Hey! I teach anthropology at the college level (I'm an archaeologist..) I know they're not exactly the same, but have you ever done the garbage exercise with kids? (I've always wanted to but I'm afraid college kids would think it was too young for them). have them bring in a bunch of items that would ordinarily be in their wastepaper basket/empty a classroom wastepaper basket(both assuming they're not too gross-i.e., that they actually contain wastepaper. or you could try it with a recycling bin, where things are presumably clean already) or have them make a list of stuff you WOULD find in their garbage at home...and then you can talk about all sorts of things. I.e., socioeconomic class, consumerism, ethnicity, different kinds of nutrition, evidence for how people interact with their neighborhoods(you can tell which stores people shop at regularly by bags and receipts and sometimes the kind of food wrapping they have in their trash), self-report bias on surveys (i.e, if people were asked to report how much pizza they eat in a week, would their trash agree with them? this is actually a study that's been done by an archaeologist named William Rathje). That's just off the top of my head, but you can get creative with it. I don't know if this would help, but it's definitely interactive and it's something I've always wanted to try. Hope this is useful!
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