Teaching during fieldwork is not a common anthropological research method. In this paper, I will share my
involvement with a local non-governmental initiative of setting up and teaching at the Volkshogeschool (a school
for adult education) during my fieldwork in Nickerie, Western Suriname. By reflecting on some of the ethical and
methodological challenges involved in teaching during anthropological fieldwork, I will show the potential of
teaching in the field as a form of empowerment both in terms of responding to educational and other social
needs of members of the local community and to those of the fieldworker. While being aware that education for
all is not a universally held value, or good, I suggest that deliberately changing a part of the field during the
research is not necessarily unethical. Indeed, to intervene more drastically in people’s lives than simply by being
there, through actively stimulating education, may in some cases be a more ethical choice than not to intervene. I
will argue that if we understand fieldwork to be a dialogical interaction of teaching and learning, teaching in the
field can be considered a form of participant observation. In my experience with the Volkshogeschool in
Nickerie, teaching in the field was an inextricable part of the fieldwork endeavour.