Teaching Statement
1. OVERVIEW AND APPROACH
This course package is presented in a format that is intended to be useful for any potential instructors of the course. It is for an introductory archaeology class offered in the University of South Florida (USF) Department of Anthropology. It is aimed at the college sophomore or junior, anthropology major and non-major alike; it also attracts first and fourth-year students.
The course is structured to include two basic areas of knowledge:
(1) Archaeology’s history, methods, theories, philosophies, and social context; and
(2) World prehistory and early history, emphasizing famous sites and important human systems and processes, such as the origins of culture, food production, and civilization.
Many anthropology departments, or even different instructors in the same department, break down these two into separate courses; this can also be done with the two sections described here. Two textbooks are used, one covering each half of the course.
At USF we are committed to the philosophy that anthropology must be both a scholarly pursuit and an applied, real-world discipline. This includes the perspective that all archaeology is public archaeology in some way or/and another. Thus the SAA effort to redesign the archaeology curriculum is a good fit for what we already aim to bring to the undergraduate in general and specifically for this course, which is usually the first time the student experiences archaeology.
This package presents the course explicitly redesigned to incorporate the SAA’s Seven Principles guiding the MATRIX project:
(1) BASIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL SKILLS: how to locate, record, investigate, analyze, and interpret archaeological sites; where and how they are carried out, from public to private institutions, from academia and research arenas to the government and business worlds.
(2) COMMUNICATION SKILLS: written, oral, visual, and interactive; to understand and tell the story of the past well and creatively.
(3) PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND VALUES in archaeology: skills, honesty, responsibility to science and to the many different publics.
(4) DIVERSE INTERESTS IN THE PAST: different people’s associations with prehistory and history, including scholars, scientists, landowners and managers, descendent groups, schoolchildren, avocational archaeologists, political factions, and the general public.
(5) STEWARDSHIP: preserving nonrenewable cultural resources through policy, law, public education and action, and private effort.
(6) SOCIAL RELEVANCE: connections of past human systems and adaptations with today’s world, including social/cultural identity, environments and ecosystems, and even technological connections.
(7) REAL-WORLD PROBLEM SOLVING: practical application of knowledge from the human past applied to any kind of situation, from natural resource overexploitation to socioeconomic inequality to garbage disposal.
Luckily, most textbooks now have some material on most or all of these. Often it is stuck all into one chapter, however, instead of integrated throughout. This package, not a radical revision of the basics, adds explicit examples of how to add in the principles in the syllabus, lectures, classroom activities, assignments, and field trips.
Since this is usually the first course in archaeology a student takes, and usually the only one as well, it is designed to be very broad and somewhat superficial. As a diner would do at a large buffet table, both instructor and students can decide whether to sample a tiny bit of everything to at least know what is available, or to concentrate on fewer, more doable, desirable, or appropriate aspects. Whatever choices are made, for this course all seven of the MATRIX principles are incorporated as often as possible into all the course components.
3. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT AND INTENT
The course typically has 50 students in a classroom now equipped with a computer, projector, videotape player, and document camera (all of which go a long way toward improving teaching and learning opportunities). At least half the students have never before had any anthropology, and few know what archaeology encompasses; usually about a third think it means dinosaurs. There are no prerequisites. Students often take the course thinking it sounds like a fun or easy class, so it is important to make them aware right away of the instructor’s high expectations.
Research on how college students learn and retain information, skills, and critical thinking abilities indicates that the scenario in which the instructor lectures and the students sit and listen is the one in which students learn the least. Aspects of a course that encourage, even provoke students to learn more/better include discussion in the classroom; hands-on active exercises; group projects (social learning); assignments in which they can include their own opinions, personal experiences, evaluations, and interpretations; and research assignments beyond reading the texts. The last include activities out in the community or with an electronic context, from Internet exercises to Web discussion groups.
There is much good literature on how to improve teaching and design courses to help students learn better (e.g., for your consideration, Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; especially January and February 1996 issues). Nearly every institution of higher learning has some kind of center for teaching enhancement, and increasingly there are various summaries of tips for good teachers, such as arriving 5-10 minutes early for class to show you are interested in students, planning lessons well but not being afraid to stray from them, and continually interacting with teaching colleagues to learn new stuff (e.g., Hipple and McClam 2002). Another important practice is to have high expectations for your students and make them aware of this; some will always live up to those expectations (e.g., Bérubé 2001).
This course design package includes some of these learning techniques, as well as suggestions for how to include the Seven Principles in the more traditional lecture format and expand it with class discussions and exercises. It is not meant to add more work to the instructor’s load, but to offer suggestions for (perhaps gradually) incorporating new ideas not only on what to teach but how to teach it in archaeology. Instructors are invited to use the entire package or pick and choose whatever is useful to add to their existing course outlines. Individual course modules, which include lecture notes and ideas, are developed based on the specific texts noted. They can be used as described or altered to fit any other such introductory texts and to design specific learning sessions. Individual instructors will also need to estimate time constraints for each teaching module in terms of their own styles, conditions, and added materials.
Evaluation of the course and the student’s learning experience is also usually specific to the institution or the instructor; nonetheless, some student evaluation can be included in several of the student exercise assignments.
The principle of incorporating good communications skills is operational in all course activities, exams, and papers, as well as written and oral exercises and assignments. Instructors need to ask for clear writing, good organization, logical presentation, and no grammatical or spelling errors. Students should be told that proofreading or review of oral presentations is expected and preferably should include a second proofing/review of a practice presentation by someone else. Furthermore, it should be clear that the course (and any college course) is intended to foster critical thinking skills, which are demonstrated by the student in various kinds of ways.
Before beginning the MATRIX project, I had been gradually developing the course over many years to depart slightly from the traditional by incorporating two specific aspects: more public archaeology and more active learning and creative assignments. Some of this came easily, for example with the call for students to discuss materials in every class, including current archaeology news articles and the political discussions and controversies they included, or with the growing visibility of archaeology done in the path of construction, or with the popular images of archaeology in entertainment media. Other ideas came from colleagues who had used various kinds of exercises in the classroom and gotten good responses.
Working to redesign the course in the MATRIX context produced three major results incorporated in this package: even more emphasis upon the Seven Principles, more ideas for class projects and other learning activities obtained from the other course designers and reviewers, and pedagogical insights and organizational ideas obtained from the educational specialists also reviewing the work. In addition, because USF just began utilizing the BlackBoard system for course organization, I was able to have an electronic forum for the whole class as well as the physical classroom.
Reflections upon completing the semester of teaching the redesigned course are now possible, though based on only this first time. The successful aspects were greater student enthusiasm and active learning, and a much higher awareness by the students of how archaeology can indeed affect their own specific lives, how meaningful or relevant it might actually be. This is great because probably none of the students will go on to become professional archaeologists, but they will be the developers, legislators, consumers, and taxpayers of the future (not to mention potential donors to archaeological projects!).
The neutral aspects of the course proved to be the student evaluations, of both course and instructor, which turned out about the same as usual, and the electronic BlackBoard system, which was useful but not necessarily considered worthwhile by a majority of the students.
Constraints and unsuccessful aspects also became clear. The increased reliance on technological assistance meant that a breakdown in its efficiency had to be prepared for, which might be considered extra work (if the overhead camera is broken, passing around the color pictures of sites or pots is just not the same). More serious is that the extra time to do so many class and outside activities is just not there, so both instructor and students must choose carefully and not overdo this at the expense of the core learning. The one activity that proves most valuable is extensive class discussion of the required reading, relating it to the Seven Principles and everything else; this gets the student actively involved. The only caution here is that this might end up being discriminatory in favor of students who are not shy or inhibited about speaking up in class. Therefore, other ways of doing class participation can be bringing in or posting archaeology news articles, answering questions in class when called upon, and participating in electronic discussion on the BlackBoard system.
Reflections upon completing the two MATRIX workshops and receiving formal and informal reviews of this course package from diverse archaeologists and education professionals are also useful (and I am very pleased to have obtained such great feedback!). As mentioned, there were more ideas for special activities, which have been incorporated herein. There were also suggestions to include this or that more specific item (a module on fantastic archaeology, a class on how archaeologists use statistics, more Web-based classes, larger bibliography, etc.). It is clear that a syllabus, indeed an entire course, is more malleable than we think, and also very much able to be personalized to suit not only the individual instructor and teaching circumstances, but also the changing character of the students, the technology, and the college environment. Therefore, my hope is that this course design package is flexible enough to be utilized in any way instructors may choose. Whether it generates one new idea for five minutes of one class, or whether it is lifted whole and complete without change for the entire course, it will have served its purpose. We may be professors as graying as our lecture notes or new instructors fresh to the world of teaching, but we do not want to stand still. Because archaeology is never old (!), but constantly fresh with new discovery and interpretation, we need to adapt every time we help students learn about it.