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Eric Alden Smith: Teaching Statement My teaching contributes to four different curricula: sociocultural anthropology (primarily undergraduate), biocultural anthropology (primarily graduate), the graduate program in environmental anthropology, and the interdisciplinary undergraduate environmental studies curriculum of the UW Program on Environment. In all of these curricula, my course content tends to be strongly multidisciplinary. My primary undergraduate offerings include ANTH 310 (Native North American Societies), which I have offered nearly annually since I joined the department, and ANTH 457 (Ecological Anthropology). Professor Don Grayson and I developed (and team-teach) BIOA 475 (Environmental Impacts of Small-Scale Societies). Professor Carl Bergstrom (Zoology) and I recently developed a non-technical interdisciplinary introduction to game theory (ANTH/BIOL 320, Game Theory, Evolution, and Behavior). In the last few years, my graduate teaching has concentrated in the areas of human behavioral ecology (my research specialty) and environmental anthropology, an innovative graduate program which I co-founded and directed for its first 4 years. I am co-directing a new five-year (2006-2011) NSF-funded IGERT graduate training program on "Model-based approaches to biological and cultural evolution." We are actively recruiting students with strong evolutionary interests and mathematical or computational abilities. The IGERT fellowships include a stipend of $30,000/year, full tuition, and up to $8,000/year in research and travel support (see program web site for details). I am particularly interested in recruiting someone with computation modeling skills who is interested in collaborating on the my current research project on the evolution of inequality. My involvement in UW's Program on the Environment (PoE) goes back to its inception several years ago. I was heavily involved in the planning groups that developed the core curriculum and the structure of the major and minor in PoE, and served on the instructional team for several of the PoE core courses, which rely on a case-study framework and various active learning techniques. This multidisciplinary teaching (my co-instructors have come from Zoology, History, Public Health, Political Science, and Geography) has been both challenging and inspiring. I currently supervise the following graduate students:
In addition, I serve on a number of PhD committees of archaeology graduate students, particularly those concerned with analysis of hunter-gatherer subsistence. Recently-completed doctorates under my supervision include:
Last updated September 2006 |