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 Pathways to Knowledge: A Lecture Series for Undergraduates
Spring 2003
February 25, 2003
Watson Auditorium
A Graduate Student's Perspective on the Ecology of African Grasslands:
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania
Michael T. Anderson
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Biology
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African grasslands have fascinated explorers and biologists for centuries. These habitats sustain the largest free-roaming ungulate populations on earth (if don't know what that word means… you will after the lecture). Four years ago I became a graduate student under a professor who has been working in Africa for almost thirty years. In this lecture I will summarize my experiences from my three separate trips to east Africa to study the ecology of these rare and wonderful habitats.
I will share my successes, my failures, and attempt to summarize what I have learned about these ecosystems during my graduate work. By the end of my talk, I hope to convince you that these ecosystems are spectacular for their beauty, intriguing for the way that they function, but also threatened by human activity and in desperate need of conservation.
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March 18, 2003
Grant Auditorium
"You Can't Ask Them Anything:"
Tamil Kinship, Women and
Decision-making RegardingHealth in Tamil Nadu, India
Haripriya Narasimhan
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
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My dissertation research looks into ways in which women in Tamil Nadu make decisions about their health and kinds of health care they access. In a society where multiple health care systems prevail, women's attitudes toward biomedicine and other indigenous forms of health care play a major role in decision-making. While several factors affect this process, this lecture will look at one significant issue - notions of womanhood and kinship, from an anthropological perspective. Tamil kinship, with its emphasis on cross-cousin marriage, was seen by scholars as providing women with autonomy in making choices. Feminist research, however, brought ou the complexities involved in marriage amongst kin.
This lecture will explore the issue further and see how women's attitudes about gender and kinship impact all aspects of decision-making, with specific regard to health care.
This study was conducted in 2001-2002 at three sites in Tamil Nadu, and involved surveys, participant observation and in-depth interviews.
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April 15, 2003
Grant Auditorium
Removing the "B" from the ABCs:
No more Blows, Belts or Beatings in Peruvian Literacy Education
Diana Dahlin Weber
Ph.D. Candidate
School of Education
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A concern to provide quality and equitable education for the world's children has initiated educational reforms in many countries. Peru, with its ancient history of the Inca Empire and its recent history of the Shining Path terrorists, is one country making changes.
Most children in Peru's Andean villages learn their ABCs and multiplication tables fearing the authoritarian teacher and the ever-present "whip." Teachers understood instruction to be dictation; group work, discussions or problem-solving activities were non-existent. Students were expected to memorize and repeat. However, in 1995 Peru's national reform called for a child-centered, socially interactive, and problem- solving classroom. What does this mean for new teachers who had learned "under the whip?"
I investigated what the graduates of a teacher education course believed about constructivist teaching and learning for literacy instruction. Will the new teachers be authoritarian, or have they too been newly constructed?
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