Dana Osborne
Dr. Osborne is a linguistic anthropologist housed in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Key themes of her research focus on multilingualism, codemixing and switching, and more recently, the ways in which language can be leveraged as a political tool. She teaches courses in methods, anthropological theory, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, among others.
As an anthropologist trained in the four fields of the discipline with a focus on language, one of her core philosophies of teaching focuses on the funds of knowledge that students bring to the classroom. This approach takes as a foundational principle that students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled, but that they are fires to be stoked, whose ultimate contribution to a given intellectual space is to share their understanding of the world with others in the mutual construction of truth and knowledge.
Learning Through Storytelling: Insights from Anthropology
The focus of Dr. Osborne's project is to assess and analyze elements of the student experience in an Introduction to Anthropology course using a storytelling approach to teach complex anthropological concepts. Careful storytelling within anthropology engenders the use of the lessons of ethnography in ways that can be transferred into the learning environment without adding too much theoretical baggage to the project at the outset. In this way, integrating meaningful opportunities to tell stories as a transformational pedagogical tool is one that can be seamlessly integrated into classrooms across the university community. It is a tool that has the potential to increase the positive valency of student experience by fostering possibilities for drawing critical connections between students’ own experiences and the experiences of others, and it is a highly sustainable tool for learning focused on increasing the efficacy in learning.