You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
- I describe how one group of archaeology students benefits from conducting their field work right in the middle of their college town.
- I share a few thoughts on midterms and fall break.
- I pass along some recent articles you may have missed.
Teaching in Public
Archaeology is often seen as “exotic,” says Mark Warner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho. Its field work, he added, is typically conducted “in the middle of nowhere.”
For plenty of people, what happens on a college campus can feel equally foreign — even if it’s just down the street.
Warner and a colleague have found an unusual way to make their discipline and university more familiar. This fall, the field-methods course they teach is conducting a dig on the grounds of Moscow High School, right in the center of their college town. The project includes both the careful collection of contemporary items and the excavation of the sites of homes that predated the building of the school.
The course is not a degree requirement, explained Katrina Eichner, the assistant professor who’s co-teaching it. But any student who wants to pursue archaeology really needs to get field experience during undergrad, she says. That usually entails traveling somewhere far from campus at significant expense. By running a field school locally, Eichner says, “we are getting students from very broad and diverse backgrounds.”
Access to crucial hands-on work is not the only benefit for students. They’re also experiencing an unusual degree of public engagement. The dig is not just for students in the class: It’s also open to community volunteers, about half a dozen of whom have participated. And given the central location, students also get questions about what they’re doing from passersby. So far more than 150 people have visited the site. Because the course was shaped with student input, the professors say, students are well equipped to answer such questions.
Members of the public, Eichner added, may have personal histories that can help students make sense of the objects they find — like animal bones left over from meals, pottery, and bottles. This underscores for students the importance of including the public in a community-history project.
And the public engagement won’t end there. The course is designed to let students participate in every part of the archaeological process, Warner says, from digging, to cataloging, to writing a paper. Some students, he says, will probably give a research presentation at a regional conference.
The current excavation is nearing completion, but the professors hope to conduct another dig at the high school next fall.
Moving forward, Warner says, he would like to have a more formal partnership with the high school. Already, he says, the location of the dig is giving the high-school students a glimpse of a discipline few encounter before college.
Have you found creative ways to include public engagement in a course? What challenges did it entail? What benefits did it bring to your students? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your example may appear in a future newsletter.
