Title
Teaching about primates with documentary film: Examining anthropology instructors' use of films and introducing the Primate Films Database (meeting abstract)
Author(s)
Koenig, C.M.R.;Koenig, B.L.;Sanz, C.M.
Published
2018
Publisher
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Abstract
The rapid development of technology over the past few decades has contributed to dramatic changes in college classrooms. In particular, use of multimedia has become commonplace in many disciplines. Films have been increasingly integrated into classroom instruction, and may be especially helpful for communicating about non-human primates, with which students likely have limited experience. In order to better understand the use of primate documentary films in the teaching of college-level anthropology, we conducted an online survey of 219 anthropology instructors. The vast majority of respondents (96.3%) reported using such films in their classrooms. The most widely shown documentaries featured many primate species, were easily accessible, and were highly rated by respondents for teaching usefulness. The following four films were shown by more than 36% of the respondents, featured many species, and were exceptionally highly rated for teaching usefulness: BBC Life: Primates, Life on Earth: Life in the Trees, The Life of Mammals: Social Climbers, and Nature: Clever Monkeys. To increase awareness about the multimedia resources available to anthropology instructors (and instructors in related fields) for teaching about primates, we created the Primate Films Database. The Database is a freely available online resource with information about documentaries featuring free-ranging primates. It includes information about film runtimes, primate species featured, instructor ratings, and film reviews. The Database will be updated biannually to include newly released films and can be accessed at https://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/primate-films-database
Keywords
Anthropology;Evolutionary Biology
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