
Designing a new Master’s Track based on the Experience in Active8-Planet
Interview with Giulia Sinatti on her Senior Teaching Qualification project
Tell us about yourself
I’m an anthropologist currently working both as a researcher and as a teacher at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (VU) at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (SCA). Throughout my career, I have alternated positions in and out of academia and I’m very keen for my research to have practical outlets. For many years, my research focused on migration and I wanted it to be relevant for professional practice. Migration research gave me many opportunities to do this. Then, the migration crisis profoundly changed this field, making it increasingly politically loaded. I was facing ethical dilemmas in my work: who did I want to collaborate with? What kind of practices and whose could my research inform? I decided to maintain collaborative research as my trademark, but pursue it in other fields. The past two years I’ve been doing this in healthcare: I conduct ethnographic research, strengthen this with insights from anthropological theory, and use my work to support the wellbeing and safety of healthcare professionals. I also teach one of the key courses in the Master’s in SCA at the VU – Field Research Design. It is for me one of the most exciting in our program because students design their own research project before doing field research and writing a thesis about it.
“The most important goal I see for myself is to infuse enthusiasm on the possibilities of collaborative research with partners outside academia.”
What is your role in Active8?
That’s a difficult one! The most important goal I see for myself is to infuse enthusiasm on the possibilities of collaborative research with partners outside academia. I’m super passionate about this kind of research. With my presence in Active8, I hope to spread the enthusiasm to others in and beyond the project, for instance among our students and among my colleagues. I would say this is my main added value in Active8. I do also have some concrete roles.
Last year, I was the Servant Leader in the Dutch team. It was a completely new experience for me. There are some things I struggled with and some things I learned from facilitating this kind of team. I enjoyed it a lot.
What is an STQ?
It’s an acronym that stands for Senior Teaching Qualification. As teachers at uni, we are required to qualify for the job through training. All teachers in uni should possess a basic teaching qualification, in which we learn about how the learning process works and tools for designing courses so that learning activities match a set of learning goals. A Senior Teaching Qualification is for those driven to further enhance teaching. It supports you to bring about change in education that’s at too big a scale for one person to do alone. It’s training that helps you develop a project and lead a small team of people. Beyond designing a successful course, it helps you design change at a curriculum level, which needs a birds eye view over an entire program. This is what I’m currently following.
“There is reluctance among students to sign up for anthropology because there’s a lack of clarity about what kind of jobs are available after the study.”
What is your STQ about?
Introducing a new track in our master program SCA. Our department has a master program in anthropology that has been running for many years. Systematically, it ranks very high among anthropology programs in the Netherlands, we get very positive feedback from our students. But, there is a but! There is reluctance among students to sign up for anthropology because there’s a lack of clarity about what kind of jobs are available after the study. And yet we train our students in very useful and sought after skills. A report by the World Economic Forum ranks the top skills that employees of the future are going to need in the labor market. Most of these skills are not technical, but soft skills: how to work in teams, how to communicate … soft skills that anthropologists typically train in. We want our students to know how to market these skills when they leave uni and enter the labor market.
The plan with the new track is to boost our education program by allowing students to conduct research collaboratively. Our current students do research departing from research questions with origins in theoretical debates; in the new track questions originate from collaboration with stakeholders. These could be an NGO, or a municipality that wants to develop policy for the youth, a housing company, a corporate company, or a hospital. As long as it’s someone who has a practical question that they don’t quite know how to address.
An example from my own research: I started collaborating with Dutch hospitals because they had the question: Our culture is not quite safe, how can our workers feel safe on a daily basis? This is an example of a question that is not phrased anthropologically yet, but responds to a deep felt need to address small daily frictions between healthcare professionals as they go about their daily work. They thought anthropologists are the experts when it comes to culture. They asked if I could measure culture before and after interventions they implemented. This was a funny expectation for an anthropologist: you cannot measure culture! But I had confidence that the kind of knowledge we generate can help discussions about how differences in roles and hierarchical levels in healthcare organizations cause frictions in communication between staff. These are the kinds of collaborations we hope to embark our students on with this new masters track.
The emphasis in this new track is on Anthropology and professional practice. What we mean with this is that the collaboration with professional practice comes center stage. Students don’t just learn about their specific research topic, but they also learn to manage collaboration and dialogue with an external stakeholder throughout the research process. As anthropologists, we never work in isolation. Doing research in collaboration with partners outside of academia also makes it easier for students to anticipate what they might do after they graduate.
What is Active8-Planet’s role in your STQ?
My STQ is one thing, but the project of setting up a new master track has to be a collaboration. There’s a small team of people, based at the department, who in the last few years have been experimenting within teaching and research in collaboration with stakeholders. This is where the link to the Active8-Planet project comes in. This project is one of those experiments. It is a research program funded by the EU commission through the Erasmus Plus scheme, which allows experimenting with our teaching programs and introducing new ways of teaching and learning. In Active8-Planet and a previous project called PEOPLE (same funding scheme) we have been doing this by offering openings for our students’ masters research in partnership with external organizations. This way their research is not only answering anthropological questions, but feeding into practice as well.
During projects like Active8-Planet we’ve had to figure out how to best guide that collaborative process between students and an external partner. Now, this experience supports the development of the new master track. In Active8-Planet we’re carrying out these experiments with four students collaborating with one partner; in the new master we want to upscale these efforts.
“Anthropologists have a branding problem”
How does this connect to the EPIC conference?
The connection is HUGE. Anthropologists have a branding problem. They could be better at selling themselves, selling the added value that they bring. In chairing the EPIC conference, which is a gathering of people who practice ethnographic research in industry, I realized that companies out there are thirsty for the kind of knowledge ethnography generates. I see a need to attune the language so that anthropologists can communicate better with potential stakeholders. What I really valued about the EPIC conference was realizing it was more than just a meeting among people who practice ethnography. Companies were also attending, eager to discuss the insights of ethnography and to experiment new ways of incorporating it in their work, and to recruit anthropologists!
It is essential as anthropologists that we can get across to others effectively how our insights are useful to them. But it is especially essential that we seek collaborations with stakeholders that are sensitized to the added value we can bring. EPIC was an opportunity to meet those kinds of partners we would want to collaborate with in research. It takes time and commitment to build these collaborations. You need true dedication from all partners to make it work. EPIC gave me hope that these kinds of partners not only exist, but that they are also abundant.
“Let’s have a coffee!”
What can our readers do to contribute to your goals?
I like this question! Companies or organizations who might be interested in having a group of anthropologists hack our brains on your challenge: reach out, because we can address it with our students.
For potential students: Are you interested in this track? Do you have a project to bring into it, but are not sure if it would fit? Talk to us! We are flexible and if you come with an idea together we can figure out a way to make it work for your thesis.
Are you a teacher at another uni working on similar education projects? Reach out and let’s exchange notes on how we can best support students to learn from these collaborations.
Are you none of the above, but still curious? Reach out for more info, or simply a chat. I am eager to share, as it also helps my own ideas to grow. Drop me a line and we can have coffee.
Contact details: Giulia Sinatti (g.sinatti@vu.nl)