By Erin-Lee Halstad McGuire, Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada
My Introduction to Anthropology course concludes with a unit on sustainability, which covers topics like globalisation, food security, and diet. It is also a point at which I want to remind students of core course concepts like cultural relativism and ethnocentrism.
I use Through the Lens of Anthropology as my course textbook because it comes from a Canadian publisher (University of Toronto Press), includes a Canadian author, and has well-integrated Canadian content. This mattered to me as I teach at a Canadian institution. A side benefit, it turns out, is that the text uses the core themes of food and sustainability to tie all chapters together, so these became recurrent themes in my course. This is why evidence for diet was a big part of my archaeology flipped class activity, for example.
Given that sustainability is central to global social concerns in today’s world, I want students to leave my course with a strong sense of how anthropology contributes to this field. I also want them leaving with clear ideas about how cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are relevant in their day-to-day lives. In this final blog post about my flipped-ish approach to teaching, I will show you how I use a flipped classroom activity to re-engage students with these concepts while applying the anthropological adage of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
Can I take your order, please?
McDonald’s restaurant is a global company with a foothold in 118 countries (Han 2023; McDonald’s). This means that while my students may come from as many as 100 different countries, there is a reasonable chance all of them have visited a McDonald’s at some point in their lives. It is familiar.
In the weeks leading up to this activity, we cover units on subsistence, economics, and political organisation through the usual mix of textbook readings, interactive lectures, and guest speakers. While the McDonald’s activity focuses primarily on globalisation and sustainability, applying knowledge from these other units strengthens student responses to the worksheet questions.
As before, there is an LMS page with instructions and a link to the worksheet (see my website). The collaborative worksheet starts with easy, Google-friendly answers to get teams rolling quickly. After that, students get started on menu items. They need to agree on a set of iconic things from the McDonald’s menu, before searching up a menu in a different country. On the new menu, they look for both the familiar and the strange and have a discussion about potential for ethnocentrism. This is an activity that tends to get a lot of enthusiasm from students, with the occasional outburst of “Spain has McBeer!!!”
A side of sustainability
The next step points students to the sustainability statements on the McDonald’s website. The worksheet asks them to evaluate those claims in terms of the biggest and smallest environmental impacts. These questions borrow from the Team-Based Learning framework, where good multiple choice discussion questions need to be significant and specific, but with some room for debate (Sibley & Ostafichuk 2023). Students must come to a consensus on some less-than-obvious questions and justify their answers based on what they have learned.
Here’s an example of one team’s reasoning for selecting sustainable fish harvesting as the least impactful of the options:
“Sustainable fish harvesting can often refer to fish farming that is bad for the environment. Claims of locally sourcing fish become sketchy when considering the consistency of products across such a large land mass like Canada. Harvesting locally also does not mean that they have the permission of Indigenous peoples across Canada as well.”
While brief, the answer connects to course material on environmental sustainability and earlier material relating to colonialism and Indigenous food sovereignty.
Extending the activity
While the whole activity can take 30-40 minutes, it is easy to extend this further, especially if the students are engaged in their discussions. For example, once all the answers are submitted, an instructor can play a video about food miles in a Big Mac. The best example I have found so far comes from the CDA blog in the UK (link: https://www.cda.co.uk/blog/where-does-your-big-mac-come-from/). The video is only 44 seconds long, but also comes with an infographic and a blog post. I use infographics as a course assignment, so the infographic is a useful example for me. On its own, the video opens up a conversation around the carbon footprint of foods and I can ask students to attempt to find the same information for a Big Mac made in Canada.
Alternatively, after showing the video, I can ask students to skim through the blog post while I quickly extract overall data from the online worksheets. This allows me to get some quick screenshots so that the session can be wrapped up with a review of their answers. If I am allowing delayed submission, then the review simply happens in the next session, which is usually the last class of the course and so is used to review the overarching take-away messages anyway. The review of the activity becomes the launch pad to review the themes of food, sustainability, and culture across the entire three months of the course, making it an effective and memorable way to wrap things up.
Resource: McDonald’s, Globalisation, and Sustainability Activity Plan for flipped(ISH) class
McGlobalisation with a side of Sustainability is number 4 of 4 resources Erin-Lee Halstad McGuire is sharing as part of their Flipped Classroom practice. This resource series includes an Introduction to the Flipped Classroom Method, an ice breaker activity, a primatology activity, a virtual archaeology activity, and a globalization/sustainability activity.
References
Han, D. (27 Feb 2023) Fast and Pluribus: Impacts of a Globalizing McDonald’s. JSTOR DAILY. https://daily.jstor.org/fast-and-pluribus-impacts-of-a-globalizing-mcdonalds/
Sibley, J., & Ostafichuk, P. (2023). Getting started with team-based learning. Taylor & Francis.
Main image: Illuminated signage photo by Monica Escalera (Pexels)
