T
he Archaeological Field School syllabus produced for James Madison’s Montpelier in 2007 was one of my first forays into curriculum design and, while it has many warts, is still used by the Montpelier Archaeology Department more-or-less as-written.
Prior to the introduction of a syllabus, the field school was primarily focused on experiential learning. While “learning by doing” sounds great, feedback from earlier field schools indicated that students wanted, well, more. Initially, this took the form of the “Archaeology Field Guides,” a 40-odd page document that summarized most of the cogent information into a single document (until another document was needed, that is!), but eventually required more structure to be introduced.
This syllabus capitalized upon user experience design to observe student interaction with the subject materials to scaffold the design of the curriculum. These observations indicated that student interest generally went through five stages:
- Oh, cool. Look what I found! The process of archaeological discovery is exciting. The first time that you find something, your interest is sparked and you begin to engage. Stage 1, therefore, concentrated on artefacts: their categories, identifying them, and what information could be gleaned from them.
- Wait, why is this here and not there? Stage 2 focused on the notion of creating relative chronologies to study site formation processes through stratigraphy or, put another way, “Why is this thing on top and the other thing on the bottom, and what does that mean?”
- What’s happening in your unit? Eventually, the notion of what is happening in your own excavation unit begins to combine with wanting to know what is happening in your fellow student’s unit—what they’re finding, how it is different from your finds etc. As such, Stage 3 focused on the spatial analysis of artefact and sedimentary deposit distribution across the site through the use of “site strata,” an interpretive tool used by the students’ supervisors to track the changing nature of site interpretation.
- So what does it all mean? Stage 4 brought all the threads together by looking at artefact distributions, stratigraphy, and other specialist data sources to allow students to practice their interpretive skills.
While the field school focused on the experience of archaeological excavation, the academic components offered a separate, theoretical approach that balanced student preferences for learning and ultimately distinguished it from contemporary syllabi offered by other institutions.
With that said, I would very much do things differently today. As such, please click on this link to see my current thoughts and reflections on this syllabus including what I would do differently.
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