5 Interesting Anthropology Research You Should Know About

Anthropology is quite a vast field – and it has a lot to offer when it comes to exploring the process of education and learning. There are several research and studies do in the field that can guide us on how to teach our children better and what are the most effective strategies to help they learn better:

Culture influences Memory.

A study by Brandeis University finds stark differences in the perceptions and memories of people from different cultures. Angela Gutchess who led the study said, “In a birthday party, Westerners are more likely to remember details like the color of the icing of the cake or decorations while East Asians are more likely to remember things like who served the cake and who danced with whom. It depends on whether you come from a culture that values individual perceptions or from one that emphasizes social interactions and emotions.” 

Understanding cultural differences in ways students learn can help us improvise our classroom teaching styles, provide them better academic support, and offer them assignment help Sydney in a manner that can advance their learning process. 

Rote learning might work well for some cultures while context-based education might be better for some others.

Social Learning differs in East and West.

An ESRC-funded study on cross-cultural differences in social learning found students from mainland China copied the person with the highest the score almost twice often than the students from the UK, Hong Kong, or even Chinese students who were studying in the UK. It means that the mainland Chinese students were able to use social learning (or learning from other people’s expertise and knowledge) to master new skills quickly – better than the groups that were ‘Westernised’.

It is a significant finding for teachers as educators. In Western countries, rote learning is looked down upon while copying the work of others is seen as plagiarism. For Chinese students, it is their learning style. It is vital that such deep-rooted cross-cultural variations in learning styles are taken into accounts when students from different cultures are taught together.

Local Vernacular Culture is Amazing.

Jason Baird Jackson conducted a fantastic study called ‘Material Vernaculars: Objects, Images, and Their Social Worlds’ in 2016. The study explores the roles of objects and images in everyday life. This research is an excellent resource to understand the significance of practices such as folk art and scrapbooking and traditional roles of Kiowa women in raiding and warfare. 

Reading through the book can help you bring the local vernacular culture to the classrooms. You can use the information it offers to help students understand how the material and the meaningful, the tangible and the intangible are entwined and inextricable in our world.

Explore Situated Learning.

Learning does not always take place in classrooms. Situated learning is a concept which focuses on education and training that takes place through interrelationships with other people and connecting prior knowledge with contextual learning that is informal, authentic, and often unintended. ‘Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning across Time and Place’ by Andrew P. Roddick and Ann B. Stahl talks about practices around the world where people draw on past and present experiences to perform their daily activities.

You’ll find interesting case studies here – from healers and fishermen of the Amazon River Basin to the potters of Southwest America to the spirit mediums of East Africa. Learning takes places across time and place – especially in relation to power and politics. It is an exciting topic to explore.

Discipline Your Class with Love and Patience.

The study by Usha Rajdev is worth a read because it explores disciplines measures used in classrooms across several countries (including China, India, the UK, the US, and Africa). The findings of this research suggested that many countries favored corporal punishment and hitting a child or yelling at him is the culturally accepted norm. Another study found that several schools in South Africa were affected by verbal, physical, and psychological violence towards learners in the form of corporal punishments. 

Some of the punishments or ‘corrective measures’ that schools thought acceptable were: cleaning the yard, cleaning the tools, and physical violence. These were meant to stop the learners from doing unacceptable conduct and to reinforce control over them.

Such research works throw important light over the real plight of students in schools and why it is so essential for us – as a society – to abolish corporal punishment and save our kids from its consequences.