Abstract
This paper outlines and interrogates the processes informing the design, teaching and learning of Culture Lab, an intensive field class designed to foster experimental learning in anthropology and cultural studies. The course’s object of study and site of learning is the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) and its multiple associations – the phenomenon, the city, and the forms of participation, debates and instances of urban change that occur during a specific iteration. It draws on problem-based and participatory approaches to learning and advocates approaches to teaching cultural anthropology and cultural studies that combine multi-faceted approaches to cultural immersion and discovery, while at the same time acknowledging the individual motivations of learners, by fostering and developing students’ interests and curiosity. This paper reports and reflects upon the course in its first two iterations of the course at Amsterdam University College, namely the field trips to Paphos 2017 and Valletta 2018.
Highlights
Culture Lab is a laboratory course designed and implemented at Amsterdam University College (AUC) as part of the undergraduate programme in Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS)
Conceived as a way of supplementing theory, it aims to extend learning beyond the classroom, with a focus on encountering the unfamiliar and responding to the unexpected as a way of inviting students to experiment with the learning process itself
While laboratory learning environments embedding experiential learning are well established and practised in the Sciences, with Culture Lab we seek to transpose this approach in ways that respond to challenges posed by the broader field of Social Sciences and the Humanities, in particular Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Summary
Culture Lab is a laboratory course designed and implemented at Amsterdam University College (AUC) as part of the undergraduate programme in Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS). The notion of the laboratory, includes both the examination of acquired knowledge and experimentation with materials and phenomena as a way of acquiring knowledge first hand or through attention In addition to this pedagogical motivation, the course seeks to respond to other, more formal challenges arising from the design of experiential learning within the curriculum. These include constraints of time in undergraduate studies (it takes time to do proper anthropological research and see the results, it takes a slow approach to reading and seeing) and complexities of methodological interrelation between theory and observation (questions about whether one should understand theory first in order to apply it to observed phenomena, or could observations create forms of conceptual thinking). In responding to these challenges, taking our cues from methods of observation in field work
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