Keene, Arthur

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Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology
Last Name
Keene
First Name
Arthur
Discipline
Anthropology
Expertise
Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology: Community cooperation, Grassroots community development. Community Service Learning. Kibbutz, Israel and North America
Introduction
I am a member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. I received my BA. from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and my MA (1974) and Ph.D. (1979) from the University of Michigan. I formally trained as an archaeologist but my current research and teaching are in the fields of cultural and applied anthropology and community service learning. I have done field work in Israel, Australia, Norway, France, The Netherlands and in various venues in North America. My current research interests focus on issues of community and social justice. Throughout the eighties and nineties I conducted fieldwork on an Israeli kibbutz examining the struggles of this community to maintain its well established webs of mutual asstistance and commitment in the face of growing individualism and pressures to privatize. For the last ten years or so I have been asking the same questions that I have asked about the kibbutz in my own community in Amherst, Massachusetts. This has led me to experiment in the field of community service learning. I founded and direct the Curricular Alternative Spring Break Program at UMass. CASB (now affliated with the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT)) gives students the opportunity to combine rigorous course work with direct service to communities in need. I also co-direct the Citizen Scholars Program at UMass, a scholarship program designed to support students who want to combine academics and service while developing leadership skills. and preparing for life as engaged citizens in a diverse democracy. These efforts also reflect my ongoing interest in learning communities and in critical pedagogy. I currently sit on the steering committee of Educators for Community Engagement (formerly the Invisible College), a national organization dedicated to the promotion of community service learning as well on the editorial board for the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. I served as Associate Dean of Commonwealth College, the Honors College at UMass, during its inaugural year and currently hold the Terrence Murray Professorship within the college. I continue to teach honors courses for ComCol and work closely with a number of its students and with the Office of Community Service Learning at Commonwealth College. When I am not at the University or out in the field I am active in community activities in Amherst. I served for several years as an elected representative to Amherst Town Meeting. For many years I was a host parent in the A Better Chance Program in Amherst. I am also head coach of the Amherst Regional High School Women's Cross Country Team and co-meet director of the Amherst Cross Country Invitiational at Hampshire College.
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    Concurrent Session B: How the Millennial Generation Learns
    (2010-10-08) Keene, Arthur
    In this workshop we will explore three questions: who are the folks who inhabit our classrooms, what do we need to know about them in order to create effective learning environments, and how might this knowledge lead us to tweak our own teaching? In the first part of the workshop Keene will share observations distilled largely from research undertaken from 2007‐10 by students in his senior capstone honors seminar, The Ethnography of Us (but also from Keene’s own ethnographic observations from his last decade of engaged teaching). In, The Ethnography of Us, students designed individual ethnographic projects to explore the question: who are the people in our classrooms and what is their disposition toward education, learning and the university? In the second half of the workshop we will discuss some of these observations, compare them with the experiences of session participants, and consider how we might fine‐tune our pedagogy to address the specific needs and dispositions of the Millennial generation.