Rosemary Joyce - Presentation
(862) I'm going to preface what I'm doing with a couple of remarks but the first and most important piece of context is that I take the word workshop very (literally), so you are going to be doing things. And I think that's important from my perspective because what we do as we teach, we ask students, well I think ideally, we ask students to do various things. One of the few things that I could think of that may be an authentic (???) participant (???) so may be I have some things to tell you that I've done that might be useful models or things that you could steal because all of my best ideas are stolen from someone else. Only these teaching ideas! Ok, and I could also probably say I'm not a morning person so, there is a little bit of roughness around the edges. (That's what's happening) but I was happy to go this morning because I've been thinking (???) things that I'd like to say.
The first thing that I wanted to actually say is that we were charged--Lynne Sebastian and I are actually this morning and we are going to do it as a tag-team--; and we were charged with the sort of general public appreciation of the archaeology area which I think that probably all of us will be focusing on in one way or another. But that then caused me some soul searching: what exactly was it that I would think was important there. And I came up with three goals that if I were to boil down that I would like students to leave an archaeology course of any kind with some less certainty it would be first about the stereotype of the archaeologist. So, Indiana Jones has done us a lot of good, but he has also done us a lot of bad. And Indiana Jones is nothing compared to Lara Croft.
The second thing that, in terms of public appreciation, I want students to leave with some appreciation of is stakeholder diversity. I think this one for me, in terms of the principles that we are trying to explore here, is probably the one that, I think, is going to (???) through everything I say, the importance of (???) some idea of stakeholder diversity out there.
And the third is, that archaeology is multi-sited. I'm going to (???) from the perspective of an archaeologist who has engaged for a lot of my career in museum work. For those of you over here this might be a little bit harder. I am going to give Erin all of this to post in the web site as an outline, it's not (???) anyway.
So, these were the three goals that I came up with, that I really wanted to address. First of all that I would want to address in teaching and that I would want to address today. That we are dealing with a stereotype of archaeologists in terms of a greater culture that we are a minuscule of that (???). And, if we don't explicitly try to get reflect from (???) they are going to leave our classes with the same ideas they came in with them. The second is the stakeholder diversity issue, and I think that one is particularly important because as the SAA principles made clear (???) as a discipline and it's caused us problems, the fact that we have consistently tended to represent the position of the practicing archaeologist as somehow a privileged position where we know more than you do and therefore that's the reason that you should trust us on underwater archaeology, on looting, and most (???) of course in terms of repatriation and the discussions and debates around repatriation.
But, I'm a Latin Americanist. I work in Central America. So, for me, stakeholder diversity as I'll see at the end of this thing is something that is a lot more complex than I think (even) that, those sorts of (???) issues that we've dealt with in the SAA brings up. And I think that we are doing a real disservice to our students to the extent that we don't make this central. And finally the multi-sited nature; if we could get students to leave the classroom understanding that archaeology takes place in many places other than the classroom, then I think we'd be along the way towards what Anne was articulating having the population that understands that archaeology is something that's a useful tool in many different ways. And since, as far as I know, consistently we are finding that the proportion of employment in archaeology is outside the academy, I think the majority is outside now? It makes no sense to continue to act as if the majority of archaeology is not. So, this is…I was trying to track this down, cause I wanted to see what percentage (???).
Ok, I also have basically four concepts that I wanted to (have this sort of explicate). But some of them are in the little background reading that you did get and you (1217) didn't have to read before hand but if any of these concepts seem to be inadequately justified, that's where you are going to find the justification for the (???). The fourth one you can't find the justification (???) and I will explain you why.
The first of these concepts is a contrast between exploratory and constructive. Exploratory and constructive…the reading that I've given you is actually by Michael Joyce who is a theorist of hypermedia/hypertexts--happens to be my brother, but that's just convenient. The exploratory-constructive contrast is one between--in hypermedia--, is one between those environments that you can go into, and run around and maybe can do a lot of things but you essentially don't affect what you are doing, you don't affect the environment. So, a lot of our teaching actually invites students into essentially explore. Most of the psychological research I'm learning, which I'm currently in contact with (???) learning, emphasizes that learning sticks longer, that it lasts longer even if immediately we don't see the (???) returns, if instead it's constructed, if it's generative, if you do something. And so, constructive hypertexts are the ones where you actually build things yourself, you create the environment, you don't just manipulate the environment. And so all those simulation games--you know, Civilization--, those are interesting places to think about exploratory-constructive. I have to keep reminding myself that Jeanne and Ruth are going to introduce you to all of these wonderful things. But I am going to steal this concept in order to think about teaching in general. So there's concept number one and the original article by Michael is in your packet of readings. The second pair of concepts actually are the conservation of knowledge. The conservation of knowledge, the conservation of energy, and minutiae and these come from a museum (???) from an ethnography done by Constance (Teran) at the (???). And again that reading should also be in your packet. What she did for us is a lot of research in museum studies. And a lot of interesting things in that research goes (???) museum context that might be transferable to our actual teaching activities. But the reason I take these two is that with (???) she's an ethnographer, she's not primarily…her dissertation and research is not primarily museum based. But this particular piece of research…she did ethnographic research on museum visitor experience. And what she found were a lot of very interesting things, all of them have some implications for us as practitioners. But one important thing she found is that people (???) they come to any new representation, let's say of the past, with an already in place schema of what they know. And that they exercise efforts to conserve what they already think they know. So they (???) more contradictors and be more intuitive to those things that confirm the schema that they come with. This is the contradiction of knowledge. Of course, the implication for all of us as teachers, specially those of us as teachers who think that the neat thing we're doing as we're making them read 280 pieces of writing and how many times have we done that and the right PSA in which they (???) they (???) both true. And they cannot all be true. And then you go through the whole thing and they're fine with that, because this part of this one seemed true and this part of this one seemed true and they're not looking at the whole thing. That's the contradiction of knowledge. And we have to take that into account (???). The other thing that she found though I find actually comforting as opposed to conservation of knowledge that I find trouble in (???) all sorts of place is that one of the ways that people engage with exhibits, you know we have big museum exhibits that have this thematic coherence and they tell a story and there is a narrative. And of course that's not a (???) possible to force people to reproduce. They reproduce it very badly, people don't actually go through museum exhibits in the direction that we think that they should. I myself always go backwards, I am left-handed, so left way is the bad way, so the whole thing is backwards. And I'm not alone, I think! Minutiae: what she found was that…the way that her subjects consistently related to exhibits was that they found some compelling small piece that designated with their own experience. And what that piece, then is going to vary from person to person. And that that's what they took away and remembered, and that they remembered essentially accurately. (1541) They would…one of her examples with her subjects was, some from the Midwest, who had done woodworking themselves, visiting an exhibit about Japanese culture. It had a part that was about Japanese woodworking, and that part had some (r???) and therefore, it's minutiae were recalled. I think that's really great for us as archaeologists because I know that all of us (???) things. We like all those particulars, and sometimes in teaching we feel this tension between the degree to which talk about the particulars seems to get in the way of the big story, well maybe the particulars are the big story (???) take a break.
And the third point is actually their concept--these are my concepts--and yes they come in threes cause I am (???) European. So, the third concept actually is just there to structure because it's just a replication, in some ways, of the explorative-constructive. But, as I said, I'm currently in a context while I'm on leave, where most of the people around me are psychologists. And, initially they had frightened me because I'm an anthropologist, and these were (???) psychologists, as they claimed that they could understand how people work, and we know that people work (???) understand it. (???) nice people, and they've allowed me to assist in their little story telling sessions, and a bunch of them are interested in cognitive basis of learning, what happens actually in terms of processing information. And they do define (???) it's the retention of particular items over long periods of time, so, you know, we are not, I don't know how transferable this is; how often is that your real measure of success. If people remember (???) faces, I mean, that's nice but I'd feel like I was a failure if it's only (???) remember, or got out of things. But there are some interesting (???) for our enterprise. On of the things that they have replicated over and over again is that doing even very simple things to create the item you are trying to recall helps improve recalling. For example, they'll give people a list of words and they are supposed to recall those words and then they give another big long list they are supposed to say is that one of the words? If the list includes the words fully spelled out, retention is lower than if the list includes the words with blanks. So, we are supposed to remember (???) which gave us (???) blank (???). (???) you have to fill in the blanks! (???) measurably increases your ability to retain things, even a stupid (???) just like that. And this I think just comes (???) reinforces that this explorative-constructive thing is not just a preference of a practitioner but it actually reflects something about learning, that making something happen, that doing something actually creates a more enduring kind of knowledge. But as a whole bunch of other things that they've been saying that are really very interesting…in one of these talks a political scientist (???) to stand and said: - so what you are telling us that we got a choice between being good teachers and getting bad reviews or being bad teachers and getting good reviews. I'd be happy to talk about that later, I think we are going to talk evaluations, because the psychologist in question whose name is Bob (Bjork) by the way…and writes lovely wonderful things that even I can understand and I really am afraid of psychologists. I think that there is an issue in terms of the reward structure. What is being rewarded by the kinds of evaluation that we currently do is probably not long term learning but short term (???). And we can influence that (1775). You don't get to change the forms your university uses, you can actually try to increase the kinds of evaluation and feedback so that by the time students get to those horrible forms where they are supposed to rate you on (???) use of blackboard, and I just got (???). Hopefully, they will in (fact) know that that's not the best way to rate you and we already had influenced their understanding that they've learned something. So that was supposed to be fifteen minutes and I'm still on, ok.
So, the whole point, for me, of teaching and learmning is doing things. So what worked on was creating a bunch of things that we could do together. Most of them…well, actually all of them are based on things I do with students. And I hope that all of them have some potential application to a wide variety of courses, which is in some cases why I have done things like (black) things out. But the first thing we are going to do is we are going to do this one as a group and this is going to be easy to do. I (???) don't tell the students that, they think that's horrible. We divide the class into small groups, I won't do that to you because we don't have enough diversity of knowledge…I'm hoping (???) fairly uniform set of responses to this. But when you divide a class into small groups one of the things that does--I've done this by the way without dividing the class into small groups with as many as 270 students, so you don't have to divide it into small groups if that's pragmatically not possible…if you do it, why is it better? Because with 270 students, everybody thinks someone else is going to respond. So, you'll have 225 students who don't talk. Or if you are really unlucky 265 who don't talk. So, dividing the class into small groups…how do you do it with a big lecture class? Well obviously you say: - row 1 you are in group one, and you just stand there and sort of shout at each other. It works real well actually! Again, this is the doing part.
All right, the first very large course that I taught using (???) at Berkeley was 270 instead of the projected 60 students. And it was…I was (???) for six (???) never done that before. And the very first weeks there were students like reading newspapers, and things, and I thought: - this is horrible, I've got to somehow get them working or else I'm just (???). So, I started doing these things and luckily I had the support of a very good teaching and learning center to help figure out how to do things. So you ask each group to define a core concept, such as archaeology…I (???) also do this in a museum studies class (???) so I do different things there…In terms of the activities, what do you do…that you'd expect a practitioner to do? And the places you would expect to find one, so where are archaeologists? And what I found was that in terms of places, well I should (???) and see what happens…the places and activities and then each small group is asked to come up with the widest range of activities, so it's a game, a competition. And then the groups present the results of their brainstorming to the class as a whole. Turn taking insures that one group doesn't dominate, in other words, each group gets to say one thing, and then the other groups have to say something. And the facilitator, groups the responses together to demonstrate how they cluster together, so you write them up on the board as they come in. And this means that you got to be either be really prepared to (???) something completely unexpected that comes in, or you got to be nice and honest about it and say: - I've never heard that before; gee, that's interesting, I don't know where to put that. How you group things is really up to you, the main thing is to show that there are these clusters of conceptual ideas among people who, in an introductory archaeology course don't think that they know anything, but they come to the course…already knowing what archaeology is as part of a culture, even they (???). And that already existing knowledge they are going to try to conserve despite anything you say, so if you tell them archaeologists do not primarily work in universities, and you're in a university, you are underwriting their already existing knowledge. And if you tell them that archaeologists increasingly don't have to work in excavations, or if you tell them that much archaeology takes place in the lab, but you show them only slides of course of excavations as what is archaeology, you are going to have a hard (???) to change anything, you won't necessarily see that you are not changing it.
I should say not only are the best of my ideas things I've stolen from people, but all bad examples are things I've done. So let's just try this, without the type of brainstorming we probably all have a set of concepts of what an archaeologist does, and where you find one. So, does anybody have one? What does an archaeologist do? Joe?
Joe Schuldenrein: Shuffles papers.
Rosemary: No, this is great, because this is where you head to…the end of your task as facilitator, what your job is to fill in the things that people haven't said. (2093) And doing administrative work is the one that almost always I end up (???) student that says anything about administration or (???) and writing. (???) we are not used to talking about administration we are talking about (???) task of writing. They don't think of it as something that's really (???) what you do is you go out and (???). (2120)
Male Speaker (???) - I took my kids to see the first Indiana Jones movie about twenty years ago (???). When they came out, one of my daughters said: boy that was better than I thought it was going to be, and my son who was 5 at the time said: yeah, when dad said it was about an archaeologist I thought it was just a guy in his office reading books.
Rosemary: This is so wonderful, this is so wonderful.
Anne Pyburn: Attends conferences.
Rosemary: Attends concerences. These are all the things nobody has ever said. Our students (???)
(???) Answers e-mail.
Rosemary: Answers e-mail, this is wonderful. We have to keep this, we have to trancribe this.
Glen (???): Obviously, prepares budgets.
Rosemary: Prepares budgets! That's one actually that considering how much time I've spent writing grants
Ruth: Not only preparing, but accounting…
Glen (???) Yes. Or trying to figure out were the money went...
(???) Payroll.
Ruth: (???)
Rosemary: Now, these are of course the things that the students don't say.
Lynne Sebastian: I once was working at a mine project, and the security guard came out to check us out, and was telling us about some looters that he had found, and before he said ‘I knew it wasn't any of you because they didn't have any strings'. Strings, square holes and pin flags.
Rosemary: Square holes actually comes at the (???), one way or another, either as a place or a thing, you lay out a grid.
(2237) (???) I have lots of ways of discouraging students, knowing their enthusiasm, (???) that archaeology is mostly bookkeeping, putting numbers on things, entering stuff in the computer, keeping track of hundreds of thousands of old pieces and stuff.
Rosemary: Yes, of data. And yes, this is revelatory for students because they think that the things we find are the data, so, one of the things that's very difficult is getting them to understand that the data are these complex sets of observations that we report all sorts of different ways. And there are also of course these whole fields of practitioners who are invisible to the average students (???) archaeologists. So…
(???): Investigates crime.
Rosemary: Investigates crime, that's great. Now, this one is really wonderful because, I don't know whether this is a specifically Berkeley thing, or whether it's happening all over the country, but increasingly I have students interested in Forensic, that's they know that's something they want to do, they come knowing, they heard, (???). And (???)
Joe Watkins: (???) through the Discovery Channel.
Rosemary: Yes, yes.
Glenn (???): (???) you would think the primary thing archaeologists do.
Rosemary: This is one of the things to know about the media, the distributing of A&E and so on, is that they run in cycles, and the reason they run in cycles is because of business, they syndicate chunks of things, they pay the rental fee (???), they run it to death. But that does affect our students. There is a group of students who are intensively Mayanist because that's what we're showing over and over again. (It's not a bad thing!).
Liz: Gives tours!
Rosemary: Gives tours.
(???): Teaches.
Rosemary: Teaches. And, again, so far (???) gotten to anything, and I'm going to actually…
(???): (???) obviously (???) digging a hole…they excavate, they collect.
Rosemary: Yes, but the purpose for doing this here in this room is precisely because these are (???) probably a large part of all our professional lives. But when you give this to a group of students, what you get is ‘digs holes' ‘digs', or ‘just digs'…‘finds treasure'. Still comes up with astonishing, either because people know (???) it is what they think. What doesn't come up, what comes up is places, the place of activity, are country names, Egypt, Mexico, physical places, so then I get to say Ok, great, but what about the museum, the lab, the archive? And that's what this work says, it's a way to…their concepts in our concepts, and I must admit that I've never even gotten this detailed, just all you have to do is (???) a few of these; as (???) and other activities of archaeology, as you've begun to address stereotypes of what archaeology is. Now, I don't want to minimize this, which is why I (???) conservation of knowledge. This is not going to change anybody's (???) knowledge. What it may do for a small minority of people is make them more aware of other kinds of things. (???), we are consistent about using these other activities and stasis in our examples, throughout our teaching. Then eventually we will begin to build up some thing that is harder for them to avoid. I think you're still going to have a certain number of people, especially large classes that will avoid it, but at least you tried. And, what this…it begins to address is the stereotypes of archaeologists. These are verbal (???), they are verbal images. (2490) What's just come up, and what of course comes up implicitly when you say ‘Indiana Jones' is in fact that most of the stereotypes actually come from somewhere else. The most powerful stereotypes are probably not these ones in words. They're the ones in images. The ones in images sure, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft they are really problematic for us, that we know that (???) to address, because you can say ‘this is a total complete misrepresentation because of this, and this, and that…', the only part that's real is the part in the classroom…is that the Indiana Jones movie? That's like a real archaeologist's life.
Ruth: Nobody writes ‘love you' on their eye! I've been looking for years.
Rosemary: The other thing about this to keep in mind is that the powerful visual images are not just as those ones but in fact things that are presented as documentary resources. They are probably our worst problem, is what is on Discovery Channel, on Arts and Education Channel…and if you don't keep up with them regularly, you are doomed to be caught (???). Because things aren't necessarily said (???). And the other source, mainly source of visual stereotypes is our own representations of archaeology, and I can (???) a moment when I was thinking about this very talk, I taught an ‘Intro to Archaeology' last fall. The first time since I was in Illinois as a graduate student, which was a long time ago, and I used my own slide collection, which was very large, I used lots of slides of archaeology practice, and not a single one of them was not in the field. There were survey slides, as well as excavation slides (???). There were no slides of tables with piles of broken pottery, and pieces of paper, there was nothing like that. So, if we don't provide those other images, then we have (???) anything to under (???) the visual agenda.
Ok, so, number one thing then is, building on those principles at the beginning, is to try to do things where students have to generate, they have to come up with it themselves. Do it in such a way that from the very beginning you're trying to sort of confront the stereotype, realizing that the stereotype is something that they will have strong investment to conserving. But that you are the only chance of changing that stereotype, and in my experience it's effective for a certain number of students, and that's all I can really hope for is that it reaches a certain number of students.
So, going on with the same general mind, a second exercise that I view (???) is the ‘stakeholders exercise'. And I've done this now in basically every kind of class that I teach, I teach ‘museum studies' classes as well as ‘introduction to archaeology' and the basic approach again says ‘the media are rarely getting their messages, let's go out and confront the media.' And the basic assignment, very flexible…find one media representation of archaeology. You can say in some particular media, but if you really want to make them read a newspaper, tell them to look in the newspaper, and usually if you're lucky there will be something really to archaeology in the newspaper within a reasonable amount of time. I find increasingly if I don't tell them the specific media that they go to the web. And as a result, I am very glad that we are going to have a long discussion of this, because we need to think about their literacy in terms of the media. In particular, if you've ever done this kind of thing, students have no idea what the source of information on the web is. They don't even do what we (???) do, in understand that ‘dot edu' means at least an educational institution, and ‘dot com' doesn't. So, one of the things that I found is helpful even if it seems like it's completely off target in terms of your educational goals is to have an explicit discussion (not in advance of the test, in advance of the test it doesn't work because somebody hasn't done the work). But (???) a freshman seminar museum exhibit course and once if you're supposed to find a museum as an interview, and one student brought back one that was actually from a personal web site of somebody who is a student at the university. And I said: now, where does this come from? And (???) its ‘edu'. Ok, but, who is this person? Why should you trust their opinion? The student looked startled at me. And I said, well, let's just figure this out. This means that this is actually a student who went through the html and we figured out what this person was, and how he could go about finding out resources. At the end of it she said: ‘ So do you mean that this could be something like me?'.
So, it helps to go through those things and actually they show them that the web actually has sources as much as any other medium. So, find me a representation of archaeology (and museums (???) routinely in non-museum courses suggest that students go out and visit museums). I think that it's good for them to understand that archaeology takes place at multiple sites, specially museums. And identify at least two stakeholders. The goal there obviously is (???) the diversity or multiplicity of stakeholders. (???) for every archaeological issue, even if you don't see it right away, there's going to be more than one. And, this by itself is hard, it's really hard, to do at first, but it's transformative. It can really change the way students think about archaeology (???). The problem we really have in terms of getting the proper public to be supportive of archaeology (not that they are not supportive, they are neutral as far as I can tell). Except that (???)% of the people I meet that find out that I am an archaeologist say (???) right? A microbiologist at Washington University that I met on this plane said the same thing. And, actually, the second thing is that if you are an archaeologist, I haven't seen you on the Discovery Channel.
So, identify at least two stakeholders. And then, for me the important thing is to follow up by asking them to identify whether either of those stakeholders or in any way this medium representation shows explicit involvement by archaeologists. And if so, how is it? Is there an archaeologist named and given a place? And again, this helps with the multiple siteness, because a lot of the archaeologists names are going to be non-academics. They are going to see them as from consulting firms, as from government entities, and begin to actually see that archaeologists are in a lot more places.
And then the hard one, how are professional archaeologists represented? Without the Indiana Jones stereotype, what are the archaeologists doing? This one often takes a lot more work to get people to focus on, usually they come there with less well developed things, I should say with all of the assignments that I do, repeatedly, students are promised the opportunity to re-submit, if their first version is not (???). So that routinely, I get power (???) which is how I motivate them. The first time does. And I also routinely do something (???) or easy-grading. It's all or nothing. It's worth 10 points; you get all 10 points or no points. And that structure works very well (???) transparent, students can understand the contract. Really, no, this is important, right?
So, the purpose of that is, again, to show that you can have the same principles at work in approaching different times of forms of stereotyping. Here, attempting to the (???) visual or media stereotyping from archaeology's practice, but also of how archaeological knowledge exists that it's not singular presented by just some archaeologist towards Egypt. And for you to make them actually be more critical of the fact that everything they see said about archaeology or about the material archaeologists discuss has a source. Whether this source is cited or not. And then you can hopefully begin to get them to see that when the source isn't cited, they're being cheated. That it could be even just be somebody just like me. And that make (???) way in case of more reflective undergraduates, at least makes them suspicious consumers of popular culture. And that would be a very good thing, I think. I should have said at the beginning that if anybody wants to say anything that you can. There is going to be time at the end of this presentation for discussion as well. Yes?
Bill Lipe (???): Can you give us an example of the kind of stakeholders that students identified in this exercise?
Rosemary: Usually they can come up with two kinds of stakeholders: archaeologists (they get that) and whatever cultural group is the descendent group of the particular image. That also means that they tend to come up with more restricted sets of media representations of archaeology. If they can't see a descendent group, essentially, so you get a lot of Kennewick Men, for one thing that's pervasive over the Internet. You get a certain number of African-American sites, where I am, you get a lot of sites that are Maya archaeology, that my Latino students do recognize themselves as stakeholders in them, very much so; it creates a very interesting classroom experience, because we're mutually constructing our understandings. I tell them where the Aztecs came for as far I'm concerned; they tell me where the Aztecs came from as far as they are concerned. It works out very nicely, because then I can talk about that, that archaeology uses that material base to actually argue for this that it's not there for the interpretation that perhaps it's kind of private. Mainly in archaeology those are the two kinds, and then what I try to do is make them more complex, with other exercises.
With museum courses, people are much better coming up with multiple stakeholders, I don't know why, but they came up with many more stakeholders. They understand that owners of things, owners of objects have a stake; that museum boards exist, depending on what level it is, that you can come up with much more complex structures. But my reading of undergraduates is that they don't understand that all (???) they really don't understand the implication that is that we work for people, that we have to produce reports for people, that our information is used even by national governments, by regional groups, and we have to teach them that. And then when we teach them that, then they can (???). But, this is…
Bill Lipe: (???) core of engineers (???)
Rosemary: No, no, no…I can swear that nobody's ever come up with CRM (???), any entities, even governments they don't come up with. I have to point out that…I use a lot of Mayan examples of obviously my Maya course, but these archaeological sites are in fact cultural resources of the governments. And that tourism is a big industry. I have to actually point those out.
Dean Snow: I was thinking that since two stakeholders are pretty obvious in every one of these cases, then if you said identify at least three…
Rosemary: That would make it…yes, you are right…I've never tried that, I'll try it. I worry about creating a task that actually becomes impossible for them. Because I use it… this is a very beginning exercise. You'll see the multi stakeholder exercise 2 after this. This is just to get them to understand that they can…this is actually the media exercise…get them to understand that they can see this. They can see the stakeholders. (3323)
(???): Do they ever see the medium itself? Whatever it is, do they have the newspaper?
Rosemary: No. And they really should. Which is why in fact I talk about the political economy of the Discovery Channel, and Arts and Entertainment and things like that. We need to do that. We need to explain to them that we're a commodity. Even when they play those video games they don't necessarily see that we're a commodity.
(3349) (???): We usually frame this question in terms of what stakeholders are there other than archaeologists, and how do archaeologists relate to them. We can also look at it by saying where do archaeologists not even occur as stakeholders themselves? Or how are they excluded? And there are lots of examples of that where the discussion is framed by other groups entirely, and it's often that disturbing archaeologists are not included as a stakeholder in this.
Rosemary: You might have two different descending groups, and that's actually why this says: Is there any evidence of archaeologists? Because in fact a lot of the things that they can come up with are mostly that they don't, in my experience, (???).
(???): I can give you a couple of examples. One is a recent article on the Boston Globe talking about the looting of sites in Afghanistan (Rosemary: I saw that!), where the looter was described as a (???) day Indiana Jones.
Rosemary: Yes, the looter was sort of one stakeholder, and then the Afghanis who were shooting and breaking the antiquities where the other stakeholder.
(???): Right, and those were the (???). And the other was in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, where they talk about the latest dealers' exhibitions. And I remember one was specifically talking about ‘well this new area to (???) now the classical artists of tightly controlled and that's (???) art, and you can start seeing it. And then went in this whole discussion of (???) culture and archaeology, and their sources were the dealers, not archaeologists, the dealers who were about to be selling this new hot material.
Rosemary: This is why it's actually worth while to try and force students into the museum, into the (???) medium, because you don't get that concrete interpretation (???) on the web, it's still look very much a print medium representation. And that's really good for them to begin to understand that the circulation of the objects creates one set of (???) that it's sure different from archaeologists who were interested in objects in their contexts.
Ruth: Actually it is on the web.
Rosemary: It is on the web? Where did you find it? E-bay?
Ruth: Also Sotheby's have a web page. I mean other people like Sotheby's.
Rosemary: I know, I know, I've stolen pics from Sotheby's…My husband has been doing a sort of an obsessive chronicle of what (???) from Honduras come up on online auctions. And, at this point we've got this enormous database, which is actually very depressing and also very interesting.
Nancy White: I was just going to say that sometimes the technology of the classroom situation can make more of this stuff possible than since last year our (???) University finally got their act together and made this document camera (???). I can rip out of the morning paper the latest Buddha statue that (???) and stick it under that to project to the whole classroom. But before that, it was necessary to do that by saying ‘I am going to stick this on the bulletin board and you'll all going to have to look at it'. So, but we are moving toward a more passive audience that doesn't have to really do anything to get there. So I don't know if that is necessarily better than making them like you said (???).
Rosemary: What might you think of this is you do…but you got to print that wonderful article on Afghanistan, (???) file even tough I'm not teaching right now because it's perfect, it's so weird on the one level, that this guy is hoping that the U.S. will successfully liberate Mazar el Sharif (???) or whoever keeps (???) treasure there (???), my head is going to explode. But you could do something like that, but you think it's unlikely for your students to come up with, for one reason or another, a model (???) once, you can actually do them work (???) and that's actually not a bad thing to do, because it shows (???) model of what you expect and then it's much easier to do (???).
Here is the activity as I, an expert practitioner, (and that's actually) this book that I've been reading (just this completely in a side, ok?) ‘Situated Learning Legitimate Peripheral Participation' by Jean Levitt, and Dan Winger. It's actually shorter than it looks, because a whole bunch of it that it's an introduction (which you can skip), but you don't have to actually read the book, if I can just point to one thing, one interesting thing they're saying here: legitimate peripheral participation is a concept that they came up with. In studying learning as ongoing activity--and they are very careful to say ‘we're not going to talk about schooling', they are not talking about schooling, they are not talking about teaching, they are talking about learning. And what they argue from apprenticeship (and I think this is applicable to archaeology not just in our formal (???) of fieldwork practice, but in all the things that we're modeling, is that learners are situated in legitimate peripheral positions with respect to those with expertise. It allows you to reconceptualize yourself as a teacher as somebody who is qualitatively different than the beginners because you have (???) expertise, rather than the model of having knowledge according to their head, which isn't worth. You are somebody who knows how to be a practitioner and they are in the business of seeing how to be a practitioner, which for me is an argument that anyone of these things, that I'm talking about, we can do, as an example, because that shows them how to do it. But if that's all we do then we've run into the generation problem, than we're just saying Ok; and here is an example, I'll show you where the stakeholders are, and now you can see that there are 16 different stakeholders and so, from now on you'll understand that archaeology is more complex. That doesn't make it (???), but that considers as a beginning of you as the expert providing the model, than then the legitimate peripheral (???), and they don't (???) but periphery to (???). So you are peripheral in the partial sense. You can do some things, but you have to (???) to all of the things. It's very stimulating little thing, and it's not anywhere near as long as it looks, plus it has huge margins (???). And I'll give that reference to you, because I just found that.
(3768) So, we get to do another activity. This one is one that you might think one would only do in the museums course. This is my biggest, most impassioned appeal for truly present the idea that archaeology is multi-sided. And I would suggest you could do this in any course you teach. (???) label exercise. This is a great exercise because it is those under (???) tips we all have to do. All of that horrible writing and editing, that you do it as a group. They have to do it in threes, and they have to edit it down. I said a hundred words here, you can actually be vicious and say fifty words. Go to a local Museum (???) count how many words are in the labels. Labels need to be (???). And, just making them pick an object, think about the (???) for defining an audience to whom they are trying to communicate and then communicate something; makes them understand more not just about museum curation but about what you do when you (???) everything, it can't make them write professional articles, I don't know about other peoples experiences, but my experience is that long term papers are painful, they (???) that they have to adopt a position and they seldom have a knowledge to adopt a position knowledgeably. So they often will say that: ‘my thesis is…', and then they cite sources which are in fact mutually inconsistent because they (???) the expertise (???) legitimate peripheral. The legitimate peripheral learning (???) were paradigm. One of the examples they use is apprenticeship of West African tailors, where there is a formal apprenticeship, which you go into (???). In the Western African tailoring situation, one of the things that emerges is that the apprentices initially do small finishing tasks, like sew on buttons, because these are the things that are low-risk (???). The sequence of mastery is towards those things which are (???) you do the last things first, and then eventually you do the first things last. The first thing is cutting out cloth (???) if you cut it out wrong, there is nothing you can do about it. That's the step that (???). Legitimate peripheral practice in other words is something that you define a task but it's actually something somebody can do with the ability they have. And I would argue with an exhibit label, not a whole exhibit, but certainly a label is something people can do, and that it's something that you can get people to do in many different ways, and then you get to go in and actually say: Ok, this label in fact doesn't communicate what you think of this. Or you can have them switch labels. (???) one group does a label and other group actually explains who (???). Any clue you can get them to actually work through the (???) is also helpful and encouraging them to generate ideas, asking them critique you generally doesn't work, for lots of reasons. But asking them to critique each other, usually that's an activity, sometimes it's actually very productive. So, this is the one you are going to do. And this one actually works fast if you do it with small groups. But I don't know if you want to do it in small groups. If you want to do it…each of you individually, we can do that, just…yes?
(???): Archaeology are good working in groups.
Rosemary: Yes, it is part of our practice, right? Collaborative work. So, I would say every three people. So, Anne.
(???): So, each table here has 3 of us.
Rosemary: So each table, and Lynne, you can work Ruth. So, what you have to do is just pick an object from any domain. The object physically doesn't have to be here, right? You can write a set of labels in absentia and mention the objects. And you've got 7 minutes to discuss it with your group.
Rosemary: Ok, if you're not all finished it's OK. It is also true to the real editorial practice.
(???): Do we still get our 10 points?
Rosemary: Yes, you can have it unfinished and to even get a second chance to go back and fix it. But the main thing is that this serves as a way to sparks a discussion. And, I don't know…if you're willing to go ahead with yours…I don't know, if Dean and Bill and Lynne would be willing to go ahead?
Lynne: Well, only Bill can read his handwriting!
Group 1 (Dean and Bill and Lynne)
Bill Lipe: The concepts are theirs, the writing is mine. We're trying to figure out a way to adopt a kind of a problem tools as solutions to the problem's approach. So, we came up with something ‘people in culture acts needed sharp tools to use in making baskets and sewing clothing. They did not have metals and found that stone was too brittle and wood was too soft to make good tools. Splatters of deer bone as shown here could easily be shaped into an awl in general purpose piercing tool. (???) wear at the tip of this awl shows that this example was probably use a couple of (???).
Rosemary: Do you have an idea how long that was?
Bill: It's 8 lines, so I figure is under 100 words.
Rosemary: It's probably…it feels a little long, but that's OK, one of the things that Maria and I were just talking about is how short museum labels really can be…
Bill: Well, you said 100 words…
Rosemary: I did, absolutely, absolutely…
Bill: But museum labels are usually a lot shorter.
Rosemary: Museum labels are usually a lot shorter
Bill: If they are as long as this, they usually don't get read.
Rosemary: They don't get…yes, this is what I was talking to Maria about, that the general rule in museums is that you have to keep it short because museum visitors research suggest that the average visitor spends a very short time looking at labels, but what I was also saying to her is there is no such thing as the average museum visitor, which is why you have these problems. I don't look that much (???) labels as a visitor.
Bill: This was 70 words.
Rosemary: That's Ok, so 50 words would have felt right to me. OK, thank you, I needed something to calibrate. That your goal in this was to contextualise this as a tool. Who's the audience? What sort of information are you assuming in the background?
Bill: That they're archaeology (???).
Rosemary: This is one of the things that, when we write we have to think supposedly about our audience but we don't necessarily tell our students that it's part of our (task) is that we write for multiple audiences.
Lynne: I think we were trying to be careful not to use any words people wouldn't know like what is (???), we said, well we better tell people what an (???) it's not part of their (???) we wanted to make the point that why would they just use a piece of metal, it would be easier, you know...
Rosemary: Yes, it's very effective in communicating, but it does, what I'm actually trying to point out (and I hope it doesn't seem like…because I've written tons of labels like this) but what we're doing here, the perspective, the interest is one that assumes already that people are interested in technology in our interests. And a lot of our writing whether it's for our colleagues or for the general public assumes that people already are interested in our perspectives. That's one of our biggest challenges, is to think about that. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but that this label is communicating more to a group like us.
Liz: Actually I think it was a functionalist perspective, and I think that goes down very well with American audiences who are sort of practically minded and you're trying to convince them that people did the best with kind of what they had, that they were very creative, and the reason I say this is because I use a lot of this functionalism very successfully in Intro Anthropology and I think it's kind of a full appreciation of other cultures because it appreciates them in terms of American values which is practicality, inventiveness. But I do think actually that that kind of label is very tailored towards an American audience.
Rosemary: Yes, absolutely. You get to be the next person to go.
Group 2
Liz: Well we did the Starbucks coffee…The audience was my mother, who can't understand why somebody would pay $3 for a cup of coffee. And we didn't finish. So what we've got is, this is a cup that once held overpriced coffee. Starbucks exist because there is a large population in the United States that can afford to pay $3 for a cup of coffee. And they like the taste of dark roasted express coffee and high quality coffee beans. But Starbucks makes the profits, not the coffee producers.
Ruth: Well, that was my addition, but you said your mother would not be interested in that…I also wanted to add that they were ecologically responsible because at least they made it in a paper cup. However, it was really interesting because our little task was that we were writing for Liz's mother. And I kept resisting it, and I said: ‘Is your mother a (???)'. Because I wanted to point out that Starbucks is actually the big monster in terms of exploitation of the actual coffee pickers. (Rosemary: this is very good!) And the producers…and that there are other coffees…goof quality coffee makers or distributors in the United States who are more responsible towards their coffee pickers, however she said that quite rightly her mother couldn't care less about that. What her mother was more interested in would be the fact that there are yuppies in there, and you wanted to express the yuppiness of Starbucks. And I was trying to kind of (Liz: address the yuppies)…I was addressing the yuppies and I was really resisting addressing her mother, and I don't know why. Because I thought it was more interesting because I couldn't get beyond myself.
Rosemary: But this actually one of the big things that doing this as an exercise with a group of students does is, although our student population is probably more homogeneous than we would like, you will nonetheless get exactly these kinds of differences of emphasis. And to give you an actual, for instance, the course that I taught that ended up in the (???) exhibit, I taught a Museum Exhibit Design Course with undergraduates and we designed an archaeological interpretive center for the site of (???) in Bolivia which Christine Hastorf worked at and it has in fact been in (???). The class did real work in trying to come up with how to present the archaeological material to the local indigenous population that had been the labor force and that were the descendent population, and what should be being the communicated. And one of the hardest things was that they very early on developed two different agendas among the students. There were the students who wanted to explain archaeology as a process. And that was clearly one of the things that this exhibit had to do, and in fact at the end what it does do, and who were bothered when the other students wanted to basically re-position the archaeology as the cultural heritage of the group. And they found these intentions to be totally incompatible, because there was this really short text that they had to write. And if they went for option A, they couldn't do option B. And that came down at some points to real inabilities to work together to having to actually reshuffle people, and in the end I should say that none of the actual student texts ended up intact in the exhibit. It was an exercise and while they did lots of wonderful and good things, they just simply never could resolve the idea of who the actual audience was.
Ruth: Well, on the other hand the way you could have resolved it, would be to not resolve it. To actually to explicitly not resolve it and say that there are all these multiple voices, these multiple positions. And to say: ‘Have multiple labels'.
Rosemary: Yes, and this is actually, of course, a major museum issue in the contemporary world, so that wasn't a bad thing that there were multiple perspectives or multiple voices going on. Just in the actual workshop environment of the course, the students were not satisfied with that, they wanted the exhibit (does it sound surprising?) to speak with a unified voice. It's going to be hard to actually change students' idea of what an adequate scholarly product is, and if it's a scholarly product because it's a single point of view and tells you the truth.
Bill Lipe (???): Multiple labels at some points those (???) their own way too, because it's too complicated for people to (???)
Rosemary: There is…basically an enormous museum literature, which I won't anticipate, I don't know whether we will talk explicitly about museums in this thing…but, actually doing this can be completely horrible, and there are lots of wonderful horrible examples. The exercise of writing the exhibit labels shouldn't be confused with the exercise of trying to design a whole exhibit. And trying to design a whole exhibit, one of the reasons that in the end the student product wasn't the thing that went in, was because it wasn't one semester wasn't enough to attain the mastery of the concepts. And they knew that from the beginning, so it was cool. They were getting an introduction through working on a real thing and that's a (???) now that they know this legitimate peripheral participation thing, I think that's what they were doing. I just didn't have any vocabulary for it. So…do we have another volunteer?
Group 3
Susan Lerner: This family duck was donated by the (???) family from a (???). It is constructed of locally available bamboo. This item is commonly used for food presentation and for serving. Reflects the importance of ducks in everyday life. It's a recycled object…
Rosemary: Who is your audience?
Susan Lerner: General public.
Rosemary: And, if I can ask, the decision to put in the name of the donor…was there some discussion about that?
(???): We live on campus…
Rosemary: That difference is an important difference both to us as practitioners and to our visitors. And those are the kinds of decisions that we often do make, that sort of provenience trail. Or provenance. It's a very standard thing to put in museums labels and often in an unquestioned way when you actually do start questioning in, it becomes clear that this is often a factor of reasonable importance to put in. That this was excavated, this was bought. Those are two different positionings of the material and at least in my experience it's very important to teach students that that makes (???) difference to what we can say about the things. The things that are bought aren't useless, Art museums worldwide prove that they are not useless, but they are not useful for what we want to do, in the same way.
???: (???) the legitimacy of how the museum (???)
Rosemary: Yes, that would be nice to think that museums were worried about this…many museums of course are worried about that. But more often I think that putting the names in this is actually an explicit way of saying: ‘This thing is connected to a donor, etc.' Whereas what they're doing is actually more an archaeological thing to do. Where does this come from? How does this come from? Liz and company…if you want to do yours…
Group 4 (Liz, Sept, and Joe)
Joe Watkins: It's for a 5th grade reading level general audience of natural history museum (???). Humans have different ways to making themselves more attractive to others. Ears spools have been worn for centuries. This one is made blue plastic, what does it have in common with other jewelry in the case? How is it different? What are other ways of decorating our bodies?
Rosemary: The use of the questions…can I get you to comment specifically on the utility of putting questions in an exhibit label?
Liz: Yes (???)…I think that was trying to go for the gender (???) as possible get an (???) glass and they can't touch it…
Joe Watkins: (???)
Rosemary: In fact even for non-5th graders that it's a very simple way to extend a short text and move it out. It goes too with that basic teaching that we all use which is asking questions. But maybe even in their professional writing we can do more of that, right? The thing that actually signals that there might be an unknown…and actually also, even if you think along (???) of your professional writing says, explains to why there was this piece of writing, because it just comes (???) as an attempt to answer a question that you yourself have generated. And it's a neat technique. I tend to overuse it in museum labels, so I act as: ‘why is this thing like this?', because that's how I think of exhibit labels…why is this thing like this…because that's how I think of exhibit labels, which goes back to why I don't read all the exhibit labels, because I think of them as all answers to little questions.
Liz: I think it also particularly for our (???) of the context of the natural history museum, where there is such a legacy of (???) objects, that it helps you (???) especially when you (???) don't know.
Rosemary: It opens it out.
Liz: Yes, there is meaning to this object, but we're not going to tell you what it is. We're going to raise the possibility if I (???) explore it.
Rosemary: And it plays on something that happens in natural history museums where you do get those interactive things which are not interactive in my opinion…where there is like a door that says: why do people want to ornament themselves? You open the door and there is the answer. And that's…leaving the question (???) unanswered is actually a neat way to go about. I don't know if you had a chance to say (???).
Joe Schuldenrein: And so, you know, the true differences really did come out so we have to first (???)
Rosemary: Oh good…that's great!
Joe Schuldenrein: Plastic coffee cup CA2001, plastic design is cheap in line to making the item disposable. Residue on bottom is consistent with (???) high pressure American lifestyle. Stimulant (???) coffee bean, only grows in tropical environment, not locally produced. Cup from petrochemical material also from foreign locations, (???) of global trade networks. The goal is to make the people here appreciate the fact that this is more than just a coffee cup, this is to show the interconnective (???) the residues…
Rosemary: Residues are really, again, this is basically the strategy that you were doing as well, which I think is the one that as archaeologists distinguishes us from other people who might write about the same objects. Is that we're continually interested in pointing to the things beyond the object itself. That the object is actually in a context that you might not be able to see but that's what we're trying to explore. And your exhibit labels, actually all these exhibit labels do this. They all point out, and you all are pointing out as well in different ways. One of the interesting things about your (???) in your label it that it's written in the fragmentary style. And we've had both of the styles, the American style…It's a legitimate museum style. It's one that you see over and over at museums (???) written any of those same things. One line has to be kind of on this, second line has to be kind of on this, third line finally you get some freedom you can comment on anything you want to, except within the context of whatever the overarching thing is. And, because you've got these constraints, that's actually a very efficient way to do this. It's also a way that is very similar to most of the undergraduates essays I read these days.
Glenn (???): (???) that if you can read the paragraph (???) you really don't have to read the (???)
Rosemary: And this is actually goes to one of the things that in exhibit labels we're doing is actually writing part of the complex representational thing. And the reason, I think, one of the reasons that students increasingly write in this kind of style is that they are winning their writing preferences from the media…I don't know that we're necessarily in the need to decide if it's good or bad. I would argue that it can be good or bad. The medium itself is not the problem, it's what you do with it…so, KD?
Group 5
K. D. Vitelli: Well, I think some of the initial things worked out pretty well. But then we didn't get the label! Our object is a digital camera. (???) we had to learn about a digital camera…
Rosemary: So you actually did a research?
K.D.: We spent our time on research, yes. Our label was intended for educated senior citizens who were probably resistant to (???) technology. So we began by saying that ‘this latest model of camera (???) requires no film, takes up to 150 snapshots or short movies, before you can transfer to a computer. And then I just switched to this short form (???): ‘In the screen, what you see is what you get, you can manipulate the images to correct problems, and add virtual messages, and print whatever size you want.' And then the disadvantages and we got to price and the need for computer and training in how to manipulate.
Rosemary: That's a really nice example of the actual rhetorical…you know, having an audience that you are trying to persuade. It's one of the things that we certainly have students come to us thinking that texts that are just representations of some reality. But in fact texts are persuasive and one of the things we can do with this kind of thing came up, I think, again over in your (???) certainly. You're trying to persuade that any piece of writing has something that's trying to persuade you about (???) descriptive thing it's trying to persuade you about…and I don't want to spend too much time talking…I think we have one last label…
Group 6 (Anne's)
(???): I think (???) that $3 Starbucks coffee cup. Our imagination focused on that notepad there. While she was away so you don't get any (???). We imagined the future museum for kids, kids in future. And so we have a 20th century lined notepad, bound packed, blank paper pages for making (???), drawing pictures and writing notes, listing other information (???), then Tobi pointed how kids in the future might not know how to actually put those things on the notepad, so we had a required use of the ancient writing implement (???) pencil or (???)
Rosemary: That's great. The, I hope you can see the utility of this, even though obviously we're a different crowd. We're doing this in a very different way than our undergraduates would do it. But some of the things are in common. For one thing, you get diversity of goals. Different students in the groups want to say different things. And that automatically reduces multivocality. You can then, when they complain about the fact that they get to compromise (???) why can't you write the two labels. How would you do the two labels? How could you put more than one label in the gallery and not have information overlooked? And one of the first things is you have to get shorter. Another thing is you can use other media. But at any rate it gets people talking, and you also get people talking about material culture, you can focus on materiality. And you can focus on materiality the way that we, as archaeologists, look at…you got the coffee cup, but you got the residues. You got the tool, but you got the traces of its use, you got the context of its use. You can actually begin to get very complex topics out, but they generated it first. And so, they've got a stake in it that actually they can attach to it. And by asking them to be explicit about aiming something at an audience, you also get them to start generating their own stakeholders. Because all of the groups that you talked about are stakeholders in archaeology. Or at least stakeholders in the study of material culture, which is I would argue something that archaeologists are real good at. So, all of these different groups, these are not necessarily what students would come up with, as stakeholders (???) question, but they are in fact different segments of what they might think of this one stakeholder. The difference between ‘this is a (???) mother' as a leftist' and this is a (???) mother as a politically conscious but not necessarily leftist. It begins breaking up the stakeholders into more diversity. And that's very important, to get them to think about (???) it's not just two or maybe three stakeholders.
(???): So you are identifying audiences as stakeholders?
Rosemary: Audiences are stakeholders. The idea is: you're not adjusting an audience unless you think that there is somebody there to be engaged in this. Now, that doesn't mean that every audience that a student groups fix up for a thing will work nicely as an analogue for a stakeholder in archaeology. You have to do some work to actually explain how, for example, age stratification matters. That different age groups are going to be interested in different aspects of archaeology. This may be self evident with respect to children for example, since 90% of children want to be firemen and 90% of children want to be archaeologists at some point of their life. But it's also true of non-children that the way that people think about archaeology or archaeological things varies with age. So you can use these things…they are not necessarily going to be directly transferable, but you can begin to say things like ‘for my perspective, class difference is a very important variable in the way that people think about archaeology. I'm highly conditioned by my own background there that archaeology (1596) has a history of being an upper class pursuit is something that means that the way that people not of the upper class view archaeology is very different than the people of even the academic class. We may not all be teaching in circumstances where we get students who are overtly identifying themselves as not of the normative middle or upper class but I'd be willing to bet that even in the most highly exclusive university setting, that you have some students who come from totally working class backgrounds for whom archaeology is really exotic thing. The idea of doing something like this is really exotic, and the value in it is really problematic to explain at home. So, bringing those things up is really, that's part of understanding that stakeholders have different understandings of the value. And, it's a…anytime you can get people realizing that there is more diverse audiences for archaeology, you've increased their ability to figure out stakeholders (???).
Glen (???): You can even ask the students to go out and rewrite their labels for a totally different audience, for a totally different kind of museum (???) obviously we've got some (???) globalization issues, etc.
Rosemary: Yes, it's an exercise that's very (???) you can define audiences to begin with. Depending on you goals, in your particular course situation and you particular instructional situation, what you're doing is forcing them to do communication task that's small enough that they can actually do it. They can actually do some useful research in (seven) months. And if you actually give them this as an assignment (???) class, sometimes, but more often, (???) go away and do some research and come back (???). So, you can actually give them a sense of what it is to do a professional task, but they can actually do…and there are a lot of professional writing tasks they really can't do.
(1713)
Glenn: There was also a great story, Kathy (???) was working (???) put her hand around her daughter and said -- now see, honey, this is what happens if you don't go to college.
Rosemary: My last little bit of time what I want to do is very quickly, and I will give these to Erin. This is not (???), but I want to suggest that we can use things like this at…we can actually use things like this in many different ways to do role playing, to get students to begin to actually enact stakeholders. So, if you are not, and most student groups are not going to come up with all stakeholding groups that you want to identify, you can actually model that. And here, at the museum curation exercise, and I am going to give these all to Erin so she can put them up, I can send them electronically, actually. The museum curation exercise…these are real roles, if you have worked in a museum, these are real things, you've got a prospective donor, you've got a curator, a collections manager, a registrar, a conservator, director of the museum, and since this was actually developed for museum studies, it assumes that there is now these separate roles. You can (???) them all together if you want, that would actually oversimplify a highly diverse situation in which the conservator won't want it, the museum collections manager won't want it, and the director will want it, and maybe the curator will want it. So, you know, this is really an internally (???) group. But you could just have a museum person. Again, this is something you do as a longer kind of an exercise, something you get people hand outs, but you make the go and do research. The first stage is that they have to get together and actually talk about this as you would in an accessions committee (1830), (???) now, first you want to give them some background information about what these different roles is; there's lots or resources for that, lots of writing that you can give people. And you can see that the scenario if set up is that there is a stakeholding group in the (???) population that's mainly not reflected in the museum's visitation (???) we've given the museum a financial incentive to try and actually reach out to them. And that's not (???). The (???) give museums money to increase their visitation by underrepresented parts of their population. So, we get people actually talking about why the thing would be good for different groups. What concerns would you raise, who do you speak for, what kind of stake do you get in the decision. And that begins a discussion. But then, in stage two, after the first round of debate the committee decides it needs more information, which is a good thing. The donors asked to explain how he or she obtained the object, the registrar is charged with researching Guatemala's antiquities legislation (???) those laws (???) very different levels, that's not hard to do, we can do it on the net. The curator is asked to consult ethical statements of relevant professional associations, for example, the SAA. But there is more, the conservator and collections manager also asked to consult ethical statements of their professional organizations, for example, the (???). This begins to hit in the subject of stakeholders (???) the statements of the SAA and (???) they are not the same. The (???) represents art museums do actually collect; things that we don't. Each of these individuals reports back to the committee. The donor gets to choose from (???) possibilities, and you can do this lots of different ways. That object was inherited from a great-grandparent that traveled in Central America prior to 19th hundred. The object was inherited from that person, but they (???) archaeological (???). The published letters and notes will be donated with the object. When you treat that that way, you get very interesting (???). Condition A, this is not a very interesting object; condition B, this becomes a very interesting object; condition C the object is inherited by the archaeologists but the donors want to retain all the personal papers. Is an archaeological object as useful to you as a museum educator if you know that there is paper work that you can get access to it, let's assume (???), but you don't have the paper work. (???) The object was purchased by donor's parents from a gallery in New York in 1965, that puts it prior to the UNESCO convention, it had previously been in a museum collection in the Midwest, that makes it even more clear that the donor (???). This is often a real problem. The object was purchased by the donor's (???).
Vin or Elia (???): For the purpose of the exercise are you assuming that each of those six statements is true or is that the story that's being defended?
Rosemary: That's the story, the donor gets to say this. (2007) The registrar (???), the museum director, they all have to…so things that they (???) to do is ask: ‘Do you have documentation of this?' Right? If you really have this 1900 purchase by your grandfather, can you document it? Do you have letters, do you have diaries? And that's part of what I coach. It's that you just can't take people at face value.
The object was purchased by the donor on E-bay. These are the conditions and you can assign randomly (???) groups, which the different conditions exist. The museum director (in each of these cases, you see that there is research role for everybody) is trying to present the argument to the arguments to the Board of Trustees, which is everybody else. In this report from the committee, the museum director must explicitly identify ho different stakeholders groups benefit or are harmed by the proposed action. Benefits are easy to identify. They…balance includes identifying the harm (???). To benefit one, they (???) the others, and think of this as an archaeologist, you know, an art historian…they well say in this case that there is a net game…the human society (???) the museum. And you as an archaeologist may say yes but it encourages looting. And so I am willing to forego the information coded in this (???). Those are two different positions and they may need to be articulated. You can't just assume that our position is the right one. That's what the whole, from my perspective, that what acknowledging the stakeholding is diverse and multiple gets us to, as we can no longer assume that we get the final word. Which means we have to make much better arguments about (???).
So, that's a scenario in which you give people stakeholding positions that's a specifically museum-based one and this second one, it's the last one I will show you, is something that I was proposing as a possible case study here, because it's based on feedback from you all, I'd be happy to write this up as a case study, I am writing about anyway as a research article. This is a real situation, and as such is a cool situation.
Archaeological research and cultural heritage in Honduras, the piece of Copán and its hieroglyphic stairway. The stakeholders: this is just the list that I've come up with so far. Honduran publics, local, national and indigenous groups, which include both the local (???) Maya and the other indigenous groups which are joined in a confederation. The global public, because it's a UNESCO cultural heritage site. Honduran archaeologists working in non-governmental organizations. Honduran archaeologists in heritage management positions. And they'd all agree! Honduran tourism officials, no more than you all (???) here. Honduran employees at the site. Hondurans making a living in tourism. Global archaeologists working at Copán, global archaeologists working in Honduras elsewhere (as me). Museum curators, epigraphers, art historians and conservators. That's not necessarily a complete list. In fact I just realized I left off the ethnographers. There are ethnographers involved in this as well (???).
The debate: this is a real debate. Should the original hieroglyphic stairway be removed from its setting in structure 26? If so, should it be placed intact in one museum or separated in segments in seven museums? Now, here you have to explain why. That's because the hieroglyphic stairway (???) continuously (???) text that is the histories of seven different rulers. The seven museums are each for each ruler (???) all the texts for one ruler. So the idea is to disarticulate the actual thing in order to advance the cause of understanding history. Should it be replaced by a replica, and if so should the replica represent it as it is today? Well, this is the biggest jungle puzzle in Mesoamerica because all the blocks after the first ten stairs fell down, in the 1890s the first ten stairs were actually intact. Then it's was all put up together in the order that was aesthetically pleasing but not legible. So, archaeologists and epigraphers today have a model of what they think it was. That model within the time period that this has been a case study hasn't get changed, which is one of the interesting things about it. Model (???) A is not the same as model (???) B. If the replicas are to be created should copies be placed in other locations around the world? One of the things that were suggested was that you could then put copies in other places where people wouldn't have to (???).
So, taking the position of one of the stakeholders I identify in the step 1, argue the position of that stakeholder. The nice thing is that there is actually publications representing several of these positions. Things from Culture Survival, for example. Here again the idea is having (???) people to generate some stakeholders. Now you're in a position where you can actually put down on paper your own list if stakeholders with respect to specific issues. And that won't be violating the idea of generating, because they've already begun to generate things (???) to see that this is you generating or (???) this case. The idea again of this kind of debate as with the last one isn't that there is a single right answer. It's very important not to have a single right answer. Because if you do, then you teach your students to guess what you to hear. And if any such case should be complex enough that there will be multiple answers. One of the reasons to (???) museum (???) one making all those different situations is to ensure that there will be multiple points of view. By just mixing up that condition, which (???) being different for the same object.
I don't want to go into Lynn's time, so let me end there. I know that we're going to have time to talk about all these things. My overarching interest is to produce materials that will be useful to the people who are getting to develop and test their curricula, because I am one of the people who is helping to use these things once they've been tested. So any of this kind of material that seems useful, I can give to Erin in this kind of form which is more schematic or even in the more flashed-out examples that I've actually used in teaching. The reason that I am (???) more schematic versions for this particular presentation is because I think that the principles are pretty obvious when you do them schematically, because sometimes it's harder to generalize from natural (???) example, again, the final (???) is that this (???) is based on a (???) or something (???). And I think that's the main thing that I see is that we have an enormous and authority existing teaching capital in this group, if we can just get those ideas out, as a set of things you can do, then you will have accomplished a very great deal.