Anthropological training and pedagogy

There were a number of articles out a few weeks ago highlighting the difficulty in finding jobs for trained PhDs. This is a bit of an old story, already, but the new spin on this round of stories was that the current job deficit extends not just to people getting advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the natural sciences and math. Brian Vastag, writing in the Washington Post:

But it’s questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists — those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.

John Hawks comments on the news by raising the issue of salary compression at academic institutions:

Most academic scientists who make it onto the tenure track begin to experience “salary compression” — the phenomenon in which institutions pay a market rate to new Ph.D. hires, which grows faster than the salaries paid to continuing faculty. This is a sort of perverse intergenerational conflict that arises in part because of tenure. By limiting the ability of mid-career academics to move to a new job, tenure protects universities against having to offer experienced faculty competitive salaries.

Razib Khan, in addition to linking to several other people’s reaction to the story, highlights what he thinks are the differences between skills and marketable skills in the disciplines:

More succinctly, I think the average physicist is smarter than the average biologist. More to the point, some of my friends crunching through large data sets have plenty of transferable skills. There are biologists, and then there are biologists. Go figure out how to manipulate a data frame while your gel is running.

For me, the issue ties into earlier posts I have had on the issue of anthropological training. Particularly at the undergraduate level, but even at the graduate level, there is no clear and regular path between an anthropological degree and a given career. The path from a PhD in Anthropology and an academic job is often challenging, involving several temporary stops (complete with poor compensation and little, no, or interrupted benefits) before a tenure-track job can be obtained. But as a discipline, Anthropology should be instilling its students with a valuable set of skills beyond the ability to be an academic anthropologist in practice. However, turning valuable anthropological skills into non-academic anthropology careers requires some degree of direct pedagogical intervention along the training process.

Mary Alice Scott had a post recently at Savage Minds on mentoring in Anthropology that is worth looking at in this respect:

Praxis, as I use it, is the process of developing critical knowledge that leads to action (which then leads to critical knowledge, etc). Critical knowledge is knowledge that communities (that could be communities of academics or other kinds of communities) produce through experience, analysis, and dialogue. Critical knowledge is founded on an understanding that “truth” is partial and perspectival. In other words, the knowledge we produce may or may not (and perhaps more often does not) reproduce the status quo or what my students and I have talked about as “received wisdom” (that we didn’t have any input in creating and that often doesn’t match our own experiences). Often producing critical knowledge begins with recognizing a disconnect between our experience in the world and what other people say about the world. We might be talking here about personal (or individual) experience, field work experience, organizational or academic experience, or other kinds of experience.

In every teaching philosophy statement I have ever read (or written) I have seen some reference to “developing critical thinking ability” in some capacity or another. And I think most courses I have seen take this seriously, getting students to engage issues critically within our field. Getting students to take that critical ability and apply it to knowledge and observations outside our discipline is more challenging, and I think requires more pedagogical creativity.

Which brings me, somewhat circuitously (sorry – I have been deep in the bellows of data analysis lately, writing is feeling a bit rusty), to my main point. Anthropological training seems somewhat paradoxically set up to minimize our creative ability as instructors to get students to expand beyond our own field. I was very fortunate as a graduate student to be well funded, first by an internal fellowship at the University of Michigan and then by a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. This aided me greatly (including better positioning me for the job market), but meant that by the time I received my PhD I had only one semester of teaching experience. My training had been almost entirely focused on the research I did, and not on what would actually be my most significant professional product–students. Only in the past year in which I have been on sabbatical have I been able to think seriously about pedagogy. If this opportunity had not been afforded me, who knows when I would have seriously considered the issue.

This is not to say I have not thought about teaching at all, but only that my experience had directed me to consider my teaching, and anthropological training more broadly, primarily from the lens of imparting anthropological-specific knowledge. And in my five years of teaching some 11+ different classes, I think I have gotten quite good at getting students engaged and knowledgeable on my subjtect. But I think anthropology can do better than that. One of my professional goals for this upcoming academic year is to begin incorporating learning activities into my courses that emphasize developing skills while imparting the same kind of anthropological knowledge I have in the past. I would like my undergrads to leave Wellesley, whether they are pursuing additional training in Anthropology or not, to approach problems from an empowered anthropological perspective. Throughout the year I will try to provide updates on how some of this works out…