Strategies to Flip the Classroom: Creating, Analyzing, and Using Data Sets in Exploring Anthropology
Abstract
This presentation considers strategies to flip the classroom—in this case teaching the online Anthropology course: Culture and Personality—that center discussion on students' collective creation of datasets and analysis of these, in conjunction with directed readings and work related to specific topics. Commonly-used, accessible course software platforms provide online spaces (primarily blogs and discussion) where students can assemble a dataset according to stipulated criteria, think about its attributes, and use this to engage with course topics for either online- or face-to-face in class discussion. For example, during the semester's exploration of psychological anthropology, students explore popular online "psychology quizzes," media depictions of non-Western cultures, play a game of strategy, use their own general cultural knowledge to create cognitive maps, and explore non-Western self-depictions. Challenges include: finding suitable, engaging, and pedagogically useful domains of material (if using Internet-generated texts); complying with institutional IRB requirements relating to undergraduate data collection, if this involves interactions with and/or observations of humans; leveraging the student learning- and confidence curve for using online resources, sharing data, and discussing it; delinking data collection from its analysis; and clearly defining a trajectory of practice and knowledge through which students demonstrate increasing critical engagement with and mastery of the course materials.
Session
Session 3A: Digital Project-Based Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Location
Dalton 300
Start Date
5-20-2015 3:15 PM
End Date
5-20-2015 4:30 PM
Strategies to Flip the Classroom: Creating, Analyzing, and Using Data Sets in Exploring Anthropology
Dalton 300
This presentation considers strategies to flip the classroom—in this case teaching the online Anthropology course: Culture and Personality—that center discussion on students' collective creation of datasets and analysis of these, in conjunction with directed readings and work related to specific topics. Commonly-used, accessible course software platforms provide online spaces (primarily blogs and discussion) where students can assemble a dataset according to stipulated criteria, think about its attributes, and use this to engage with course topics for either online- or face-to-face in class discussion. For example, during the semester's exploration of psychological anthropology, students explore popular online "psychology quizzes," media depictions of non-Western cultures, play a game of strategy, use their own general cultural knowledge to create cognitive maps, and explore non-Western self-depictions. Challenges include: finding suitable, engaging, and pedagogically useful domains of material (if using Internet-generated texts); complying with institutional IRB requirements relating to undergraduate data collection, if this involves interactions with and/or observations of humans; leveraging the student learning- and confidence curve for using online resources, sharing data, and discussing it; delinking data collection from its analysis; and clearly defining a trajectory of practice and knowledge through which students demonstrate increasing critical engagement with and mastery of the course materials.