Experiential Learning

Learning in our department goes beyond the classroom. We offer a wide range of hands-on research opportunities — including:

• research methods courses
• lab volunteering
• work-study placements
• field schools
• and faculty-supervised Undergraduate Summer Research Internships (USRIs)

Anthropology is a discipline learned by doing. Students in our courses engage in hands-on activities across all four subfields, including: collecting and transcribing language in use; participant observation and interviewing; archaeological surveying and excavation; artifact, skeletal, and dental analysis; mortuary analysis and osteobiography; research design and ethical practice with human subjects; and putting methods into practice in lab and field settings. Here is just a sample of some of our more hands-on courses:

Launched in 2024–25, the Western Ethnography Collaboratory (WE-ColLab) is a new ethnography lab housed in our department. It provides a dedicated space for sustained collaboration on ethnographic methods, research, and writing — bringing together students and faculty in a hands-on, workshop-style environment.

Follow WE-ColLab on Instagram 

Anthropology has always been a discipline rooted in community. Our students engage with communities locally and globally — working with Indigenous language partners on revitalization efforts, partnering with museums in southwestern Ontario, and contributing to research that has real-world impact. This community-engaged approach is central to how we teach ethical research practice and collaborative methods.

Field courses are an excellent way to practice anthropology, and they offer a fun and rewarding experience.

In some years, our department offers our own intensive and immersive field research experiences, providing advanced undergraduate students with the opportunity to participate in original research. These 1.0 credit courses are offered over 4-5 weeks in May-June. Past field schools have focused on Archaeology, Environmental Anthropology and Sociocultural Anthropology in South America (Argentina, Peru), Africa (Madagascar), and the Caribbean (Nevis).

Our previous field courses were focused on the politics of food, environmental anthropology, linguistics (language revitalization) and archaeology (including field survey and excavation, landscape mapping, lab work on collections, drone mapping, GPR, and 3D scanning).

You can find more information about this by visiting our Field Courses webpage.

We encourage students to seek out other field opportunities, and many students in our program opt for field schools run by other institutions. These field schools are run in various locations all over the world, from ancient Maya sites and pyramids in South and Central America to heritage and ancient historic sites in the Caucasus, the Mediterranean Europe, and Africa.

Whether you can get course credit for these field schools or not, many of them are fantastic opportunities, and if you are able to partake, you should go for it! The experience you will gain from these could be incredible -- and it will look great on your resume as well! They offer intensive, hands-on training and practical experience in areas ranging from archaeological field methods, such as survey, excavation, artifact processing, field recording techniques, and lab analysis to GPS, drone operation and mapping, and photogrammetry skills for archaeological research, to underwater archaeology, to advanced ethnographic methods. Register in any of our modules to have access to those opportunities.