AAA Awards Exceptional Undergraduate Anthropology Teachers and Researchers

Thomas L Leatherman, Chair
AAA Awards Committee

There are two recipients of the 2007 AAA Award for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduate Anthropology: Kent Lightfoot and Elizabeth Chin. Both instill a passion for anthropology in their students, mentor well beyond the classroom and have a broad impact on their students’ lives. Though different in the types of courses they teach and pedagogical style, they each exemplify the sort of teaching excellence this award seeks to honor.

Lightfoot Brings Archaeology to Life

Kent Lightfoot

Kent Lightfoot is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for 20 years. He is an anthropological archeologist whose research and teaching focus on historical archeology and especially the historical archeology of California. Lightfoot teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including courses on California archeology, lab methods, an advanced seminar on culture contact, and a large introductory course in archeology for which he consistently receives rave reviews. He also teaches a service learning course that engages undergraduates in ethnographic fieldwork while they work with 6th grade students in an underserved Oakland, CA, school on issues of culture, identity and family history, and what one can learn from archeology and material culture.

In an particularly innovative course, he teaches Introduction to Archeology employing a theme of “excluded pasts” and the construction of alternative, pluralistic histories—in this case of Native Californian tribes, Hispanic descendant communities and Euro-American historical societies. Lightfoot regularly teaches a summer field school at his primary field site at Fort Ross on the California coast. Students writing about that field experience made it clear that they not only learned field methods and gained field experience, but gained first-hand experience in how archeology can be practiced with attention to ethics and the full collaboration of multiple stakeholders.

Lightfoot has a reputation for being an energetic, passionate and caring teacher who presents insightful, informative and thought-provoking lectures and classes—often infused with his own research experiences. While his research experiences enrich the classroom, his teaching influences his scholarship. His recent book Indians, Missionaries and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (2004) is an outcome of years of research, but also a course on the California Frontier he developed with then-colleague William Simmons. Though primarily a research monograph, it has been hailed as a “superb choice for undergraduate classrooms.”

Many of his students attribute his teaching and mentorship for their own career path in archeology. As one student noted, had Lightfoot been a chemist the student would have majored in chemistry; fortunately he taught anthropology. Indeed, his students have gone on to graduate training and work as professional anthropologists. As his nomination letter stated, “his courses and his teaching effectiveness represent the best of what anthropological archeology is doing in these early years of the 21st century.”

Chin Creates Teachable Moments

Elizabeth Chin

Elizabeth Chin is associate professor of anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA, where she has taught since 1993. She teaches a broad range of courses from Anthropology Theory, Urban Anthropology, and the Anthropology of Children and Childhood, to Music and Motion in the African Diaspora, and her provocative the Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie. She builds on numerous pedagogical approaches with foundations in feminist teaching practice that, in her words, “seeks to make visible power dynamics in the classroom, empower students and humanize what more and more is becoming a fetishized consumer endeavor.”

Chin doesn’t seek a comfortable classroom experience but one that is personally engaging, intellectually stimulating and challenging, and in some cases life-transforming. Letters from students speak of her classes as challenging, never a “cakewalk” as one put it, but they remember her classes as among the best they had, and the ones in which they produced some of their best work. Several also noted how her teaching and mentoring in and out of the classroom inspired and helped guide their academic, professional and personal lives. From all accounts, she engages and challenges her students to strive for excellence, brings great passion to the classroom and instills this passion in her students, and is a selfless mentor in and out of the academic setting.

Chin is described in a nomination letter as the anthropologist-as teacher who “stands out for her efforts to relate inside the classroom pedagogy to outside of the classroom advocacy and educational work.” She has led student groups on two study trips to Cuba and one to Haiti, has encouraged and supported students in presenting papers at professional conferences, as well as in pursuit of graduate training.

Chin also carries her work as an educator into the local underserved community. She has developed a project that teaches anthropological approaches to fifth graders, and has used her knowledge and experience in the anthropology of childhood to design the curriculum for a gang intervention and prevention program. She founded a Haitian folkloric dance performance group, the Troupe Ayizan, among Occidental College students.

She also shares her insights on teaching more broadly in the community of anthropologists and the public. One example is her contribution to the Oct 2006 AN on “How Ethnography Saved the Day,” where she discusses how a classroom exercise to study each other’s worlds ethnographically helped diffuse the tension among students in her class at Duke University that had developed during the Lacrosse Team scandal. She has shared her views with the broader public through multiple commentaries on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show. As one letter noted, she is “adept at creating teachable moments,” critical in the current era of tabloid culture.