anthro notes

a newsletter for teachers

vol. 1 no. 2

fall 1979

TALKING WITH TEACHERS

How do you squeeze anthropology into an already crowded curriculum? How can it mesh with history, biology, or geography? What seems to capture students’ interests? In the interviews below various teachers from last year's Anthropology for Teachers Program answer these questions.

Barbara Cianelli teaches Ancient and Medieval History to 9th graders at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. She starts off the year with a unit on Early Humans. “It's a good way to start since it's a whole new world for students. They observe primates at the zoo by looking at communication and family structure. I also take them to the National Geographic's Explorers Hall to the new exhibit on Visiting Prehistoric People. The caves are lifesize and the exhibits are good for beginning 9th graders.”

When teaching Economics to 11th and 12th graders at Richard Montgomery High School, John Day has developed a unit on cross-cultural views of money. “I start off with the Bushmen filmstrip by Richard Lee in Patterns in Human History. We look at the Bushmen at the beginning of the course to show the universality of economic concepts such as scarcity, means of production, and distribution. Then the students find it very interesting to look at cigarette “money” in a P.O.W. camp and at the Papuans’ use of money.”

Sister Barbara Gress teaches 9th and 10th graders at St. Cecilia's High School in Washington, D.C. In World Geography, “I organize the course so that we look at the earth first as if from a spaceship, then from an airplane, and then from the ground. In the airplane view, I bring in anthropology with a discussion of migration routes, such as the peopling of the Americas across the Bering Strait.” In General Science, she relies on the National Museum of Natural History, especially the Ice Age Mammels and Emergence of Man Hall. “I have also used the Monkeys, Apes, and Humans Program (see p. 5), which is excellent and the students like it very much.”

Mary Thompson teaches 10th grade Biology at Perry High School in Montgomery County. “I bring in anthropology in genetics and in human evolution. I have recently visited the new Dynamics of Evolution Hall at the National Museum of Natural History and it is wonderful. They have so many examples that are talked about in the students’ textbooks.”

Richard Abell teaches a one semester course in Cultural Anthropology at Walt Whitman High School. He decided not to offer a watered-down survey course and instead selected five units. (The Concept of Culture; Human Life Cycle; Science, Myth, Religiòn, and the Supernatural; Culture Change; and Anthropology and the Modern World.) In the first unit, “I avoid definitions, and immerse the students right away in an ethnography such as Forest People or Coming of Age in Samoa. That way each student has a base to use for comparison and can develop a holistic view right away.”