The best part of being a college professor is that I have many opportunities to keep learning. This summer I had a chance to head back to the classroom twice. Was it ever wonderful to be on the other side of the table!

In June, I participated in the John Dewey Kitchen Institute at the University of Vermont. Here I was able to reflect on the concept of cooking to learn and the experiential work that I have been doing with my anthropology of food courses at Connecticut College. I wrote about my experience at UVM on the Food Anthropology blog here.

The second course I took was through the NSF-funded Qualquant Short Courses in Research Methods (aka Nerd Camp). This was my second time at nerd camp and, once again, I enjoyed learning with anthropologists from all over the US. Although a week in Gainesville, Florida in July was daunting, I have no regrets about the course in text analysis that I took with Betsy Krause and Amber Wutich. Although I still haven’t drunk the positivist Kool-Aid, the course helped me take a more systematic approach to analyzing quantitative data. I left Florida feeling fired up and ready to get down to some analysis and writing.

As the academic year starts, I look forward to sharing my new learning and the opportunity to learn from my students.