Dr. Lauren Braunstein is an Associate Professor of Instruction in Social Foundations. She teaches courses in the College of Education including EDF 2085: Education, Diversity, and Global Society, EDF 6705: Gender and the Educational Process, and EDF 7747: Introduction to Qualitative Methods. In 2017, she won the USF Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Margaret Burlington Tritle Excellence Teaching Faculty Award. She is the lead faculty on the Social Justice, Peace, and Pedagogy study abroad program in Barranquilla, Colombia.
Dr. Braunstein’s research interests include investigating the role of language ideologies within multilingual educational setting, the use of online discussion boards for critical feminist pedagogy, and the interdisciplinary relationships of education and anthropology.
Session Description
Globally, social scientists in recent decades have increasingly examined how their disciplines have privileged scholars from the North Atlantic over others. To address this imbalance, anthropologists developed the concept of world anthropologies. However, few of these works have addressed structural and cultural differences related to training new anthropologists. In the anthropology of education, studies of curriculum and teaching have focused on K-12 school engagements and on university student experiences globally. Science and technology studies have pointed out the cultural aspects of scientific practitioners. As a result, scholarship on anthropological training worldwide fosters the incomplete notion that student education consists almost wholly of technocratic formation and individual fieldwork, thus marginalizing the work of university professors, the classroom context, and political economic and institutional dynamics. This paper provides a corrective by analyzing the teaching practices, course readings, assignments, and interactions in anthropology programs at universities in the Dominican Republic as well as the future use of anthropological training by students. Using ethnographic research in classrooms, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis, we describe how students are trained in anthropology within two different institutions. These findings will contribute to discussions on world anthropologies, anthropologies of education, and science and technology studies while providing a blueprint for a more equitable and productive academic environment across the globe. This research builds on the PIs’ previous work on Caribbean anthropologies (Jayaram) and on curriculum and classroom setting (Braunstein).