Tag Archives: anthropology

New Title: Learning from our Past

Learning from our Past is a new release published by the University of Victoria Libraries ePublishing Services. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace

 

cover for Learning from our Past textbook

This middle school learning resource focuses on the history of livelihoods and lifeways in the Banda District of Ghana, West Africa. Today a rural district in west central Ghana, Banda has long been a crossroads of trade and a place where people from different backgrounds settled and formed communities. The fascinating history of how Banda area people interacted with neighbouring communities, responded to changing climate, and drew on local knowledge and resources to sustain their families comes from studying archaeology, oral histories and textual sources. Among the topics covered in this open-access resource are trade and the effects of global connections on rural life; the science and innovation behind local industries like potting and metallurgy; the role of weaving as a technology that transformed local materials into valued goods; and the range of ways in which people provided for their families through farming, fishing and hunting. The resource combines background information with suggested hands-on activities that support learning. The resource is available in English and in Nafaanra, which is one of several languages spoken in the Banda District.

Authors

Allison Balabuch is a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. She earned her degrees from the University of British Columbia – a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science and a Bachelor of Education – and the University of Victoria – a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction. She has been a French Immersion teacher for 25 years in British Columbia and England. Her teaching and research are centered on project-based learning, arts-based learning, land-based learning, and interdisciplinary studies in the classroom. Her current research is focused on community-based and interdisciplinary collaboration with the goal of improving and decolonizing educational systems and pedagogy.

Dr. Esther Attiogbe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Professional Studies Accra. She holds a PhD in Adult Education and Human Resource Studies from the University of Ghana. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Administration and Master of Philosophy in Administration from the University of Ghana. Esther did her Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the University of Ghana in collaboration with the University of Victoria, Canada. She teaches at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research interests are in the areas of higher education management, adult learning and human resource management. Her teaching philosophy is underpinned by the concept of gameful learning where learners and instructors collaborate and interact to make the learning environment interesting, engaging and personalized. With a passion for educating the youth, she is involved in youth programmes in her community. She is an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Human Resource Management, Ghana.

Dr. Ann Stahl is a Professor in the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology who earned her M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Calgary (1978) and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1985). She is an anthropological archaeologist whose long-term research has focused on how daily life in rural West Africa has been reshaped over centuries by involvement in global exchange networks. Funded by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant (“Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past,” 2018-2022), a recent project involved collaborations with partners in Ghana and the University of Victoria Libraries to develop sustainable and accessible digital heritage resources that help communities to sustain place-based relationships and foster knowledge revitalization (Banda Through Time). Her most recent work, supported by an SSHRC Connection grant, has involved collaborations with educators to enhance the role of heritage-based knowledge in classroom learning. She has held faculty positions at Binghamton University in New York (1988-2008) and University College London’s Institute of Archaeology (1985-1988) and her work has been funded over the years by the British Academy, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. She is editor of a key text on African archaeology (African Archaeology. A Critical Introduction, 2005, Blackwell), co-editor with Andrew P. Roddick of a multidisciplinary collection, Knowledge in Motion. Constellations of Learning across Time and Place (2016, University of Arizona) and author of Making History in Banda. Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past (2001, Cambridge University Press). Her most recent book, Archaeology. Why It Matters was published by Polity Press (2023). She is the 2020 recipient of the University of Victoria’s REACH Award for Excellence in Knowledge Mobilization and a Faculty of Social Sciences Lansdowne Distinguished Fellow (2020-2023).

Translator – English to Nafaanra

Mr. Sampson Attah is a resident of Banda-Ahenkro, Banda District, Bono Region, Ghana. He is a member of the community-based Banda Heritage Initiative and a long-time contributor to work of the Banda Research Project (1986-2011), which studied the archaeology and history of Banda’s global connections. From the mid 1980s to the early 2000s, Mr. Attah worked as a Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation (GILLBT) translator and he is a strong promoter of indigenous language literacy and revitalization of Nafaanra, which is among Ghana’s at-risk minority languages.

UVic Author Genevieve von Petzinger is “one to watch”

Cave art researcher and UVic doctoral candidate Genevieve von Petzinger has created a name for herself in the world of archaeology through her study of paleolithic cave images.

“Genevieve von Petzinger studies cave art from the European Ice Age and has built a unique database that holds more than 5,000 signs from almost 400 sites across Europe. Her work has appeared in popular science magazines such as New Scientists and Science Illustrated. A National Geographic Emerging Explorer of 2016, she was a 2011 TED Global Fellow, a 2013-15 TED Senior Fellow and her 2015 TED talk has more than 2 million views.” Simonandshuster.ca

We are looking forward to seeing what is next for this prolific UVic researcher!

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Open Education Resources Grants @UVic

What are open Education Resources (OERs)?

“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”[1]

OER Grants

UVic’s OER grant was established in 2019 with funding from the UVic Undergraduate Student Society, UVic Libraries, the Division of Learning, Teaching, Support and Innovation (LTSI), and UVic Systems. The LTSI, Libraries, and UVSS administer the grants. The grant provides funding of up to $5,000 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt, adapt or create open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.

Proposals were evaluated based on the following five criteria:

  1. The potential impact of cost-savings to students based off the cost of educational materials being replaced, class sizes, as well as possible employment of TA’s for the project;
  2. Their potential impact on student learning and the student experience in the form of high-quality materials, and open and innovative pedagogy;
  3. Overall alignment with UVic strategic framework;
  4. Long-term plans to reuse the OER in courses in subsequent terms;
  5. The extent to which the OER will be freely and openly shared throughout and beyond UVic (e.g., through BCcampus); and,
  6. Feasibility of the OER being ready within a reasonable timeframe, preferably ready for the following winter or spring term.

We congratulate the  July 2019 round of grant recipients:

  • Jane Butterfield, Department of Mathematics and Statistics – Pre-calculus Review Workbook

Over the past two years, we have been developing online review modules that calculus students can use to brush up their pre-calculus math skills. The purpose of this project is to convert those PDF files into an open-source html workbook, and to extend them to include trigonometry review. We will be using the markup language PreTeXt, which allows for the full range of mathematical typesetting, is extremely screen-reader compatible, and also allows for embedded WeBWorK exercises. The result will be an attractive, open-source, accessible, and widely-available workbook that gives students instant feedback as they refresh their skills!

  • Christopher Eagle, Department of Mathematics and Statistics – Open-access text for Math 110

Chris is producing an openly available supply of practice problems, together with hints, answers, and full solutions, for Math 110.  The questions are being obtained from a variety of existing open-access linear algebra texts, and then are being modified and arranged to match the way the material is covered in Math 110.  In the short-term this will make purchasing the Math 110 textbook optional for students.  In the long-term he plans for this to be the first step in the process of moving to a fully open textbook.

  • Shannon Fargey, Department of Geography – An Introduction to Earth System Science

The main goals of this project are both moral and academic. The underlying moral purpose of this project is to remove financial barriers to student success. Simply put, Students in GEOG 103 need a textbook to succeed and few students at present buy the textbook because it is too expensive. The UVic Bookstore has informed me that < 50% of students acquire the Textbook (hard copy and digital version). Earth system science is a very visual subject matter and all adequate textbooks are extremely expensive because of the number of required colour photographs and diagrams.

As I see it, a textbook is like a tutor. A good textbook guides the students to what is important, it explains concepts, and it helps students gauge their learning. This textbook will provide students an opportunity to read about the subject matter ahead of class, link to further resources, and include exercises that facilitate the achievement of the main learning outcomes of the course.

  • Allyson Hadwin, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies – Learning to self-regulate learning: Strategies for optimizing learning, motivation, and socio-emotional success at university

This interactive multi-media OER will include interactive modules used as: (a) a course text for Learning Skills courses, or (b) just in time resource for teachers, student services professionals, or university instructors supporting undergraduate students. Content will be drawn from two decades of empirical research and instruction with first year undergraduates students presenting a state-of-the-art catalogue of evidence-based of strategies for optimizing success in the face of range of student-identified behavioural, motivational, cognitive/metacognitive and socio-emotional challenges.

  • Quentin Mackie, Department of Anthropology – Introductory Archaeology: An Open Access Textbook

The Introduction to Archaeology open textbook will create a readily-updatable, locally-focused resource for students at UVIC and beyond. The textbook will integrate new writing, existing online resources, and open licensed images, all tied to original examples from the archaeology of Indigenous British Columbia and Canada.

 

The grant recipients were invited to welcome session on August 6 to share information about their projects, platforms they may use in publishing content and to gather information about supports available through the Libraries and Technology Integrated Learning.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). OER Defined. Retrieved from https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/

Dancing the Feminine by Monika Winarnita

Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.

Dancing the Feminine: Gender and Identity Performances by Indonesian Migrant Women is a recent title by UVic Anthropology post-doctoral research fellow Monika Winarnita.

About the Book

Dancing the Feminine is a compelling vision of expressions of gender and identity at the heart of the Asian migrant women’s experience as expressed through the performance of cultural dance. Winarnita explores the particular experiences of Indonesian migrant women in Australia and provides an analysis of these cultural performances as ‘rituals of belonging’.

For the Indonesian female migrants, performing ‘femininity’ is frequently negotiated in a cross-cultural context. The performances that Winarnita analyses are dramas of human interaction brought up through fissures and resolutions between the performers and their various audiences. The book provides analysis of these cultural performances as rituals of belonging, which demonstrate that in the diaspora meanings of the ritual are always open to being contested.

A particular appeal of this book is the way in which cultural dance performance offers profound insight into migrants’ life experience as well as into how human beings tell their stories and interact with one another. Based on her experience of performing dance with Indonesian migrant women in Australia, Winarnita provides a unique and novel set of research data that contributes to a diverse body of scholarly work in migration, performance, gender, sexuality and cultural studies, anthropology, and Asian studies.

About the Author

Monika Swasti Winarnita is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, with affiliation to La Trobe University, Australia. She has a PhD from the Australian National University (2014). Monika was a Project Research Officer for the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University ) and  assisted in research projects for various departments at the Australian National University and the University of Indonesia, as well as being the Media Officer for the Indonesia Update Series. Her published work covers Indonesian, Malay and Australian studies, migration, transnational families, diaspora politics, identity, gender, sexuality and cultural performance.

Praise for the Book

“Monika Winarnita’s work provides an intellectually rigorous, insightful, original and engaging examination of the pursuit of ‘traditional, authentic’ Indonesian dance performances by Indonesian immigrant women in Perth, Western Australia. The author is to be congratulated for extracting layers of nuance from a topic that for many may not even have drawn a second look. She reminds us all that all human interactions are fraught with deep, shifting meanings.” – Professor Henry Spiller (Ethnomusicology) and Chair, Department of Music, UC Davis

“This book is a very enjoyable read and makes a very good contribution to knowledge in the field of anthropology of migration in which it sits. The book invigorates key debates in the anthropology of migration – with important insights drawn from Indonesian studies, anthropology and studies of performance.” – Deirdre McKay, Social Geography and Environmental Politics, Keele University