Topic Exploration
Within the field of anthropology, one of my interests is in medical anthropology/public health. My main interest within medical anthropology is understanding maternal and child health disparities. In addition to medical anthropology, I am also interested in educational anthropology. Unlike medical anthropology, I am not as familiar with educational anthropology. I recently gained knowledge that the subfield existed after doing research to figure out whether sociocultural anthropologists played a role in educational studies. I was then introduced to the Anthropology & Education Quarterly, which is where I began looking more into my topic of interest. The reason why initiated looking more into the connection between anthropology …show more content…
Rather than trying to understand, teachers often deemed these students as “unteachable” and thus assigned them detention. The children were not being taught on a level that applied to their needs. In addition, they did not have teachers who were taught how to teach them. What I took from my experience at Linden McKinley STEM Academy is one example of how students from marginalized communities are being “othered” by the education system. They could not help their circumstances but they were treated as bad children or incapable of being taught, which wasn’t true. I spent a whole academic year teaching them a lot about the Holocaust, multiplication, and grammar. In conclusion, I believe that if students are in an environment where they feel wanted and accepted, then their attitudes and behaviors will reflect that. After a while, my children at Linden McKinley found detention to be the cool hangout spot after school every Wednesday because what my colleagues and I did was provide a safe space for them where they felt they could be themselves and not be “othered.”
For my master’s project, I am interested in studying college students rather than primary and secondary school children. One reason being that college students are more accessible to me and it would be a more feasible project to complete during the remaining of my time at UNCC. But, also because similar to how primary and …show more content…
As a student of color, I understand the difficulty of trying to maneuver through a white space, such as the education system. My objective is to use anthropology as a tool to better understand this “othering.”
So far, what I have noticed from researching my topic is how few articles have been written about higher education. There is even fewer that discuss higher education and race, which does not surprise me. What I have gathered so far about sociocultural anthropology is that there is a lack of conversations about race and racism. I find this problematic because by putting conversations about race on the backburner ultimately leads to the silencing of those who are affected by