tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4645839568564602372.post8003318483429950311..comments2024-01-16T20:32:16.809-06:00Comments on Teaching Anthropology: Unteaching: its what we doPamthropologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04061905270637904812noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4645839568564602372.post-790541433247295032010-01-13T09:30:38.677-06:002010-01-13T09:30:38.677-06:00As a faculty member at the Army's School of Ad...As a faculty member at the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies, I do much the same thing, and in many ways along the same lines as the NYT article. I think a brief description might help with your confusion about existing vs. discovered problems. We teach design/critical thinking to our students as a way to get them to ask the right types of questions so that they can get past their initial perceptions of a given situation (i.e. what they think the existing problem is) and try to discover those critical relationships that are at the heart of the situation in order to find the "real" problem - if such a thing can be said to exist. Because causal relationships are hard to identify in the highly complex (wicked) problems we ask them to work on, we often find ourselves working to manage rather than "solve" discovered problems. The students' questioning, along with faculty guidance, leads to a lot of unteaching (some of it self-imposed) about assumptions many have about the world and the various actors in it. Our biggest shortcoming is that we don't have any significant social science representation amongst the faculty -- mostly historians, with a few political scientists. I'm to start my graduate work in Anthropology this summer and hope that will better allow me to contribute regarding the human aspects of complexity.Erichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17094262887500664787noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4645839568564602372.post-45472492800232549952010-01-10T15:57:14.254-06:002010-01-10T15:57:14.254-06:00I wonder if some disciplines are more suited to un...I wonder if some disciplines are more suited to unteaching that others? I know I spend about half of my time debunking false assumptions about religion or religious groups.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com