Introducing anthropology at schools: Global challenges and local strategies
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2608
Contributo al Forum Teaching Anthropology in the Secondary School, Anuac, vol. 5, n° 2.
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Vesna Vučinić Nešković
Anuac
Introducing anthropology at schools: Global challenges and local strategies
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Forum: Teaching anthropology in the secondary school
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Vesna Vučinić Nešković
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2608
35
University of Belgrade, Serbia
2239-625X
2
en
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Introducing anthropology at schools: Global challenges and local strategies
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                                            2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2016: 35-40




                                                                                 FORUM

Introducing anthropology at schools
Global challenges and local strategies
Vesna VUČINIĆ NEŠKOVIĆ
University of Belgrade



Contribution to the FORUM: Teaching anthropology in the secondary school, ANUAC, Vol.
5, n° 2, dicembre 2016.



   This is a trying but also exciting period for engaging with past initiatives
and future challenges of introducing anthropology into secondary education.
The roundtable on “The Teaching of Anthropology in European Secondary
Schools”, organized by ANUAC and AISEA during the EASA Conference in
Milan (July 2016), was an opportunity to hear about some valuable experi-
ences from different national contexts and to internationalize the initiative
further.
   I take the opportunity of this Anuac Forum to sketch how the World Coun-
cil of Anthropological Associations (WCAA, www.wcaanet.org) has ap-
proached this issue over the past two years, a period during which I served as
WCAA Chair1. Also, in order to contribute to the dissemination of innovative
local initiatives in the field, I give the example of an extracurricular program
in anthropology for secondary school students that has been developed since
1994 in the Petnica Science Center, Serbia.
   The WCAA became involved with the issue of secondary education in an-
thropology when the UK’s Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) an-
nounced that Anthropology as an optional A-level subject, introduced in the
UK in 2010, would be terminated by 2018. Informed about this decision in
1. This is the period between October 2014 and June 2016.


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Vesna Vučinić Nešković
Introducing anthropology at schools: Global challenges and local strategies
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2016: 35-40.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2608
36                                                                    VESNA VUČINIĆ NEŠKOVIĆ


February 2015, the WCAA Organizing Committee, with the approval of David
Shankland, Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute (which had initi-
ated the A-level Anthropology Program), wrote a letter to the AQA board in
support of the Program2. This action was taken in coordination with the Ex-
ecutive Committee of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethno-
logical Sciences (IUAES, www.iuaes.org). At the same time, both organiza-
tions assisted in distributing a petition, “Save Anthropology A-level” that
had been initiated by a group of UK colleagues, and sent support letters to
add to the then growing number of statements from other anthropological
associations and eminent scholars. WCAA and IUAES also wrote a joint letter
to The Guardian newspaper to raise public awareness and to solicit support
for the same cause in the UK. We received a bureaucratic explanation from
AQA and no response from The Guardian.
   This situation inspired a wide and dynamic discussion among WCAA dele-
gates (all presidents of national anthropology associations) and WCAA Advi-
sory Board members. The discussion included exchanges of experiences from
diverse national contexts on past and present initiatives, and on successes
and failures in introducing anthropology into secondary education. For ex-
ample, we learned that Norway has been successful in introducing and keep-
ing alive such a program, that Portugal had introduced such a program but
then abandoned it, that Cameroon has anthropology in teacher training col-
leges as well as in public and private secondary schools. These were only a
few such cases in which anthropology has been nationally accepted as a sec-
ondary school course. Many more examples indicated that there had been no
initiative, that there were those that had failed from the very start or those
that, despite being pushed through legislation had failed to be realized. I
thought that this provided an important collection of experiences to start
with and to develop in a wider international setting in which WCAA could of-
fer an adequate communication platform.
   It also became evident that this potential should be integrated into the
WCAA’s major project – the Global Survey of Anthropological Practice
(GSAP), which had been inaugurated at the WCAA Biennial Meeting in Taipei
(October 2014). Initiated and developed by Greg Acciaioli assisted by three
other task group members, Vesna Vučinić, Chandana Mathur, and Lorne
Holyoak, the project’s purpose is to collect information from all WCAA mem-
ber associations concerning how anthropology is practiced in various na-
tional contexts. The aim is to develop a survey questionnaire that gathers in-
formation about the state of affairs in different countries regarding: (a) edu-

2. AQA is an independent education charity and the largest accreditor of academic qualifica-
tions taught in schools and colleges in UK.


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2016: 35-40
INTRODUCING ANTHROPOLOGY AT SCHOOLS                                                   37


cational, research, and applied anthropology activities; and (b) anthropolo-
gists’ employment, status, criteria for advancement etc., along now with the
additon of (c) non-university education.
   The first phase of the GSAP was reported on at the WCAA Global Survey of
Anthropological Practice Symposium, organized at the IUAES Inter-congress
in Dubrovnik (May 2016). One of the symposium’s five sessions, devoted to
“Teaching Anthropology Outside the Traditional Anthropology Program”, in-
cluded papers by Paul Nchoji Nkwi, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and Vesna
Vučinić respectively focused on secondary education experiences with an-
thropology in Cameroon, Norway, and Serbia3.
   These papers and the presentations at the 2016 EASA roundtable revealed
three major avenues that may be pursued in struggling for anthropology’s
presence in secondary education. One is to try to introduce “Anthropology”
as a subject in its own right, first as an elective and then possibly as a
mandatory course. The second is to fight for the right of anthropologists to
teach other (existing) secondary school social science courses, such as his-
tory or geography. This would allow the introduction of an anthropological
perspective into non-anthropology courses which could (possibly) be more
beneficial than having non-anthropologists teaching anthropology. The third
avenue is to experiment with different modes of teaching, either in sec-
ondary schools that agree to be try-out cases or by establishing specific pro-
grams outside the regular secondary school educational system.
   In what follows I present a unique educational program in anthropology
that is being realized within the Petnica Science Center, Serbia (Istraživačka
stanica Petnica, www.petnica.rs). Before doing that, however, I must mention
a few facts about the institutional presence of anthropology education in
Serbia. To date in higher education, anthropology is represented and taught
only in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. There, a Depart-
ment of Ethnology was founded in 1906, and renamed Department of Eth-
nology and Anthropology in 1990 (Naumović 2008; Nedeljković 2014). At
present, the Department has 16 full-time faculty and 9 part-time junior fac-
ulty involved in teaching BA, MA and PhD programs.
   Initiatives for instituting our discipline in secondary education have
reached as far as formally allowing ethnologists/anthropologists to teach
“Civil Education”, an elective course, in vocational secondary schools. In
practice, however, this principle is not being realized, primarily because the
3. P. Nchoji Nkwi, “The Teaching of Cultural Anthropology in Cameroon Public and Private
Schools: The Challenge of an Emerging Society”; T. Hylland Eriksen, “A Small Drop of An-
thropology: Experiences from Norwegian Secondary School”; V. Vučinić Nešković, “Chal-
lenges and Opportunities for Secondary Education in Anthropology: An Innovative Educa-
tion Program in Socio-Cultural Anthropology in Serbia”.

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already employed staff teaching social sciences (e.g. sociology, geography or
history) is required to take on this subject’s content as a means to ensure
they have a full teaching load. Other than that, a few ethnology/anthropol-
ogy graduates are employed at secondary music and ballet schools, where
they teach “Ethnology” or “Ethnomusicology”.
   Despite this grim context of secondary school anthropology within Ser-
bia’s regular educational system, there is one highlight. It is at the Petnica
Science Centre, an institution for innovative scientific education that offers,
among others, an alternative year-round course in anthropology. Situated in
a picturesque village near the town of Valjevo (western Serbia), the Petnica
Science Center offers programs in 15 different natural and social/human sci-
ence disciplines. Founded in 1982 as an independent nonprofit organization,
the Center has become the largest and most active of such institutions in
Southeast Europe. In its early days, it was financially supported by the firms
and institutions of former Yugoslavia. Since the early 1990s, it has come to
be funded primarily by the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Tech-
nology, by other Serbian ministries and, to a small extent, by various domes-
tic and international funding organizations. Starting with a few small build-
ings, it has been developed into a relatively large complex, equipped with
boarding facilities (a 100 bed dormitory with restaurant), a library (with
40,000 books and journals), laboratories, and a teaching resource center
(with classrooms and modern electronic equipment). Participants in the
Center’s programs are chosen from among the best and most motivated sec-
ondary school students in Serbia and surrounding countries, all of them hav-
ing been recommended by their teachers to attend the Petnica Science Cen-
ter’s programs. The basic concept is to involve each participant in a small re-
search project and to take them through all its phases, starting from theoret-
ical inquiry, methodology, actual research and writing, to publishing their
work.
   Under the initiative of an Archaeology Program coordinator, and with the
support of the Center’s director, in 1994 the Petnica Science Center board in-
troduced a Socio-Cultural Anthropology Program. They invited two younger
members of the University of Belgrade’s Department of Ethnology and An-
thropology (Vesna Vučinić and Slobodan Naumović) to conceptualize and or-
ganize the first course. The course was structured in terms of the Petnica Sci-
ence Center’s general framework, which comprised a cycle of four seminars,
occurring each winter, spring, summer, and fall.
   The Program starts with the winter seminar (January-March) to which the
selected applicants are invited. Students attend a week long seminar com-
prising an intensive set of lectures and discussions. The Program coordina-


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INTRODUCING ANTHROPOLOGY AT SCHOOLS                                                39


tors choose topics that are most representative of the contemporary disci-
pline, and invite their colleagues from academic and research institutions as
lecturers. The four-day spring seminar (April-May) involves students who
have expressed interest in continuing with the course and teaches them ba-
sic anthropological research methods. During that time participants start to
define their own individual research topics, helped by the Program coordina-
tors.
   The summer seminar (June-August) lasts about two weeks and is devoted
to students realizing their individual research projects, assisted by the Pro-
gram coordinators and undergraduate anthropology students recruited for
the purpose. Some projects have assumed that the students have undertaken
fieldwork in their hometowns beforehand, while others have required field-
work in Petnica village or the nearby town of Valjevo. Papers analyzing the
ethnographic data are finalized in the coming months with the best being
published in the Center’s journal, Petničke sveske.
   Finally, the fall seminar is organized to focus on a particular new topic
based on the major themes of the students’ completed research and accord-
ing to the Program coordinators’ interests. In the first year of the program,
we chose to work on “Urban Anthropology” and “The Use of Tradition in
Contemporary Political Campaigns in Serbia” as the main themes for the
summer research seminar, while the fall seminar was devoted to “Visual An-
thropology”.
   In subsequent years, colleagues who led the Program in Socio-Cultural
Anthropology chose various other themes. They also divided the participants
into two groups – beginners and the continuing students, with the second
group being permitted to pick a new research topic or to continue working
on their previous topic.
   Since the Petnica Science Center has a potential to diversify and extend its
programs to primary school pupils and to teachers, as well as to interna-
tional participants, there is scope for further development of the Program.
   What I have outlined above provides examples of failure, success, and new
experiments in secondary level anthropology courses in different national
contexts. But it indicates clearly that there is scope, in the present excitingly
turbulent and uncertain time, for anthropologists to position our discipline
in secondary school curriculums. While we heard details, during the 2016
EASA workshop, of why the Anthropology A-level in England and Wales was
perceived as unsuccessful by its financiers, we also heard how it may very
soon gain new life in Scotland. In addition, we learned about the University
of Poznań’s Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology’s trial efforts
to teach anthropology in all four grades of a local secondary school in


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40                                                                      VESNA VUČINIĆ NEŠKOVIĆ


Poland. In Italy anthropologists have succeeded in pushing through a law
that enables anthropologists to teach social sciences at secondary schools. In
the USA, the AAA’s Anthropology Education Task Force has produced a re-
port on the possibilities for action in various educational contexts 4. This is
all good news.
   The main recommendation for our future efforts could be that we should
work from both ends – at global level (in order to make a coordinated inter-
national framework for social action) as well as at national level (in order to
influence educational reforms and changes in current legislations). However,
we should not forget the very local, grassroots initiatives and opportunities
which provide spaces for experiments that may be good models for others.
Another recommendation is that we need to create a pool of the existing
text-books and visual materials that are presently used in secondary educa-
tion in anthropology.
   It is clear that we need to continue to exchange our experiences so that we
can learn from one another. To achieve that, we need to organize a large in-
ternational workshop or conference that focuses specifically on non-univer-
sity anthropology education, with the aim of enabling synergy between
global, national and local strategies.


REFERENCES

Naumović, Slobodan, 2008, Brief Encounters, Dangerous Liaisons, and Never-ending
     Stories: The Politics of Serbian Ethnology and Anthropology in the Interesting
     Times of Serbian Socialism, in Studying Peoples in the Peoples Democracies II,
     Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe, Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev,
     Slobodan Naumović, eds, Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Berlin,
     Lit Verlag: 211-261.
Nedeljković, Saša, 2014, A Contribution to the Study of the Development of Ethnol-
     ogy and Anthropology in Post-Socialist Serbia, Ethnologia Balkanica, 17: 241-
     266.




4. The report may be accessed at http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-aaa/files/production/public/An-
thropology-Education-Task-Force-Report-2015-FINAL2.pdf (accessed November 1, 2016).


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