This semester I am teaching a substantially revamped course on “Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Study of Antiquity.” One of my new goals for this course is to explore the ethical implications of what we, as students of the past, research and write. This is something that has been on my mind for some time, and while I have found resources such as Eidolon and Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s site enormously helpful, I have still have some ways to go. I am hoping to be able to progress along with my students. A version of the syllabus (which has some mistakes) is here. Note that I am also experimenting (it is a small class) with a variation of “ungrading.”
We met for the first time the other day and worked together on a concept map of “race”. Pretty much everyone at Brown has thought about race somewhat, so our map is probably not typical. It is also clearly imperfect. But simply the process of trying to articulate in this way what we might mean by “race” was both challenging and enlightening. Below is what we came up with (we drew on Whiteboard and I redid it in Miro). (Note that you may need to zoom in with your browser to see some of the connecting words – a disadvantage of using the free version.) Comments welcome!
I’m teaching a course this semester on race, religion, and the Bible and really wish I’d done something like this on our first or second day of class. And I’m sure I’m not the only reader who’d love to hear more about how you planned this class session: what did your students read before class, how did you introduce the idea of a “concept map,” etc. Many thanks for sharing this!
This was a first day of class, get students involved, activity. So they read nothing in advance, and some may not end up taking the course. Some had used concept maps, and they explained the process to the others – this took no more than 5-10 minutes. Then we were off and running. I asked them how they wanted to do this (e.g., alone, in pairs), and since it was a small class they decided to do it together. I had them brainstorm for a few minutes on their own to write down the “nouns” they would associate with the concept of race. I wrote these on the board. Then I stood at the board and let them direct me as to how to link them and what verbs to use. Afterwards, we discussed the map a bit. I took a photo of it and cleaned it up a little when I put it in Miro. I was going to do this directly in Miro, but my computer went into an infinitely long upgrade about an hour before class. I then suggested that they try this same thing for “ethnicity,” and I’ll see next week if anyone took me up on that suggestion.