TEACHING STATEMENT
1. OVERVIEW AND APPROACH
This course package is presented in a format intended to be useful for any potential instructors. It is for a course in South American archaeology offered in the University of South Florida (USF) Department of Anthropology, aimed at the college sophomore or junior, anthropology major, Latin American studies major, or other students who have at least a basic knowledge of archaeology already. The course also attracts first- and fourth-year students, and graduate students (for whom I assign additional work, such as a book review or term paper).
The course is structured to include the basics of South American culture history, processual archaeological examinations of sociocultural change and evolution of different adaptations and political systems, and an awareness of the indigenous perspectives and the sociopolitical context in which South American archaeology has been and is done, including international heritage management issues. There is emphasis upon famous sites and new discoveries; important human systems and processes, such as the peopling of the continent, origins of food production, and origins of civilization; the immense natural and cultural diversity within South America, and the modern quest to interpret, save, and manage the evidence of the glorious past in the many different countries.
Many anthropology departments offer South American archaeology courses that are mostly focused upon Peru, simply because the archaeological record there is often better known and most texts available in English emphasize it. To embrace the entire continent, I use two textbooks, one focusing on Peru (Moseley 2001) and one on the entire continent (Bruhns 1994), plus a few assigned articles (Atwood 2002, 2003; Roosevelt et al. 1996; Fagan 1997; Mann 2000, 2002) on more controversial topics. I use many other references (see references section) that instructors can consider for adding to the assignments, writing lectures, and showing pictures to the class (for illustrations, recent magazine articles are great). As with any survey course, some sites and cultural manifestations are emphasized more than, or at the expense of others. I am very interested in having the student understand cultural processes more than memorizing a great number of dates and names of sites, artifacts, and cultures. I also wish to demonstrate to the class, which is being held in subtropical forested Florida, the bias in favor of the better preserved desert and highland archaeological record and the prejudice against jungle archaeology, especially in English sources. Users of this course package will also note that many of the references are items that have just been published as I am teaching the class. This is crucial for good teaching: watching the current scientific and other news for new discoveries and perspectives. The next time I teach the class there will undoubtedly be newer articles to use for writing lectures and showing pictures in class. My fervent hope is that users and other visitors to the SAA website will note additional references and comment on all this material, pointing out omissions or shortcomings and helping correct the overwhelming English-language and North American biases.
A note on orthography: the spellings for South American archaeological terms used in this course package are both the old traditional ones (e.g., Huari, Inca) and newer ones (e.g., Wari, Inka) used to avoid western biases and hispanicization of native names. Whether instructors teaching a course in South American archaeology are specialists in the area or not, so much of the literature still uses the traditional spellings, that students at least must be aware of them and of the newer variants and reasons for their use.
At USF we are committed to the philosophy that anthropology must be both a scholarly pursuit and an applied, real-world discipline. This includes the perspective that all archaeology is public archaeology in some way. Thus the SAA effort to redesign the archaeology curriculum is a good fit for what we already aim to bring to the undergraduate in general. Specifically, for this course, which concerns a continent of increasing global importance in the modern world, it is crucial to bring in the relevance of archaeology and the knowledge of the past in dealing with modern human problems and cultures.
2. MATRIX PRINCIPLES:
This package presents the course explicitly redesigned to incorporate the SAA's seven principles guiding the Matrix project:
BASIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL SKILLS: how archaeological sites in South America are located, recorded, investigated, analyzed, and interpreted; who is doing the professional and other archaeology, including public, private, local, national, and foreign institutions, agencies and businesses. Making, reading, understanding maps is one skill especially important for this class.
COMMUNICATION SKILLS: written, oral, visual, interactive, to understand and tell the story of the past well and creatively
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND VALUES: in archaeology—skills, honesty, responsibility to science, to the many different publics, from local residents to international institutions and very diverse national governments
DIVERSE INTERESTS IN THE PAST: different people's associations with prehistory and history, including scholars, scientists, landowners and managers, local residents, descendent groups, school children, avocational archaeologists, looters and art dealers, political factions, the general public at home and abroad
STEWARDSHIP: preserving non-renewable cultural resources through policy, law, public education and action, private effort, from the local to international scale
SOCIAL RELEVANCE: connections of past human systems and adaptations with today's world, including social/cultural identity, environments and ecosystems, even technological connections in areas such as water management, hydroelectrics, agriculture
REAL-WORLD PROBLEM SOLVING: practical application of knowledge from the human past applied to any kind of situation, from natural resource overexploitation to socioeconomic inequality to agricultural production and drug traffic
Most textbooks now have some material relating in one way or another to most of these principles, though they primarily emphasize culture history and process. This course package is not a radical revision of those basics, but simply adds explicit examples of how to discuss and utilize the principles in the syllabus, lectures, classroom activities, assignments, and field trips.
This is an archaeology area course dealing with an extensive
span of prehistoric and early historic time and an entire continent
in space. It is thus designed to be very broad and somewhat superficial.
As a diner would do at a large buffet table, both instructor and students
can decide whether to sample a tiny bit of everything at least to know
what is available, or to concentrate on fewer, more doable, desirable,
or appropriate aspects in greater detail. I tend to emphasize culture
process more than names and specifics of artifact and architecture
types within the survey of culture history, and a few specific sites,
including those most famous, most controversial, most interesting or
spectacular, and most productive of important scientific data. The
instructor's own specialties and experiences should be emphasized wherever
possible for the most genuine and enthusiastic teaching, so the course
outline should be altered to become more tailored to the individual
directing it. Whatever choices are made, for this course all seven
of the Matrix principles are incorporated as often as possible into
all the course components. Some portions of this course package may be applicable to any course in an archaeological culture area.
3. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT AND INTENT
South American archaeology typically has 40 students in a classroom now equipped with a computer, projector, videotape player, and document camera (all of which go a long way toward improving teaching and learning opportunities). Most of the students have never been to South America or experienced anything archaeological beyond an introductory archaeology or anthropology course. Some have no anthropology background but come from Latin American studies programs, and while they may have a disadvantage in the lack of archaeological knowledge, they make up for it with a keen understanding of the incredibly diverse geography and environments of South America. Many students are heavily influenced by popular media portrayals of archaeology. Many at USF are native Spanish speakers whom I will at times permit to do written assignments in Spanish (rather than laboriously correct their English—but this is a judgement call as we are not supposed to be English teachers; some of these are foreign students who will return to South American homes after receiving degrees). For all students, it is important to make them aware right away of the instructor's high expectations and how this is not a course chosen just to fill a time slot, but one requiring learning and understanding a great deal of often very foreign material.
Research on how college students learn and retain information, skills, and critical thinking abilities indicates that the scenario in which the instructor lectures and the students sit and listen is the one in which students learn the least. Aspects of a course that encourage, even provoke students to learn more/better include discussion in the classroom; hands-on active exercises; group projects (social learning); assignments in which they can include their own opinions, personal experiences, evaluations, and interpretations; and research assignments beyond reading the texts. The last include activities out in the community or with an electronic context, from internet exercises to web discussion groups.
It should be obvious that any class in archaeology must include a great deal of visual material, including sites, artifacts, modern geography and people of the area, maps, and so forth. Whether using slides, real artifacts or replicas, books and articles under the document camera, or power point presentations, the instructor should have visual materials for every class session. A cautionary note is in order here, however. The increasing popularity of power point has led to two unacceptable aspects of teaching. The first is the inertia that leads the instructor to use the same notes and pictures every year; such teaching is just as common with written notes, yellowed and old, used every year. However written notes might be updated with additions stuck in by hand; it is more trouble to make a new power point disk, some might think. Far more unfortunate is the tendency to add a lot of text to power point presentations, then have the instructor read the text to the students while it is also showing on the screen (as if the audience cannot read themselves!). This makes for a most boring lecture, and worse, in some classrooms such as ours, equipped with printers, students request a printout and then either 1) do not have to take notes themselves, or 2) do not have to show up for class, even. This is the opposite of active learning.
There is much good literature on how to improve teaching and design courses to help students learn better (e.g., For Your Consideration, Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; especially Jan and Feb 1996 issues). Nearly every institution of higher learning has some kind of center for teaching enhancement available to all instructors. Increasingly there are various summaries of tips for good teachers, such as arriving 5-10 minutes early for class to show you are interested in students, planning lessons well but not being afraid to stray from them, and continually interacting with teaching colleagues to learn new stuff (e.g., Hipple and McClam 2002). Another important practice is to have high expectations for your students, and make them aware of this, and some will always live up to those expectations (e.g., Bérubé 2001).
This course design package includes some of these learning techniques as well as suggestions for how to include the seven principles in the more traditional lecture format and expand it with class discussions and exercises. It is not meant to add more work to the instructor's load, but to help (perhaps gradually) incorporate new ideas not only on what to teach but how to teach it in archaeology. Instructors are invited to use the entire package or pick and choose whatever is useful to add to their existing course outlines. Individual course modules which include lecture notes and ideas are developed based on the specific texts and additional references noted. They can be used as described or altered to fit any other assigned readings and to design specific learning sessions. Individual instructors will also need to estimate time constraints for each teaching module in terms of their own styles, conditions, and added materials. However it is done in the classroom, instructors must realize that archaeology is changing worldwide; students cannot simply be taught in the same old academic ivory tower fashion without regard for the public nature of all modern archaeology (Fagan 2002, Little 2002).
Evaluation of the course and the student's learning experience is also usually specific to the institution or the instructor; nonetheless, some student evaluation can be included in several of the Student Exercise assignments below.
The principle incorporating good communications skills is operational in all course activities, exams and papers as well as written and oral exercises and assignments. Instructors need to ask for clear writing, good organization, logical presentation, and no grammatical or spelling errors. Students should be told that proofreading or review of oral presentations is expected and preferably a second proofing/review of a practice presentation by someone else. Furthermore, it should be clear that the course (and any college course) is intended to foster critical thinking skills, which are demonstrated by the student in various kinds of ways.
4. COURSE DEVELOPMENT
Before beginning the MATRIX project I had been gradually developing the South American archaeology course over many years to depart slightly from the traditional by incorporating two specific aspects: more public archaeology and more active learning and creative assignments. Some of this came easily, for example, with the call for students to discuss materials in every class, including current archaeology news articles and the political discussions and controversies they included, or with the growing visibility of archaeology done in the path of construction, or with the popular images of archaeology in entertainment media. Other ideas came from colleagues who had used various kinds of exercises in the classroom and gotten good responses.
Working to redesign the course in the MATRIX context produced three major results incorporated in this package: even more emphasis upon the seven principles, more ideas for class projects and other learning activities obtained from the other course designers and reviewers, and pedagogical insights and organizational ideas obtained from the educational specialists also reviewing the work.
Reflections upon completing the semester of teaching the redesigned course are now possible, though based only upon this first time. The successful aspects were greater student enthusiasm and active learning, and a much higher awareness by the students of how archaeology (even in a faraway place) can be meaningful or relevant. This is great because very few of the students will go on to become professional archaeologists, but they will be the developers, legislators, tourists, consumers, and taxpayers of the future (not to mention potential donors to archaeological projects!). I am especially glad about the ones who are from South American countries and have gained some understanding of their own nation's struggles with heritage management (and taught me some things about this).
Two elements of the course that were very successful, though extra to the typical lecture class, were the museum field trip and the fictional presentations/storytelling in prehistory exercise. The former were two field trips to the Orlando Museum of Art (1-hour drive from campus) to see a special exhibit of a newly donated collection of South American archaeological materials. The two trips provided alternative days so that more students could attend. The first trip was enhanced by the exhibit curator's gallery lecture, and during the second trip I could pass her information on to the second bunch of students. It was especially interesting to contrast the art history perspective, seen both in the exhibits and the curator's lecture, with our archaeological perspectives (aesthetics, beauty, material types or similar shapes or themes exhibited together vs. things from the same time period, or of the same function, for example, not to mention buying and selling and donating collections vs. obtaining them through professional excavations).
The fictional presentation or "storytelling in prehistory" exercise was really a hit. Students had fun imagining themselves to be, among other things, the wife of a Paleo-Indian hunter; llama herders, farmers, pottery makers, textile weavers and dyers, metallurgists, lords and nobles, a recent trephination patient, human sacrificial victims in different time periods; and simple peasants encountering the supernatural in monumental temples. A Brazilian student took on the role of a sacrificial victim who ended up not being killed during Huari times, and an African-American student portrayed a slave on the boat of conquering Spaniards. One student actually made and served chicha (corn beer), having researched various recipes. Another made a costume (a dress of red cloth with a hole for the head) decorated with Middle Horizon designs and the logo, "got maize?"; she carried a basket of fresh vegetables of the types that would have been available for her character (corn, squash, etc.). Two students indicated in advance their inability to give a presentation before the class due to fear of public speaking. One of these, despite my coaching or telling her she could just read it, simply preferred not to do the oral part of assignment. But the other designed a clever solution: he sat on the front table with his back to the class, facing a projection on the screen of the Lanzón stela from the inner chamber at Chavin de Huantar, and playing a tape of thunder and rainfall, and delivered his presentation, which was an incantation to the Early Horizon gods for rain. Not having to face other people, he did fine. After each presentation, the other students were able to spot archaeological inaccuracies and ask very good questions of the presenters, as well as evaluating each presentation on an anonymous sheet that did not count for the grade.
The neutral aspects of the course proved to be the student evaluations, of both course and instructor, which turned out about the same as usual, though almost all students did like the fictional presentation exercise and the music incorporating indigenous sounds and instruments from some South American countries that I played at before many classes. Some said that having to do their own maps throughout the course helped them learn the geography better.
Constraints and unsuccessful aspects of the course also became clear. The increased reliance on technological assistance meant that a breakdown in its efficiency had to be prepared for, which might be considered extra work (if the overhead camera is broken, passing around the color pictures of sites or pots is just not the same). More serious was that the extra time to do many class and outside activities was just not there. Both instructor and students must chose carefully and not overdo this at the expense of the core learning. The two field trips, one during spring break, took a great deal of time. The one activity that proved most valuable was extensive class discussion of the required reading and news items, relating it to the seven principles and everything else; this gets the student actively involved. The only caution here is that this might end up being discriminatory in favor of students who are not shy or inhibited in speaking up in class. Therefore the other ways of doing class participation can be bringing in or posting archaeology news articles and answering questions in class when called upon. The student who was too shy to do the class presentation forfeited six points, though she did hand in a written version so as not to lose total credit for the assignment. I am not sure how to deal with this problem in the future.
Reflections upon completing the two MATRIX workshops and receiving formal and informal reviews of my other course package from diverse archaeologists and education professionals also are useful (and I am very pleased to have obtained such great feedback!). As mentioned, there were more ideas for special activities, which have been incorporated herein. It is clear that a syllabus, indeed an entire course, is more malleable than we think, and also very much able to be personalized to suit not only the individual instructor and teaching circumstances, but also the changing character of the students, the technology, and the college environment. Therefore, my hope is that this course design package is flexible enough to be utilized in any way instructors may chose. Whether it generates one new idea for five minutes of one class, or whether it is lifted whole and complete without change for the entire course, it will have served its purpose. We may be professors as graying as our lecture notes or new instructors fresh to the world of teaching, but we do not want to stand still. Because archaeology is never old (!), but constantly fresh with new discovery and interpretation, we need to change and adapt every time we help students learn about it.
Thus this course design package should be considered a work permanently in progress. It is intended for English-speaking, U.S. students and thus is extremely biased in neglecting many sources and references available only to speakers of Spanish and other South American languages, so this is a major caution that other instructors must take into account. The course concerns a continent full of enormously diverse countries and peoples, and ever-changing politics. Archaeologically, everything from discoveries of the past to heritage management, tourism, commercialism, and antiquities policies is also constantly in flux. Every year this course should be redesigned at least a little to keep up with such change and new developments and use more and more South American sources (especially the many new websites, and deletion of old ones that no longer work). Similarly, I hope that users of these materials will help identify inaccuracies and suggest changes and updates, and that specialists in the areas covered will not think me too presumptuous to have boiled their research areas down into tiny, simplified bits for lecture and discussion. The discussion and commentary section of the MATRIX website should be a good place for posting updated, expanded, or corrected information, especially new data and references from colleagues in South America.