Though my training and scholarly activity is primarily as an archaeologist, I am fully dedicated to a broad application of social science principles in my teaching as well as my research. I have previously taught courses in archaeology, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and sociology. I have also taught interdisciplinary intensive writing courses in folkloristics, US popular culture, and humanities. Some of these courses included instruction in formal academic writing, research methods, and the critical evaluation of both familiar and unfamiliar cultural texts. My curriculum vita lists course numbers and titles for all these courses. Syllabi and student course evaluations are available on request.
Each of the fields in which I have taught is of relevance to my research activities, ripe with the potential to address modern cultural issues, and also a field that often engages students in their own learning. These criteria, of course, are always important for judging any college course.
This is because the job of a college professor is not to transfer facts so much as to provide students with the skills needed to teach themselves. This includes creating an environment where they want to learn, as well as one where the necessary information and guidance is regularly available. It also means challenging the students to push past their own comfort zones, to challenge their previously (and perhaps uncritically) held beliefs, and to strive toward the greatest achievements they can attain.
Such a goal is not easily obtained, and an effective college professor must never become too comfortable with his or her syllabi or lectures. As a matter of course, I continually revise syllabi, shift assignments, and revise lectures to respond to student performance. I also participate in university- or college-sponsored professional development activities regularly. If I, as the professor, become too comfortable with the material, how can I ask my students to abandon their own comfort zones? It is partially because I am constantly learning something new that my students are encouraged to learn something new for themselves. My task is not to fill students’ heads like empty water containers, but rather to demonstrate how exciting and relevant the field of archaeology is, and then to guide the students as they fill themselves. Once students are motivated to learn and given the tools to do so, they will eagerly follow the trail of knowledge wherever it leads.
This is one reason why teaching in archaeology is so fulfilling. A field so directly tied to who we are and how we have come to be that way forces students to examine their own unspoken assumptions. Students confront ideas about themselves and about the world around them that had remained unacknowledged and unconsidered. While, to the untrained eye, it may seem like students are simply absorbing dates, place names, and other largely irrelevant historical data, they are actually exploring the most basic questions about humanity and its place in the world. Once students confront the complexity of the world around them, they are able to craft for themselves a complex and nuanced worldview. In so doing, they also come to learn not just facts, but also the critical thinking skills necessary to become productive, successful members of a community.
The most effective setting in which to guide students to acquiring these skills is a diverse and multicultural classroom. As students from diverse backgrounds share their own experiences and viewpoints, the true diversity of the human race can become both immediate and relevant in ways that bare texts can never achieve. There is diversity in every classroom, and I highlight it at every opportunity, even when the students are outwardly quite uniform. By doing so, students learn more about themselves and the world in which we live than they ever would in a mathematics or basic chemistry course.
On the other hand, the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology also serves as a convenient springboard to lead students into a variety of other disciplines. Statistics, chemistry, geology, history, and economics: all of them have relevance to the study of the human past, and all have relevance in any number of fields beyond archaeology. Archaeology courses can introduce students to fields that may eventually become their passion. Whether today’s archaeology students become tomorrow’s archaeologists is, for me, largely beside the point. What matters is that they leave the course enthused by the knowledge they have learned, and better off for it.
Students learn best when they are enthusiastic and challenged. Archaeology is an ideal field for doing both. I feel my own teaching interests are well suited to these goals as well.