Traditionally, anthropology has been configured as a craft, passed down from teacher to students. Yet at NUI Maynooth, anthropology is delivered to very large and diverse classes. What are the implications of this for the learning the principles of anthropology?

This Fellowship 2011-12 project sought answers to this question by bringing together staff in the Department of Anthropology as a team that also included a graduate student researcher. We set out with the ambition of using the tools of anthropology itself to investigate the teaching and learning of anthropological principles. But we were also concerned to understand the ways in which students understood ‘evaluations’, the extant systems of module evaluation of the Department, and possible ways to introduce improved methods of two-way evaluation. In this seminar, Mark will discuss how the project was implemented and share their findings and recommendations from the project.

This Fellowship 2011- 12 project was led by Dr Patty Gray, Dr Mark Maguire and Dr Thomas Strong from the Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth.