The march of the syllabi

Today marks the beginning of the Fall semester at Wellesley College. I am teaching two courses this Fall, Forensic Anthropology (Anth 209) and The Anthropology of Food (Anth 110).

This will be my fourth time teaching Forensic Anthropology at Wellesley, following two iterations of straight Human Osteology at the University of Michigan, so it is beginning to feel comfortable. The two primary challenges I face in teaching the course at the moment are dealing with having limited access to human skeletal material for use in the class (thus trying to be creative about how I expose students to osteology and use osteology in the lectures) and effectively incorporating the course into our larger Anthropology curriculum. As the lone physical anthropologist at Wellesley, the course is both an introduction to osteology for my students and a feeder course of sorts for physical anthro given the course’s popularity. In order to fit the course into our broader curriculum I repeatedly return to issues of understanding, identifying and classifying variation, a theme that I feel resonates within broader anthropological questions.

The Anthropology of Food class is in its second iteration, having first taught the course three years ago. The course operates as a first-year seminar, and additionally this year, has been designated as an intensive public speaking course. As such, in addition to using the course as a 4-field intro to Anthropology, the course has a number of elements that are specifically intended to transition outstanding high school students into outstanding Wellesley College students as quickly as possible. I want the students to come out of the course with a basic understanding of what anthropology is all about, including its various sub-fields, as well as a more detailed appreciation of the significance that food plays in human society. More importantly, I want the students to come out of the class with some knowledge about the resources available in the Wellesley College community, a sense of the expectations placed upon them as Wellesley students, their own responsibility and prerogative towards their learning, and a set of skills necessary to take advantage of the opportunities available at Wellesley.

One of the new twists I have added to the course this time around is to make the course a mandatory pass/fail course (something common for first-year seminar classes at Wellesley), but also to make self-evaluations a critical part of the grading process. My goal, should it work, is to provide my own evaluations alongside the student evaluations so that they can appreciate how their work is being viewed by me relative to how they see their work. We will see how it goes…

I have attached the syllabi for both courses below:

* Forensic Anthropology
* The Anthropology of Food