Caelin Bragg
Advertising & Distribution Manager
Most classes consist of non-stop lectures with the occasional break for questions, but one freshman instructor aims to take his class in a more active direction.
Adjunct Instructor Jonathan Coffey, a recent anthropology graduate and environmental scientist at Stantec, teaches BS106, Intro to Cultural Anthropology, with a unique twist. As the semester unfolds, Coffey splits his three-hour classes into two halves; the first half is the lecture for the day, and the second half is a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired roleplay of survival situations, with the goal of demonstrating how society and culture develop over time.
“I thought it was important to do this project because I think that getting people to cooperate and interact in such a social setting as that is very important because we live in a day and age where you don’t have a lot of cooperation,” Coffey said. “ … There’s a different kind of connection you have and form when you are face-to-face and having to debate back and forth what you think the group should do, and being a part of something larger than yourself kind of changes what you think you should do, because you may start to consider the group as more important than your own.”
Coffey initially got the idea halfway into his first semester after a student suggested that there be some group project where they begin to build a culture, and he began to build the scenarios with feedback from the students.
“It’s a fun challenge, because it is a challenge where I have to kind of tailor it to my audience,” Coffey said, in response to writing a story to fit his students’ personalities. “I am literally writing fiction, and if the person’s not willing to reciprocate or build on what I’m throwing out, I have to adapt on the spot and try to come up with ideas that they may be able to go along with.”
When Coffey first began teaching this course in fall 2018, his students were thrust into a post-apocalyptic scenario after huge swaths of the population began dying from a strange illness, leaving the students to survive on their own. This semester, the students are put into a nature reserve outside of Andover attempting to escape finals and are currently trying to head back to school after one of them fell ill from a spider-bite.
“Do you place yourself as more important than the survival of others?” Coffey said, talking about interactions in his scenarios. “And I think that’s what humanity is kind of built upon; we place value on a system that’s larger than our own. And that’s culture.”
