My 10-week heritage fieldschool for first-year undergraduates was launched at the end of April, and since then, we’ve been engrossed in its many elements, which (like all field training programmes) entail a major commitment of time and energy: more than 32 hours per week of making, doing, learning, revising, accounting and critiquing. As per last year, I designed the course to provide students with the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the full spectrum of heritage practice, from excavation and recording through interpretation, collections handling, audio-visual production, museological display and curation, to archiving, promotion, audience evaluation, reporting and critical self-reflection. The structure is similar to that from 2013 (read more here), but it’s benefited from a massive amount of feedback offered by the students themselves, by our many collaborators, and by generous members of the public and readers of this blog.
The students are documenting their process on group blogs, which you can access through the links below.
I continue to be amazed by the amount that can be achieved in such a short timeframe, and by the phenomenal progress demonstrated by these students who, just a few weeks ago, had virtually no experience with planning interpretative content, nor with audio-visual production and editing, archival research, blogging, presenting to non-academic audiences, or curation. We invite others to follow along as the next 7 weeks of their training unfurl and they evolve into filmmakers, exhibition designers, audience evaluators, promoters, event organisers, and digital media technicians. I’m really proud of their accomplishments, and I hope you might consider offering your constructive input on their outputs and experiences as we move forward.
This year’s fieldschool is particularly interesting for me, as it coincides with a larger personal research project (part of my PGCAP certification) that I’m doing on the efficacy of digitally-mediated pedagogy. I’ll be presenting on that research several times over the next couple of months, including at the Google Apps for Education (European User Group) conference, and the York Learning and Teaching Conference (please come along – there are some amazing presenters featuring at these events), and I’ll hopefully—fingers crossed—also be publishing some aspects of it in an exciting forthcoming issue of Internet Archaeology (more details soon).
In preparation for these outputs, I’ve been conducting 30-60 minute interviews with my undergraduate and Master’s students who’ve kindly agreed to give me critical feedback on their experiences of my courses. Honestly, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response that I received from everyone when I emailed to ask for their time—nearly 100% consented to being interviewed, meaning that I’m now in the course of conducting these interviews and processing thousands of minutes of associated qualitative data. I’m very indebted to my students because they’ve offered me much food for thought—and some needed positive reinforcement too. Perhaps the most revelatory of these interviews so far have come from last year’s cohort of fieldwork students, because I can reflect immediately on the relationship between their experiences and my current cohort’s evolving experiences.
I engage with digital media in my teaching because I think they have the potential to transform the research that we do, as well as our fundamental conceptions of the nature of archaeology and heritage studies themselves. These media can facilitate (and, of course, hinder) the pedagogical experience, but my concern is not so much their impact on teaching itself as the effect they can have on how my students practice, interpret, and create our field of enquiry in the future. If they leave the classroom feeling enabled, equipped and confident to test out these tools in different contexts, then I feel like I’ve made a constructive contribution to their professional trajectories—and to the profession itself.
Scholarly discussion of the creativity that is made possible through digital media work is recognised within educational (e.g., see Smith and Burrell 2013), media studies (e.g., see Gauntlett 2012; Losh 2012) and archaeological (e.g., see Morgan and Eve 2012; Richardson 2013) circles, but arguably among the latter the conversation is primarily driven by professionals speaking to other professionals or to the interested public, without the benefit of extensive and reflective student input. The digital humanities literature on ‘critical making’ or ‘building’ as a form of scholarship and training is more advanced (e.g., Ramsay and Rockwell 2012; Ratto 2011), and I am hopeful that my research (alongside the work of, for example, Shawn Graham, Terry Brock and Lynne Goldstein, among others) will offer an avenue to insert archaeology into that more substantial and influential line of thinking. At the same time, I am also hopeful that this work will contribute to and challenge the existing discourse on field schools/field work in (and beyond) archaeology, recognising the scope that creative, public, digital production has for narrowing the gap between theory and practice, and simultaneously empowering students.
I’ve much more to say on this topic, but I’ll save it for my talks and forthcoming publication! I’ll end by expressing my great thanks to all those who are supporting the students on this year’s heritage fieldschool, including my fantastic teaching assistants Claire Price and Katrina Foxton; the unparalleled team at the Yorkshire Museum – especially Natalie McCaul, Martin Fell and Mike Linstead; filmmaker Gavin Repton; my colleagues on the Star Carr Project; and the many experts who’ve taught the students either in person, via Skype, or by otherwise sharing resources, opinions and good practice – including Colleen Morgan, Simon Davis, Tom Smith, Sophie Norton, Teri Brewer, Joe Tong, Tara-Jane Sutcliffe, Don Henson, Angela Piccini, and Nicole Beale.
As anyone who does fieldwork knows, our investment is long, intense, and filled with highs and lows and innumerable blunders and miscalculations; yet the outcomes are deeply rewarding because of the friendships, creative breakthroughs, and collective ‘ah-ha’ moments that are generated through its collaborative, experimental underpinnings. Thanks so much for following along on our adventures.
Gauntlett, D. 2011. Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Losh, E. (2012) Play, things, rules, and information: Hybridizing learning in the digital university. Leonardo Electronic Almanac 17(2):86-102.
Morgan, C., and Eve, S. (2012) DIY and digital archaeology: What are you doing to participate? World Archaeology 44(4):521-537.
Ramsay, S., and Rockwell, G. (2012) Developing things: Notes toward an epistemology of building in the digital humanities. In Gold, M. (ed.) Debates in the Digital Humanities, Open Access edition: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/11. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ratto, M. (2011) Critical making: Conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. The Information Society 27(4):252-260.
Richardson, L. (2013) A digital public archaeology? Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 23(1):10, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pia.431.
Smith, C., and Burrell, A. (2013) Creativity in learning spaces: We can all gain! Paper presented at the University Campus Suffolk Annual Learning and Teaching Day, Ipswich, 5 July 2013.