot of pictures that look like Indiana Jones, i.e., male archaeologists with images of shovels, bones, dinosaurs, etc. Students often don’t know what anthropology is because they don’t study it in high school. Their drawings allow us to begin that initial conversation about what the discipline is and its subfields, something about its history, and it allows me to talk about what I do and why I did it. We start with their themes and work the rest in as discussion develops.
6. Have students put their names on their paper and turn them in. Looking at each drawing after class and consciously connecting it to the student’s name and their photo in Canvas may help you begin to put names and faces together more easily.

Effectiveness

Students often resist having to do something creative, but they will go along. In the process, they come to see themselves as helping create our knowledge in the course, they begin to meet and engage with fellow classmates (starting a sense of community), and if I am lucky, a lively discussion among the groups moves right into a continued lively discussion as we start to lay out what was accurate and what not so accurate about their depictions.