 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Saki and we are still on site in San Jose at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. We are now sitting down with Dr. Daniel Ginsberg. Hello. Hey, how you doing? Thanks for coming on to the show. Yeah, sure. Greatly appreciate it. Daniel's awesome. He's got a great background. He's manager of education research and professional development at AAA. He's also an anthropologist in residence at American University in Washington, DC. He's got his PhD in linguistics from Georgetown. So Daniel, I'd love to learn more about all of this from you. Let's start with how you even fell in love with anthropology in the first place. Yeah, that's it took me a while. I first thought of myself as an anthropologist in my fourth year of my grad program. My background was in I had had a previous career as a school teacher and I had decided I wanted to study linguistics. So I started off studying applied linguistics and that took me into sociolinguistics and I was working in classrooms trying to figure out how students and teachers talk to one another and learn more about that. So eventually the way that took me was sort of into anthropology because I realized that if I was gonna understand what was going on I needed to understand the whole social setting of it and it so happened that my advisor was actually a bona fide anthropologist and so he brought me along. What were you learning about when you were learning about how teachers and students communicate? So my research in grad school was on mathematics education. I was really interested in how students learn to talk about math and how they think about themselves as being successful math learners or not because so many people have a hard time imagining themselves in that way and it was interesting to see the different ways that that came out through the ways that they talked in class and then the ways that they talked about it when I would interview them later. And how what was the difference there? So there's a couple of different potential barriers that make it hard for people to see themselves in it. So the first one is if you think about for a lot of people math is a study of like x and y and it's hard to know if you don't know what x and y actually are. You don't really relate to it and you don't see much purpose in it. The second one is that there's this idea that math is the subject where there's always exactly one right answer which doesn't have to be that way. There are other ways of teaching math, but in a lot of cases that's what it is. For a lot of students, that's what they like about it. But for a lot of other students, they'll say look if there's one right answer, if the teacher knows the right answer, what are you asking me for? And if I can't get it, then I just feel bad about myself. And then the third level is there's this idea of people will say I'm not a math person, right? Like if you're educated adults say I'm not a math person, in the same way they would never hear them say like oh a book, well I'm not a reading person, right? But the people will say oh I can't figure out the tip on our restaurant bill, you figure it out. And so I was really curious about what's behind that. And if there's an idea that some people are math people and some people are not and if you're not there's no way to become one. Then once you get that idea in your head, it's very difficult to figure out how to get there from here or even to care about it much. Those are really interesting points of analysis. I think the one right answer one is really interesting. If you already have the answer why I asked you, these are all very interesting and also the not math person one. There's this very strange. It's something that I've continuously explained to people when they say that I don't really like math, I'm not a math person. Which is that you do math all the time, you just don't know that it's math. Like when you're crossing a sidewalk, you have to calculate how many seconds I have left until a crosswalk stop. And you're actually doing calculation. Can I walk fast enough to make it on time etc when you're driving the same thing? What time do I need to leave for the airport? The time when you leave for the airport, all this different type of stuff. So okay, so then after that how'd you do the, what was the thesis in linguistics and how'd you get into Georgetown to do that? So I had been a public school teacher. Like I said in my last career, I was teaching English as a second language to students in a public high school outside of Boston. So I worked there and I had studied comparative literature and math in my undergrad. So it came up at a certain time that our students who were learning English, it was teenage immigrants and refugees. There was sort of this idea that they didn't need particular help to learn math that they might need in English or science or US history. But in a lot of cases that wasn't really true. And so I realized that I could get my teaching license also in math and learn how to work with them and be able to work with them, you know, within what the school would allow for us to be able to offer them linguistically appropriate mathematics instruction. Interesting. So I did that for two years and it was really a struggle because the way that sort of best practices in doing that kind of work as you say, for each lesson that I have, you know, students are going to learn this piece of math and they're going to learn that piece of English. And it has to go together because it's one lesson. And I really struggled to figure out what would be an appropriate sort of language objective. And I remember I asked, you know, we had an instructional coach and I asked her about it and she said, well, if you're doing, let's say for example, you're teaching students how to graph linear equations in the plane, then you could say students will learn the vocabulary of graphing linear equations in the plane, which it felt to me like a cop-out, right? It's like there's more to it than vocabulary. Yeah. But there wasn't really good science on what that was. Or if there was, it wasn't accessible to me as a high school teacher, you know. The education research that we were exposed to would be like somebody did a study with 50,000 kids and they tried a thing and it made a difference in their test scores. And I really wanted something that I could recognize on the scale of I'm working with this group of 20 kids every single day rather than a huge group that I saw at one time. So that's how I ended up also, I mean interested in anthropology and ethnography because it really, it reads on that level of that a practitioner can recognize from their work experience. But also it's how I got into the classroom discourse because I wanted to try and figure out like what what is the language of math? I had a job in between where I worked in language testing and it was one of the standards that we worked on was we wanted to assess students knowledge of the language of math and they didn't really have a good sort of concept of what that is precisely and so that was what took me into asking the questions that I asked in grad school. And so then a lot of them, is it in my right that the linguistics analysis for you was in relation to how students learned math? It was, it was mostly what I was working with was video recordings that I made of math classes and session. There are two classrooms where I was working. One was a middle school class for English learners kind of like what I had been doing in my in my previous career, but with the younger kids and the other was a college calculus section. And so I would go in every once a week and video the entire class session and then I would take it home and transcribe it and do different kinds of analysis. And while I was there I would also take field notes because I found it was a really good way to keep myself keyed in and remember the kind of things that I was noticing and that I might want to follow up on later. Yeah Whoa. So so a lot of then the what are some of the I guess the solutions then to helping with the way that we speak about math? That's a great question. And I think it's important to think about how research feeds into practical solutions within the bounds of my grad program. I didn't really have space to do as much as I could have. But what I became aware of a lot was that there were interesting points of intersection between what I was doing and what people were doing in math education. There's a lot of really sort of cutting-edge work on trying to take down some of these same barriers to students seeing themselves as successful learners. So the one right answer thing there's a lot of work around that from people in mathematics education and the learning sciences. So to give an example like there are ways of asking the same question in a way that has multiple right answers and then you can have a conversation about it. So the example that I like to use is I could ask you if I have a rectangle that's four units by six units what's the area? And then I'm asking you can you multiply four by six and tell me what you get or I can say I have a rectangle that's 24 square units. What are the dimensions? Oh Interesting. And so then if I have one student says four by six and one says six by four then we can say well is that or is it not the same thing. If one student says four by six and one says three by eight then we can say could they both be right. And then once we've decided that they could both be right. We could say well how many right answers are there. How will you know when you've got them all. If you have one that's 48 by one half does that count. And so then you can really get into a lot of that understanding and you sort of get around the one right answer thing that some people find to be a barrier. That was a really good example. I like that one. Thanks. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah because in math we were never taught what you just taught. I think maybe we were taught four by six or six by four. But I don't think we were taught that it was all that the purpose in so many ways was that in the way that you're describing the importance of it being that there is more than one right answer. Right. Yeah. And it really gets you thinking more deeply as a teacher right about am I trying to get my kids to know how to find the right answer. Or am I trying to get them to understand something about geometry on a deeper level than just like can I solve. Can I answer the question quickly. Yeah. In a lot of sort of more traditional ways of teaching math there's so much emphasis that's put on speed. You know I remember as a kid having these sheets with like a hundred multiplication facts and I had to see how many I could fill out. Yeah. And some kids are good at that. And for ones who are not it just makes them feel bad about themselves. And when you're actually doing math like as a professional mathematician it's like it's not related to that at all. That's not the kind of thing they work on. And so one thing that's really interesting is to think about how you can make school math be more of an exploration in the way that professional you know research pure math might be at an appropriate level. Yeah. Wow. That's a really cool point. So what do you have another cool one that that we could get better at with linguistics and learning like with math or other subjects. One thing that I think about is there's a there's a book that I was reading by a one of these math education people his name is Christopher Danielson and he wrote a like a shapes book for kids where traditionally they're like here's a triangle and you ask your kid like oh what is it it's a triangle OK. And so by the same token like that's not an interesting thing. And so his book he's done a couple but the first one was which one doesn't belong. And so it's like a two by two and you have four different shapes. And the question was which one of these shapes doesn't belong with the other three. But the trick is the way that he's designed it is it could be any of them. Oh interesting. There's whichever three you pick they have something in common that the other one doesn't have. Yeah. So they all look kind of similar. Right. It's like shapes. So it could be like a triangle and three rectangles but two of the rectangles and the triangle are shaded in and the other rectangle is not you know is this kind of thing. And so I could say they have some three of them have a similarity that one doesn't right. Right. But whichever three you pick they have some similarity. Yeah. And so then I guess it is linguistic because then what happens is the point of it is not the answer. The point is the conversation that you have. Yeah. And the right answer he says the right answer is anything where your reasoning is true. Yeah. And so I'm not interested in did you which one did you pick. I'm interested in how did you explain why you picked it. And that's what tells me whether you picked the right one or not. Yeah. This is a proof. Yeah. It's basically a proof but it's a proof at a level that like six worlds can do it. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. That's so interesting. I like that example a lot too. Wow. What a cool. What a cool way to apply linguistics to opening up the conversation around around math and getting more people involved in and feeling like they have a role to play in in math. OK. Now so now what is it like as you manage education research professional development at AAA. What does that mean. What does it look like. Yeah. That's I mean it's a lot. It's a very long job title. The reason that it's so long is that we were talking about me working on research and me working on education and me working on professional development. We wanted to pick two out of three to make it a reasonable length. But whichever one we left out is like which one doesn't belong. It's like whichever one we left out didn't quite hold together. And so we decided we needed to include the whole thing. So the way it breaks down is the research is basically research on the profession of anthropology. So for the association it's important for us to know things like how many people are studying anthropology in U.S. colleges and universities. And what is that number. Do we know. I should shouldn't I. It's like a couple of tens of thousands. It's something that it's so at the undergraduate level it's in that range. And then I want to say maybe 1500 master's degrees and 500 PhDs are granted a year something in that ballpark. OK. And maybe maybe eight to ten thousand bachelor's degrees. Yeah. OK. OK. So we have like resources to produce resources to to to share that kind of information with people. We also do like snapshots of this year of of all the degrees that were granted. What part of the country were they granted in. How did the people who earned them break down according to gender and racial classifications. Because those are things that we can monitor to see how inclusive the discipline is and start you know not because we want to ask everybody what race you are because that's not really interesting or appropriate. But because we want to have ways of starting conversations about being more inclusive as a discipline. Totally. But we also said we have research that we do on our own association members just to know like what kind of jobs they're doing and how they've arrived at where they're at and what they want to get out of the association and how they feel engaged with it. We have a project that I'm really excited about because you know one question that comes up a lot is what do you do with a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Good question. Yeah. And I've heard people say you know you can do whatever you want with it which is true but it's not helpful. So we want to try and find ways of giving more concrete specifics and if there's anything that anthropology is good for it's telling stories. So this year we're going to have a group of five really six undergraduate research fellows it's five but one is a team of two who are going to be doing research on this topic at their own home institutions working together collaboratively online so they can sort of share the experience and support one another as they go through it. But the goal is for them because they're really living it but also that they can really dig into this question that's important to so many people about how do anthropology majors plan for what comes next after they graduate. Yeah you know on the one level I can look at census data and say you know there's so many thousands of people in the US census who report when they do the American Community Survey they say do you have a four-year degree of so in what. So they ask a certain number of people who have degrees in anthropology and then they say what sector of the economy is your job in and what are your job responsibilities and we can say like do some statistics and say okay anthropologists are way more likely to do a certain kinds of jobs that have to do with explaining culture to other people so anthropology majors are more likely than others to be museum curators social scientists librarians and that's good on a certain level that we have those numbers but we really also want to be able to tell the story and we want to bring the anthropology to that question and be able to talk about you know what was this process like for these students as they went through it how did they talk about it amongst themselves how do they imagine their future selves doing anthropology somewhere and it's it's like the math students right how do they how do they see themselves getting from here to there. So social scientists librarians museum curators museum curators yeah nice there's this idea that if you're gonna study anthropology you're gonna end up as a college professor because it's the only place to do it but what we found looking at the statistical analysis of the census data is that anthropology majors are no more I mean they do do that some amount of the time but they're no more likely to do it in any other liberal arts major oh so it's not like anthropology is uniquely poorly supported for like other kinds of work it just takes more effort to figure out for any individual person exactly what that is because it's so adaptable and like so broadly useful so we want to find ways of telling more success stories that's what I was just about to say it'd be cool to to get more anthropologists excited about telling stories that are relatable for the general public about how society has evolved or what's certain what's certainly what's currently going on in certain geographic locations around the planet yeah certain demographics around the planet so I love storytelling we love storytelling so if that could be something that he said so there's these groups now that are six of these individuals that are going at their local institutions to do research on where anthropology majors go for work if we could funnel into storytelling that'd be great now what else is with managing education research and professional development yeah what else yeah yeah so that's the research piece okay and the research piece like I said it's important for us to know these things because people will call us up and say you know in my department we have had this and that change in the number of majors we have year over year does that mirror trends that are happening in the discipline more broadly and we can talk about that but it's also important for us to be able to support professional development offerings that the Association provides to its members and also for us to be able to support public education outreach initiatives for broader public and so that's the the professional development piece and education piece which I also work on and then what does that look like for AAA to do outreach to the public it takes a lot of different forms probably the keystone example that we've had the best example of successes that we've had doing that is a traveling museum exhibit that we had that was going around the country for the 10 years it's about to wrap up called race are we so different interesting and so this was traveling museum exhibit yeah there was one there was so much demand for it that they made a copy of it and then there was still so much demand for that they made a third copy of it that's smaller that can fit into smaller spaces and it draws from all different ways of doing anthropology to talk about first of all what is the science of human biological variation and then the second thing is how how is that used to classify people according to racial categories and then the third thing is what what ramifications does that have for the lived experience of people you know as they go through their lives and dealing with race in different ways or not and so the museum exhibit built in all of these things it's just wrapping up a 10 year run going all over the country and then we also produced a number of you know there was a book 10 year run yeah we expected it to be less than they keep people kept asking for it there was a book there was a before we get in the book what was the the in what were some of the interesting takeaways from like the variations and what that means about race for race are we so different so there are some really cool things that that came out as part of the materials that we use so for example what we did was we had a group of people who had t-shirts printed up where it would say at various points over the last hundred years or so how would they have been classified racially on the US census because there's this sort of naive idea that race is this inherent thing of humans that it's like you know we just anthropologists know there's no scientific biological basis for it there's not you know if you had a if you had a sort of hypothetical Martian come and look at who people are just as animals there's not like a different species that are white folks and black folks that's not scientific that's that's social and it's it's racist thinking that then makes these categories but then you can go back and look at the interesting so it goes under the umbrella of humans and not a specific genetic variation right right like there's more genetic variation within a race than there is from one race to another you know and so what it looks like on the on the genetic level is that it's one species and it's very clear science but the other thing too with it being something that that comes out of human society is that that is also a moving target and so the way that people think about racial classification over time changes yeah and so we found a really cool way to illustrate that where we would have people wear a t-shirt that would say you know and if I were alive in 1910 I would have been called this yeah if I were alive in 1950 I would have been called that and then when I filled out the 20 then census I put this other thing yeah and you can see that it's not the same thing from year to year example of what how someone so before the 1970s we didn't really have an idea of Hispanic or Latino or Latinx as people say now there was a census category this wasn't in the race category it was and still the census asks about race and ethnicity separately and so this is the ethnicity question is are you Hispanic Latino or not but this wasn't even a thing that they would ask about up until the 1970s there were census designations for Spanish surname but there really wasn't a sense that people who were descended from Latin American countries or Latin American immigrants to the US would necessarily form a cohesive social group and so there was really a social project in the 1970s to build that identity for US political purposes and then it's interesting too that even now you can see when migrants arrive in the US from Latin America they kind of have to learn to be Latinx because it's like before I was just Nicaraguan and in Nicaragua they might have other different ways of thinking about race that don't map neatly onto what we do we're filling out a different sense of survey right Nicaragua than you are in the US right and and what I think of myself as being the same category as a Guatemalan or a Salvadoran or a Mexican or a Argentine right just because we all speak Spanish yeah but in the US the politics of it is different and so the classification is different and it's something that's really come up pretty recently that is so interesting whoa yeah how you can evolve over time as so but we were really not even taking census surveys really of populations prior to 1900 were we I don't know how far I mean so the it's in the Constitution that we do that a census every ten years okay so that we can figure out who's in here or at how what where the congressional districts are going to be how many representatives does each state get in Congress is proportionate to the population so it's in the Constitution that we have to count everyone every ten years so that goes back to the 1790s why California has more votes in South Dakota right yeah but the development of social science along with that over the last you know hundreds of years and and so the US Census now does a lot more of that kind of work yeah interesting and then the the other thing you said was there's more genetic variation within a race than from a race to another race yeah interesting so there's more genetic variation between two French people than there is between a French and like a South African person well it's hard to look at it on the level of individuals right like how many genes do I have in common with you personally is and this is I'm getting way out of my area yeah it's better this is an exhibit yeah yeah it's an exhibit I just was finding the exhibits so interesting and we have genetic anthropologists that I could hook you up with that would be interesting but my understanding of it is that if you look at the population as a whole right if there were if races were a real scientific fact then you would say if I look at your DNA that there would be like different trends where like all of these people's DNA is similar to each other and different from them right and if you look at groups of people it's not the case that's not how it is it's it's that we have these racial groups that we've decided on because of culture and history but if you look at the DNA of people within that group they don't hang together as a unit in that way they just look like human DNA and so then this is part of the education right and then is there another exhibit that's going up or what yeah how does that yeah we're currently working on a successor to so we're revising some of the race material so I said it's it's been in the in the field for ten years that means that it was first going out around the time that Barack Obama was elected president and so if we're thinking about you know race and culture in the United States it has been so much in the last ten years so we've been working on updating those materials to reflect a lot of what's happened since then from Obama to Black Lives Matter to a lot of other things that have come out and at the same time as that because the the museum exhibit is winding down we're also starting to ramp up another thing which is called world on the move 100,000 years of human migration yeah that sounds cool yeah so we have done we're still working on finding the resources to put together the museum exhibit for that but we've done some writing in our own so in anthropology news as I remember newsletter and we've had a series of articles about migration under that heading we have a collaboration that we've done over a number of years with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage where they put on a the Folklife Festival on the National Mall every year and we've had presence there working on it's always ties in with migration in some way because they bring in cultural heritage performers from around the world and so then it's been a real great opportunity for us to have conversations about that and in collaboration with such a good partner what does a hundred thousand years of migration look like what are you guys gonna be showcasing there's there's a lot of different angles on it and so we're still working through a lot of the details but there is sort of the long view story that you can tell of how the human species began in East Africa and now populates you know the entire world how did that happen and and what is the evidence that we use to tell that story you know and you can tell the story in terms of DNA you can tell it in terms of bones you can tell it in terms of cultural practices and food you can tell it in terms of language you can you can find artifacts that that show how culture was shared between people from here to here to here and so it brings together all different ways of doing anthropology to tell that story in the long term but then there are also more micro stories that you can tell about specific instances of you know in this place who lived here and then who came here why did they come where did they come from and what happened to the people who are already there yeah and there are there that story has happened in a lot of ways in a lot of places over the last hundred thousand years and we're still working out exactly what that's gonna look like when we build it out but that's that's the kind of stories that we're looking to tell oh man there's yeah there's so many variables to calculate for this story of the hundred thousand years of migration and and I like I like all the angles that you want to take on it that's that's the way to do it now I want to ask you about what's going on with the anthropologist in residency at American University in Washington DC because I AI are the anthropologist in residence it's so interesting so like what is that like this is a brand-new thing that I've just been been doing recently it's it's some my goal is never to be a college professor even though I got my PhD I was just interested in doing this kind of research and figuring out how to ask these questions and go through it in a in a rigorous way and find satisfying answers to difficult questions and it's something that I've been able to do you know working at a non-profit you know the AAA is a non-profit but there's a lot of reasons why it's also good to maintain contacts with academic institutions so part of it is that thinking of it from the association perspective so many of our members work in higher education either as professors or graduate students and so it's good for me to just be in touch with that world on a professional level as well as on a sort of member services or conceptual you know reading about it kind of level and so this gives me a kind of a academic home base where I can have professional colleagues that I can support so for example I've done a guest lecture in classes where people are teaching things that intersects with what I know to give you an example there's a there's a course that they're teaching now called craft of anthropology where students learn theory and method in a project based way and so they're working with a community near Washington DC they're doing some I think some archaeological work and also oral histories and for me coming into it with a background in linguistics my question is once you've taken that oral history interview what do you do with it yeah how do you think about what people are saying to you and interpret that and so I went in and taught a sort of a mini workshop on how to look at narrative there's this idea that you know when you do oral histories people tell you stories and there are ways of thinking about a story as you know it has a beginning middle and an end and usually there when you get to the end of it there's some like here's why I told you that story and so you can look at it in a structural way of what are the stages of it but you can also look at it in a functional way why are people telling stories what kind of world are they constructing so if I'm telling a personal narrative it's a story about me and I'm building this story world where I'm a certain kind of a person dealing with other kinds of people in a certain way and that is presenting a kind of like my interpretation or representation of a social reality and so for me looking at the transcript as an analyst I can pull all of these things out but there's another level to it too where by me telling you a story I in this real life world have decided to tell you this story in this way for some reason yeah and that tells me something about who I am in the story world but it also tells me something about who I am in this world right now of the story telling world and what's going on in this interview interaction how am I thinking about participating in oral history how am I how am I trying to represent you know my heritage to this researcher today and so what I was offering in that setting was I have the the analytic tools to be able to look at these things and talk it through in a way that really complements cultural anthropology in exciting ways yeah that's a really good way to look at why is someone telling a certain story the way that they're telling it about themselves oral history and and I look forward to the work that you end up doing as an anthropologist in residence and the continued work thank you for the continued work at AAA this is yeah this is an incredible place and I feel very much like a kid in a knowledge haven right now thanks that's crazy here yeah it's super fun Daniel thank you for joining us on the show yeah it's been a huge pleasure talking to you it's been my pleasure thank you and thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it give us your thoughts in the comments below we'd love to hear from you also go ahead and check out AAA links in the bio and much love everyone thanks for tuning in and go and build the future manifest your destiny into the world everyone peace