Anthropology and Pedagogy: An Interview with Bill Maurer

PEDAGOGY Jennifer Heung University of California at Irvine Susan Coutin California State University, Los Angeles Anthropology and Pedagogy: An Interview with Bill Maurer SC: Well, maybe you could start by describing what classes you teach. BM: I teach an introduction to anthropology class which has between 400 and 500 students in it. It's a large lecture class with required discussion sections that are led by TAs, like Jennifer. What I try to do in that class is to get the students as involved as I possibly can. You know, have activities even during the lecture just so they stay focused, pay attention, and keep coming. My biggest fear always is that as the quarter goes on fewer and fewer people will show up. SC: Are they mostly anthropology majors or is that a general education course? BM: It's basically a general education course. It counts as a distribution requirement for the undergraduates. So almost everybody in there is taking it to fulfill one of the distribution requirements. SC: And when you say, you want to keep them coming. For you personally what is the important point of this course? Are you trying to recruit people into the major? Are you trying to [just] expose them to anthropology? BM: It's all of that. I'm trying to recruit but it's not a major that a lot of people are going to be drawn towards simply because they don't know how it's going to make them money later in life. I figure if I can get eight to ten people interested then I've succeeded. If they go on to another class in anthropology even, that's great. You know, as far as general education goes, it's probably one of the only classes they're going to get where they're really encouraged to do some critical thinking about the kind of world we live in today. And that might sound really harsh to say about other classes, but a lot of other classes are simply read the text books, learn the terminology, get a general sense of a particular field of study, and the boundaries of the field are always really tightly drawn. Like this is political science and this is what we're learning now. And I don't approach the anthropology class that way. I could care less if they come out with the definition of anthropology; what I'm really interested in is that they come out with some tools that they can use. I really like it when I have the students tell me things like, You've ruined everything for me. I can never watch another movie the same way again, you've totally ruined it. Or, I used to love that movie and now I see all these things in it and it drives me crazy. That's what I'm aiming for. Another thing, and this is also sort of terrible to say, but in the U.S. and in the social sciences and in other disciplines as well, the sort of common sense knowledge that's out there in the world about how human beings behave is totally biologically reduc-