PERSONAL TEACHING STATEMENT
Lewis C. Messenger, Jr. (Skip)

1.    APPROACH, RATIONALE, AND OVERVIEW

a.     General Approach to Teaching

My general approach to teaching is reflected in the following statements:

• Teaching is a way to develop student colleagues. A successful course should produce students who are enthusiastic about the subject and who actively engage in it in formal and informal ways. This can occur formally in terms of their being able to involve themselves in formal discourse with professors and other professionals in the discipline through presentations of talks and papers suitable for consideration for publication. Informally, students are recognized as colleagues when they can be engaged confidently in subjects related to course content and its implications for broader, discipline-specific, and interdisciplinary kinds of questions. Emphasis upon this aspect of collegiality encourages an ethic of collaboration rather than competition.
  
  
• Teaching should involve a willingness to "profess" opinion. Students should be encouraged to consider ethical implications related to the discipline and to larger world questions. In this regard, the Society for American Archaeology's Seven Principles of the MATRIX are particularly relevant. Students should be encouraged to develop their own understandings and assessments of ethical issues, but we, as professors, should also be willing to engage students with our own views—clearly couched as only our personal ones, but acknowledging how and why we came to the particular conclusions we reached (i.e., one's own "soul-searching journey"). A professor's view should be stated as their personal opinion and not be used as a criteria for assessing a student's examination responses.
  
  
• It is better to explicitly and comprehensively lay out rules and expectations at the outset of a course. These can be adjusted later without seeming to add new components or restrictions.
  
  
• Course design must reflect that adjustments must be made to accommodate students' needs, given the increasing demands of the current economy.
  
  
• Learning a new subject is analogueous to learning a new language and culture. Hence, "facts," terms, and concepts are tools that students require to be able to intellectually negotiate a class subject as well as to be able to articulate their understanding.
  
  
• Learning a new subject should emphasize comparative epistemological issues. "How we know what we know" fundamentally reflects what epistemological inquiry investigates. We, as anthropologists, must recognize that there exist a variety of "ways of knowing," and that these are often in conflict. At the same time, we should recognize that "multiple ways of knowing" need not be mutually exclusive. Western concepts of deductive scientific reasoning can be informed by traditional oral tradition. Conversely, indigenous knowledge can benefit from knowledge gained through Western scientific approaches.
  
  
• Teaching anthropology involves the cultivation of techniques and skills of cross-cultural empathy. Whether we are dealing with contemporary peoples (an ethnographic context) or with ancient ones (an archaeological context), we should recognize that ultimately we are dealing with people and what their day-to-day experience is and was.
  
  
• Students usually absorb more than they generally are aware of. Hence, one must be flexible and employ a wide array of formal and informal assessment strategies. One-on-one informal conversations can often help a student reveal their grasp of topics better than formal examination situations.
  
  
• "Knowing what you do not know" is a major part of the academic process. Allowing students to test themselves through detailed study guide lists and formal review sessions helps them to accomplish this. This can furthermore be emphasized by telling students that their examinations should reveal what they know, rather than penalize them for what they do not.
  
  
• Students learn in various ways and at differing rates. Successful teaching should involve being sensitive to and able to recognize when a student's intellectual, cognitive "light goes on."
  
  
• Assessment is to be done primarily for the student's benefit. Hence, grading should not be used primarily as a way of ranking students. Emphasis upon ranking using grading curves leads toward the belief that excellence can only be a scarce resource. Furthermore, curve ranking leads toward an ethic of competition rather than collaboration. Student grading should be explicitly laid out at the onset of teaching a class, but should be flexible to accommodate a student's subsequent acquisition and internalization of concepts that were not present in their initial examination responses. Grades should not be viewed as "verdicts," but rather as more like a doctor's "diagnosis," with appropriate recommendations for how to improve.
  
  
• What should be foremost is what students take with them in their heads when they walk out at the end of a course.

b.    Approach Specific to Teaching Introduction to North American Archaeology

• How does the design of this course reflect my approach? This course was designed as a survey lecture course—to provide students with a kind of smorgasbord of information. Its focus is on ancient history, and it begins around 20,000 years ago and extends to the arrival of the Europeans. It is organized geographically by archaeological culture area, with each one constituting individual modules in this MATRIX format. While a significant part of the class focuses on terms and concepts relevant to each of the culture areas, the approach taken in each lecture emphasizes cultural processes as revealed in the archaeological record and as informed by ethnography and history. Using anecdote as a device to enhance empathy, the personhood of people in the past is continually emphasized. Throughout the class, the techniques employed by archaeologists—both laboratory analysis and subsequent interpretation—are emphasized to explain, rather than merely describe, the dynamics of life during ancient times in North America.
  
  
• What are the course goals, and how did I select them? As suggested above and in the syllabus, the course is intended primarily to provide students with a survey of the corpus of information currently available concerning the cultures and lifeways of ancient peoples in North America. Students were expected to internalize a substantial body of factual information and be able to articulate this. Furthermore, students were expected to develop an understanding of the epistemology of archaeology and how this applies to our understandings of ancient North America. A major intent was to help students avoid the depersonalization of ancient peoples through active cross-cultural empathy as developed in their BACAB CAAS writing project. Throughout the class, both implicitly and explicitly, the Seven Principles of the SAA MATRIX provided guidance.
  
  
• What teaching methods and strategies did I use to achieve the outcomes? Through a combination of lecture, video and movie presentation, focused sequential writing projects, structured review periods and examinations, and open-ended discussion both in and out of class, students came to appreciate both the pros and cons of the archaeological approach and to internalize a wide array of factual information.
  
  
• How did I assess student achievement of the outcomes? Student internalization of factual information and theory was assessed through structured review sessions followed by three take-home examinations (60 percent of final grade). Numerous formal and informal, written, and one-on-one interactions provided feedback to students as they progressed through the sequential steps leading to their final BACAB CAAS paper (40 percent of final grade). Throughout the class, grading practice reflected the philosophy indicated above.
  
  
• How successful was the course in achieving the goals and objectives? "Success" was not primarily determined by final grades, but the class as a whole did quite well. Numerous "A" grades were awarded in recognition of mastery of factual information and theory. Perhaps the greatest indication of "success" was provided by the thoughtful and positive responses to a final essay question that asked students to first self-define whether they were anthropology majors, and then asked how what they have learned in this class will be of relevance to their future lives and careers. They were cautioned to not write "pat-on-the-back" essays, but to provide clear, substantiated essays. Their opinion was not to be considered in grading this essay. It was gratifying to read how much students felt that it was important to make sure that knowledge about the accomplishments of ancient Indian peoples of the Americas was infused into public school curricula; that they had developed a different and more respectful position about American Indians; and that "their" (American Indian) heritage was something to be valued and protected with the same zeal as has been devoted to that of the Euro-American legacy.
  

2. MATRIX PRINCIPLES

• How are the MATRIX Principles addressed in the course? There are a number of places where the reader can track and locate the MATRIX Principles infused within North American Archaeology. The MATRIX Principles are introduced on the first day of class and are placed directly on the first page of the syllabus. They are also found in a Cross-Tabulation of Modules and Principles, with rows indicating specific course modules and columns reflecting the Seven Principles. In this table the Xs are hot- buttoned to take the reader directly to the particular module and principle of interest. To find all of the MATRIX principles in one place, users can access the MATRIX Principles in Modules for North American Archaeology page, which sequentially lists all of the Principles explicitly mentioned within each module and provides links to the associated lecture modules. Furthermore, each lecture module has the MATRIX Principle employed placed within it.
  
  
• How do the course goals relate to the MATRIX Principles? The MATRIX Principles are infused throughout the class and can be found by looking at the links above and the individual course lecture overviews and modules.
  

3. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

• Where does the course fit in your institution's curriculum? The North American Archaeology course has been taught in the Department of Anthropology at Hamline University for a number of years and by a number of professors. I have been teaching this class since I took it over in 1986. Please consult my faculty description to learn a bit more about my personal background.  The current course description for the course is found in the Hamline University College of Liberal Arts 2000-2002 Bulletin.
  
  
• Are there any prerequisites? There are no prerequisites.
  
  
• How many students are usually enrolled in the course? There are usually 25-30 students enrolled in this class.
  
  
• What types of students are in the course?  This varies semester to semester.  Usually, the majority of students enrolled are anthropology majors, but often there are a number of students representing the other social sciences, the humanities, and the "hard sciences."
  
  
• Has the course always been taught at your institution? Variations of this class have been taught since the time of Lloyd Wilford early in the twentieth century.
  
  
• Has the course always been taught in the same way?  Since I started teaching the course in 1986, the most significant change occurred with respect to its having been developed to meet the writing-intensive criteria for the "Hamline Plan" in 1988. Initially, this involved what could best be called a "term-paper approach." Students were to develop their own particular hypotheses and then, through a literature search, confirm or deny what they had assumed. This continued for a number of years until I decided to provide an optional writing assignment that involved students creating an archaeologically well-grounded fictional account of life at a time and place in ancient North America of their choosing. This initial experiment was so fulfilling that I decided to permanently abandon the "hypothetico-deductive" paper in favor of the creative writing one. This subsequently became the BACAB CAAS assignment as used in this current incarnation of this class. The most recent modification of this class has involved incorporating and making explicit the Society for American Archaeology's Seven Principles for the MATRIX.
  

4. COURSE DEVELOPMENT

• What is the "story" of the development of this course? The "story" of the development of this North American Archaeology course is mentioned elsewhere in this Portfolio. In sum, it began as a survey course that later had an intensive writing component added to it. In many respects, this addition came to be the most significant aspect of course development, allowing students to themselves internalize the agenda of understanding the epistemology of the archaeological process so that they could then answer their questions relevant to what life was like in the time and place of their choice. Furthermore, the emphasis placed upon developing a mind-set for their writing that had individuals in the distant past speak in their first person reinforced the notion that we should be dealing with persons in antiquity, not just data to reconstruct activities.
  
  
• What limitations and constraints were dealt with in the development of the course? As far as limitations and constraints in my own experience, this writing-intensive class is extremely time consuming. This is most clearly the case in terms of the number of sequential assignments involved in the creative writing part of the class. There are numerous sets of writings that must be carefully read and then commented upon for student feedback. Given that this writing assignment is open ended with respect to time and place within archaeologically ancient North America, offering this class necessitates a fairly deep knowledge of potential resources on cultures from the Arctic to the Desert Southwest, from the Atlantic woodlands to the California coast, and over a considerable time span with debatable origins during the Pleistocene to the arrival of Europeans (at least as far as this particular version of a North American archaeology class is concerned). It would seem that the writing-intensive part of the class could be enough to have to deal with, but this class also has three essay-and-short-identification exams that, as take-home tests, often involve a considerable amount of student writing.
  
  
• What critical decisions did I make that shaped the course? Probably the single most critical decision made was that creative writing—"pre-'historical fiction'"—was a legitimate assignment alternative to a traditional hypothetico-deductive paper. While this was a risk, the insistence upon students' soundly grounding the scenarios they created for their characters not only enhanced the legitimacy of what they wrote, but enhanced their appreciation of the intricacies and complexities of using the methods and methodologies of the archaeological process.
  
  
• How did the students react to the course? What did students say about the course in their evaluations or other forms of feedback? Which elements were successful or unsuccessful (and why do I think so)?

• Successful: Without wishing to be overly redundant, I feel that the most successful aspect of the course involved the processes related to the students' BACAB CAAS creative writing projects. Students indicated the positive value they placed on this project formally in their responses to essay questions asking them to discern what of value they were taking with them at the end of this class and informally in the form of conversations with them. Furthermore, the high quality of their projects were a clear indication that they had "gotten the messages."
  
• Unsuccessful: Perhaps it would be better to qualify this and instead use the word "difficulties." Perhaps the greatest challenge involves just keeping up with students in terms of being timely in reading their various BACAB CAAS sequential assignments and giving them feedback. It goes without saying that this kind of assignment works best with small class sizes. Even with 25 students, this is difficult to accomplish.
  

• What changes do I intend to make before I teach it again? Given the realities of teaching North American Archaeology as a semester-length course, I see no major subjective curricular changes in the future. Each instructor will have his or her own particular areas of interest, as well as types of research questions. I have chosen to focus on the prehistoric periods and have not allocated much time to the archaeology of North America after the arrival of the Europeans. While others in the MATRIX workshop would have liked this class to have dealt more with issues of culture contact, the colonial experience, slavery, etc., I have chosen in this class to emphasize what occurred previously.

Having said that, future incarnations of this class will involve some changes:

• I will be more explicit in describing and infusing particular MATRIX Principles in its curriculum.
  
• I will try to develop ways that individual students' creative writing projects can be disseminated and shared with others in the class. This will most likely involve publishing their papers on the Web.