In the ANT 4403 Environment and Cultural Behavior class that I taught for four years, I used fieldtrips with local scholars and field experts to get students outside of the classroom and engage in hands-on scholarship. I have taken my classes to the Natural Areas Teaching Lab on campus so that the students could learn basic principles of ecology like habitat fragmentation, ecosystem dynamics of upland pine and hardwood forests, and then apply these concepts through a role-playing exercise in which they are grouped into dairy-farmers, local residents, ecotourists, and conservationists to understand how environmental policy is values-contingent.

 
Students at Ethnoecology Garden at UF.

Other class labs have included going to the Millhopper’s Sinkhole with a geologist, walking the back paths of Payne’s Prairie with a park ranger, taking a tour of the Leveda Brown Transfer Station to understand where our trash and recyclables go, and doing an activity that integrated understanding raised bed agriculture, composting, soil quality and other facets of organic agriculture into a trip to the Ethnoecology Gardens on campus. At the end of the Fall semester 2010, I took interested students on their final fieldtrip to Gum Slough (the head springs for the Withlacoochee River) where we kayaked and camped out for two days learning about the wetland ecosystem through active, experiential and collaborative learning.

The culmination of this class is an applied final project that (once the research and writing are complete) must be creative and interactive. I have been very impressed with the relevance, the rigor, and the presentation medium that students have developed. Some of their projects have included documentary videos, others have been photostories accessible on You Tube, while others have been well-crafted websites that offered information and interactive games along with specific actions of community involvement that the viewer could pursue. Students have also created powerpoints, brochures, calendars, magnets, boardgames, video games, radio plays, sculptures, and teaching manuals to convey their diverse messages of environmental sustainability to a specific audience of their choice in an accessible form. In the last class (Spring 2010), I integrated the requirement that this final project had to be researched and cultivated in direct relationship with an organization that is committed to accomplishing the goals that coincides with the student’s chosen topic. For instance, a dyad who researched local food systems of Gainesville chose to work with the manager of the Farmer’s Market and made sure that each of the farmers who were in the film got a copy of the DVD. Another group of students researched the sustainability of local student apartment complexes. They then shared their results through a website they had made with the primary agent that students go to to find student apartment housing. Thus, I integrate my experience with video and digital ethnography to encourage students to learn the skills of photostories, blogs, podcasts and video creation to fulfill their assignments for the class and thereby attain skills that are relevant beyond the classroom in fun and enriching ways.

I was able to incorporate these techniques into my role as Head-TA for Human Sexuality and Culture in which I guided eight other Teaching Assistants and 650 undergraduates in learning to discuss sex and sexuality. Three times a week, each Teaching Assistant would gather with thirty students to form the discussion section, for which I offered detailed agendas and specific techniques to encourage open, respectful communication among diverse students—ethnically, regionally, religiously, politically and ideologically. These sessions were crafted to create an atmosphere of ease to be able to integrate interactive activities where students as much as possible take control of their learning and the classroom experience.

Additionally, through FlaVA (Florida Visual Anthropologists), I conducted various workshops for students on learning about video equipment and Final Cut Pro editing software. Furthermore, I was Director of an applied, experiential project that integrated several students into learning the fundamentals of videography. This project culminated in the documentary short called Gainesville Farmers’ Market: A Possible Economic Alternative. In the context of the global economic crisis, this video documents the Gainesville Farmers’ Market and integrates diverse perspectives (from producers and consumers to the homeless) into understanding opportunities and challenges to address community needs of local food production. As an example of an alternative economic model, this documentary short helps promote anthropological engagement of University students with local human problems through building partnerships of students, farmers and community members. The film was shown at the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2009.