Holly Dunsworth has a great post outlining her approach towards teaching the Biological Anthropology introductory course (Human Origins, at her current institution). As she describes it, her approach is a “naturalist’s approach in the molecular age,” and acknowledges the reality that most undergraduate student’s are not going to go on and become biological anthropologists, but they all stand to benefit from a solid understanding of how evolution acts in relation to humans.
For the most part, the popular textbooks present the material as a tour of what biological anthropologists do. But why do this to hundreds of students a year who aren’t going to be biological anthropologists? Those students are, however, going to continue to be humans. So while the content is very important, it’s just the presentation that’s off.
I’ll teach the intro course again next Spring for the fourth time, and have heavily revised my syllabus each time and likely will again. Holly’s approach gives me more courage to do less “broad survey” work in the course, which can consume the entire semester very easily, and more hands-on empirical work.
The one thing I would add to Holly’s goals for the course is my desire to explain to the students not only why studying human evolution is important for understanding contemporary issues associated with health and biological variation, but also why humans are a unique and informative model species to understand how evolution operates. One common hang-up associated with understanding and accepting evolution is the issue of human uniqueness. Why are we so seemingly different than everything else? Shouldn’t we require some external explanation for this gap between humans and the rest of the natural world? My response to these questions is to point out that human evolution is unique in terms of the kind of evolutionary dynamics that have developed because of specific human characters, our large and hard-working brain in particular.
As far as texts for the course, this next year will be the first time I use the same texts for consecutive iterations of the course, indicating at least reasonable satisfaction on my part for how they worked. I use Jonathan Mark’s recent The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology as a primary text for the basics of what biological anthropologists do and why, and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb as a text to generate thought and discussion on how evolution operates in practice in a complex organism like humans. Of course these are always subject to change…
I’m also toying around with how to do away with tests and use more “learning-based outcome” assessments, mentioned recently by John Hawks about his courses.
