New graduate course FA10 on using digital media to teach/communicate better about culture

This professional development course (ANP 892, section 5, Adan Quan) is about how to improve your ability to communicate about “culture” related topics to diverse publics (undergraduates, K-12, policymakers, business) and how digital media can facilitate this. It addresses two challenges many graduate students in anthropology and related disciplines will face in their careers: changes in teaching methods and expectations (including increased use of digital media) and increased demand for knowledge about “culture” and “cultural differences” presented in a clear, understandable manner. Through a series of hands-on projects, students will learn how to assess learner’s/audience’s needs, to create effective learning materials, and to use digital media to facilitate teaching/learning. Our “real world” challenge will be to create learning materials for a MSU online course that introduces “US culture” to foreign college students. Your challenge: to identify basic concepts/knowledge appropriate for this course, and to translate this into creative learning materials using digital media. Students should walk out of this course with actual teaching materials they can use in courses they anticipate teaching, with a better sense for effectively designing courses and online learning materials, plus a sense of how to better communicate basic insights about “culture” to diverse audiences. The key goal is to improve your abilities to teach as TA now, as well as make you more marketable to schools after you receive your degree, due to your knowledge about digital media and creative teaching approaches usable in both “real” and online courses. To theoretically inform this practice, we will survey literature covering relevant topics such as intercultural relations, digital anthropology, and the conceptualization of culture in and outside anthropology. Course is open to non-anthropology graduate students but some basic exposure to sociocultural anthropology (at least some undergraduate coursework or independent reading) is presumed. For more information, please contact me: quan at msu.edu