Hi ACYIG members!  Have you been looking for a creative new course assignment to get students excited about the anthropology of children and youth?  Or have you felt like your anthropology students’ written submissions could benefit from a broader audience? How about asking students to write and comment on blog posts?  The ACYIG blog can publish your students’ work in a special student blog series.

Student posts could take a variety of forms, depending each instructor’s goals, including ethnographic observations, critical reflections, fieldwork commentaries, proposed research, etc., and they may range from very short contributions of a few hundred words, to longer submissions adapted from student papers.  This exercise could work with undergraduate or graduate students, and might involve a peer-review process before and after posting to reinforce learning.  Having participated in a live graduate student blog for a course assignment in the past, I can testify that asking students to share work through this kind of medium can be exciting and rewarding.  The process incites thoughtful contributions and constructive peer comments, and it enables students to gain valuable experience writing shorter pieces for online dissemination.

I invite instructors to contact me directly to express their interest (sthiam1@jhu.edu), and we can work together to shape the parameters of a possible course assignment or set of submission guidelines to fit with your teaching objectives.  I have some ideas to get started, but I hope this can be an iterative process, and so I welcome any suggestions that you may have to make this initiative a success.  We appreciate your participation in this effort to enhance the variety and relevance of the ACYIG blog to the teaching and research of our professional and student members.

Thanks!

Sara Thiam
sthiam1@jhu.edu
ACYIG Content Coordinator for Blog & Social Media