The three values I listed were:

• Fun – Enjoyment- Pleasure (I want students to genuinely look forward to the 100 minutes they spend with me and their classmates twice a week, and the readings or assignments I have them do outside of class.. Put another way, I don’t want students to dread my class or my assignments or see them as a drag.)
• Unlearning (or at least Revisiting) Assumptions and Taken-For-Granteds (I want my students to be challenged by some of what they learn in my class. Anthropology has the potential to expose students to people in other times and places, and show us that what we assume are innate or immutable characteristics of human society are just one of many possibilities. So part of my goal is to have students realize through my course in whatever subject we cover that some of what they may have learned elsewhere, in an academic setting or just through enculturation in American society.)
• Equity and Flexibility (Of all these, this might be the most central value of my teaching. Equity for me means understanding that students come with different challenges and needs, and that I need to accommodate those differences so that people can get the most out of the class. Flexibility for me is often the HOW of equity.

After closely reading my syllabus for AN/SO 3510 Illness Wellness and Healing from this past spring, I can say that the value of equity and flexibility is most present, both explicitly and implicitly. Some explicit examples: I have a section about Open Education, explaining what it is and how it informs some of the choices I made in designing the class, and a few of those choices are rooted in the value of equity/flexibility. I have an entire Help page, where I state that I value their health and wellbeing and share information about lots of campus resources to meet various needs. And I have a FAQ page about some of my course policies, where I talk about flexibility around deadlines for example. In terms of implicit evidence of equity, I have tried to use language that is welcoming throughout.

My value of Fun/Enjoyment/Pleasure is really not in evidence at all in my syllabus! I do state under a section titled “Course Activities and Assignments” for Participation “Class is more fun and rewarding if everyone participates…” I think this is not implicitly or explicitly present in my syllabi for a couple reasons. One, I don’t want to oversell the course. Maybe it won’t be fun. Two, I think the pleasure and fun come through the doing, not the initial presentation. But! It intrigues me to think about how to create a fun or pleasurable syllabus.

My value of Unlearning Assumptions is more about what we learn than how we learn it. I don’t think it is explicitly or implicitly woven into my syllabus because it would be too in the weeds. It guides what topics we cover, what readings I choose, how I frame some of our discussion questions. I also kind of want it to be a surprise! Like, telling someone that their worldview is incomplete might provoke some resistance – but showing them through examples and letting them come to that conclusion on their own is more apt to result in them actually rethinking some of those taken-for-granted ideas. But! Again, I am intrigued by the thought of stating this explicitly in the syllabus. Perhaps in my learning outcomes or course description?

Doing this activity also probably reveals that I actually hold some values that I did not articulate. Those would be:

• Clarity: I pride myself on having students feel like my courses are well-organized and set clear expectations from the outset. I think the formatting of my syllabus shows this, as well as my choice to be succinct in my wording!
• Care: I want my students to feel like I care about them as whole people. I care about their success in the class, and also recognize that this course is just one of many things going on for them during the semester, and will not always be able to be their priority. I think this is pretty explicitly stated in the syllabus, and also woven throughout such as in policies that I have around grading, deadlines, attendance, and so on. This is related to equity and flexibility, but distinct enough that I think it is its own value.
• Choice: I want to provide opportunities when possible for students to tailor the course work to their interests and goals. They will have some choice around topic or end products in their assignments. They set individual goals for participation.

Overall, I think this activity is interesting as a way to think about how our values are articulated to students. I wonder how this would go if I used something other than a syllabus – an assignment description? A Canvas site? A video recording of 100 minutes of a random class day?