Greg Downey is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. As an anthropologist, Greg has extensive fieldwork experience in Central and South America and in the Pacific, and he has taught the Department of Anthropology’s core curriculum on human rights and economic anthropology since he came to Australia in 2006. While teaching at the University of Notre Dame (USA) prior to that, Greg developed ‘Cultural Difference and Social Change,’ an award-winning, full-credit re-entry course for students returning from international service learning projects, study abroad, and internships in the developing world. In collaboration with Jan Gothard and Tonia Gray, and with support from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (Grant CG10-1549), he produced the ‘Bringing the Learning Home’ curriculum, an open access model curriculum for better integrating study abroad experience into enhanced curriculum at students’ home universities. In 2012, Greg created Macquarie University’s first MOOC (Massive Online Open Classroom), the Open2Study short course, ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology’; and, in 2013, he won the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Macquarie.
Greg is currently developing an anthropological ‘fieldschool’ in Fiji (Anthropology 225) with the University of the South Pacific, as part of Macquarie University’s PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) program. He is a dedicated proponent of open educational resources and community-based and service learning, and has published on these subjects in academic forums and the weblog, PLOS Neuroanthropology.