Zooming in on the COVID-19 Pandemic in Community College Classrooms: Experiments with a Pedagogy of Place in Anthropology Courses

Abstract

Reflecting on our recent experience of online teaching with mainly historically marginalized students at the U.S.-Mexico border, we emphasize the importance of engaging a critical pedagogy of place by creating communities of trust. We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced among us and our students, focusing on how it impacted practical aspects and the context of our teaching. We discuss four teaching strategies we implemented during the pandemic that highlight the importance of communication and flexibility in allowing students to self-pace their learning. These strategies proved useful as we began to reach a level of trust among students and gained knowledge of their needs. We conclude by describing the pandemic as a period of opportunities in which anthropology students can apply concepts from assigned readings to confront and analyze a historical moment that neither we, nor our students, had previously experienced.

Beyond extraction: Data strategies from the Global South

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Multi-Course and Faculty-Student Collaboration: Reflections on Implementing a Qualitative Research Project with Undergraduate Students

“…Second, there have been various discussions about the teaching implications, challenges, and opportunities of COVID-19, both within and beyond anthropology (e.g., Cheuk 2021;Christian, McCarty, and Brown 2021;Daurio and Turin 2021;Jacobs et al 2021;Jenks 2021;Kim et al 2021;Mandache et al 2021;Russell et al 2021;Santos 2021) as well as about the stresses, challenges, and uncertainties that students have, and continue to experience, in the context of the pandemic (e.g., Lee, Jeong, and Kim 2021;Moore, Petrie, and Slavin 2022;Salvador et al 2021;Villani et al 2021). We were aware that the combination of uncertainties about the pandemic, changes in teaching formats and approaches, and pre-existing vulnerabilities (Santos 2021;Kelly 2022) had affected, and continued to affect, our students.…”