David Sausdal
Abstract
Kindling curiosity: Why and how do we encourage curiosity in (anthropology) students?
This TLHE essay focuses on the kindling of student curiosity – a curiosity perhaps too often hindered by present-day university politics and pedagogics. As research has shown, curiosity can be said to be a foundational aspect of good and effective learning and student motivation. Furthermore, curiosity is not only core to learning per se, it is also integral to anthropology’s main methodology, namely ethnography. An ethnographer needs to be not only organized and prepared to learn about the life of the people s/he studies; s/he first of all needs to be open-minded and inquiring. In this way, an exploration and encouragement of anthropology students’ curiosity is both a central didactic method and central to their education in anthropology. Furthermore, as demonstrated by studies of what employers of anthropologists look for in potential candidates, a worldly curiosity and a creative mind are in fact core skillsets that employers find attractive and which, therefore, will get new-fangled candidates employed. Bearing all this in mind, this TLHE essay offers insights into the still scarce yet budding educational research of curiosity and curiosity-based learning (CBL). Subsequently, the essay provides descriptions and discussions of how I attempted to form and conduct my teaching of the master’s course on anthropological project design with a focus on the encouragement of student curiosity