Abstract
This paper seeks to explore the pedagogical nuances of student self-reflective feedback,1 as it highlights the importance of acknowledging 1st year students’ uncertainty when approaching anthropological terminology for the first time. I attempt to explore the conceptual impact of the broad discipline of anthropology's conceptual terminology on 1st year students. In later sections of this paper, the notions of “experimental knowledge” and “knowledge appropriation” will be developed further and illustrated with examples extracted from focus groups and observations conducted as part of this research. The outcomes of this research suggest that current unproblematised uses of speculative concepts, such as “culture” and “indigenous” negatively impact the discipline’s image inside and outside the class. However, these concepts pose numerous opportunities for highlighting their frictions and uncertain natures as thresholds where knowledge is produced and re-produced. Unfortunately, curricula are often designed with standardised assessments in mind; this predisposes students towards a certain body of knowledge required to meet the demands of these assessments. Yet, how do students conceptualise such disconnections between curricula and daily experiences? This paper seeks to combine the fields of education theory, critical pedagogy and linguistic anthropological analysis to approach Higher Education learning from a student-based perspective, where students reflectively navigate their own learning processes and voice their uncertain experiences and knowledge. This will help situate the disconnections between curricula, student experience and outcomes in the context of the very transitory spaces that students occupy. Students’ semantic adventures, including all its frictions, can contribute to contemporary ways of understanding student agency and liminal knowledges as conceptual devices that challenge the assumedly immutable aspects of anthropological curricula.
Highlights
The notion of a concept as a “threshold” where the “troublesomeness” of knowledge is produced (Wilson and Leitner 2007) suggests that a threshold concept “can of itself represent...troublesome knowledge – knowledge that is 'alien,' uncertain or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value” (Perkins 1999, Meyer and Land 2003)
Since anthropology is situated within the everyday and seeks to understand the myriad of relations it produces, why not start from the anthropology classroom and the spaces that are often silenced when official assessment is conducted? By doing this, I hope to highlight the importance of critical engagement with the impact of unacknowledged student agency on successfully learning anthropological terminology
Concluding thoughts The main purpose of this study was to explore and understand the underlying issues that fostered discontinuities between what students experienced and what they consumed in the anthropology classroom
Summary
The notion of a concept as a “threshold” where the “troublesomeness” of knowledge is produced (Wilson and Leitner 2007) suggests that a threshold concept “can of itself represent...troublesome knowledge – knowledge that is 'alien,' uncertain or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value” (Perkins 1999, Meyer and Land 2003). The notion of “threshold concepts,” when approached critically, provides anthropologists with an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the ways anthropological knowledge is produced, and approaches to teaching anthropology (Wilson and Leitner 2007). Student agency is defined here as the capacity to navigate “threshold concepts” that have been pre-designed as essential for that the undergraduate level of competence (e.g. ethnocentric, culture, primitive, modern, relative, indigenous) and to produce new learning spaces in the frictions between these concepts. These frictions produce uncertain knowledge -knowledge that is private and ignored yet successfully thriving in students’ anthropological thinking. Uncertain spaces are referred to as learning spaces that emerge from conceptual frictions
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