May2014

TEACHING ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURYtheme of the presentations was the importance of bringingundergraduates into research projects to solidify basic fieldand laboratory skills. The practice and enhancement of theseskills in a variety of active learning contexts has resulted inundergraduates contributing to professional researchthroughout the Middle Atlantic.A number of pathways for future collaboration emerged duringthe workshop. For example, it is common for archaeologistswho teach undergraduates in the Middle Atlantic to doso in a restricted setting— for example, in archaeology programsembedded in combined departments, with smallnumbers of faculty and increasing numbers of students. Participantsdecided to initiate discussions on the creation of a“Middle Atlantic Archaeology Teaching and Learning Consortium,”through which faculty with a particular expertisecould offer short courses for students from a variety of universitiesand work with them on a specific skill set. This willbe the focus of a workshop at the 2015 MAAC.Teaching Archaeology through Active LearningArchaeology has much to offer undergraduate education: aninterdisciplinary approach; a focus on temporal and spatialcognition; an emphasis on a broad skillset oriented to thefield sciences; and an anthropological framework. Archaeologistswho teach undergraduates commonly offer anecdotalevidence of the transformative power of the experiential pedagogiesthat are hallmarks of archaeological training. Wellassessedand shown to encourage a higher level of understandingand integration for students and teachers alike,experiential learning results in the mastery of skills sosought after in undergraduate education.From a pedagogical standpoint, the instruction of archaeologicalskills is an archetype for active learning (Bonwell andEison 1991; Felder and Brent 2009) in which students are atthe center of the learning process and partners in discoveryand problem-solving. Originally defined in opposition to traditionalteaching, in which the lecturer is the “Knower ofAll,” active learning should sound familiar to archaeologists,who will welcome the large body of research on a teachingapproach that is part and parcel of our discipline (Burke andSmith 2007). Active learning can take many forms, includinghands-on learning, problem-based learning, case studies,and simulations, to name a few. In addition to the shift awayfrom passive learning, the characteristic that truly distinguishesactive learning from traditional pedagogies is thefocus on student engagement, resulting in independent, creativeinquiry (Bain 2004). Interestingly, this strength hasbeen most clearly articulated for pre-collegiate archaeologyand programming for the public (Smardz and Smith 2000).Archaeology is not as visible in the scholarship of teachingand learning (SoTL) for higher education, despite the factthat archaeologists have much to say from years of activelearning practice.Archaeological skills like those seen in the syllabi collectedfor the present study embody a practice in which students“learn through an education of attention” (Ingold 2011:190).To borrow Høgseth’s identification of the transfer of knowledgethrough craft, archaeologists combine “knowing what”and “knowing how” (Hogseth 2012:61) to create rich learningenvironments. Taxonomies of learning propose dimensionsof knowledge that extend from concrete (factual) toabstract (metacognitive), the latter associated with higherorder thinking skills (Anderson and Krathwohl 2001). Activelearning in archaeology can move students along this continuum,requiring them to build on foundational knowledge tounderstand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and ultimately create(hypothesize and design) as undergraduates. In addition toapprenticing students (Wendrich 2012) early in their archaeologicalcareers, active learning in the undergraduate curriculumhas the potential to promote higher-order learningfor all students. This “thinking about thinking” or metacognition(Bain 2012), emerging from a variety of learning experiencesand environments, positions archaeology students todevelop the “far transfer of knowledge” (Ambrose et al. 2010)from one course to another, and to later life (Lang 2013).Rather than claim that archaeology teaches transferrableskills, it is more apt to say that archaeology, based in activelearning, promotes a disposition of critical and syntheticthinking, requiring students to work across disciplines indifferent learning domains.References CitedAmbrose, Susan A., Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, MarshaC. Lovett, Marie K. Norman, and Richard E. Mayer2010 How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles forSmart Teaching. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.Anderson, Lorin W., and David R. Krathwohl (editors)2001 A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revisionof Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman,New York.Bain, Ken2004 What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, Massachusetts.2012 What the Best College Students Do. Belknap Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts.Bender, Susan J.2000 A Proposal to Guide Curricular Reform for the Twenty-First Century. In Teaching Archaeology in the Twenty-First30 The SAA Archaeological Record • May 2014