What Could Archaeology’s Impact Be On Education?

Summary

Twenty-five years from now, as America’s educators put into place yet another "new" set of standards, and classroom teachers endure yet another pedagogical adjustment, will archaeology be at the table, included as an appendix, or invisible? Predicting the future is risky business, but the intrigue of the past never fails to engage learners. It’s our responsibility as educators to nurture that engagement and channel it toward understanding. Drawing from the preliminary results of a piloting project in four Kentucky schools, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter as a vehicle for inquiry-based teaching and deep conceptual understanding of diverse humanities subjects, and offer suggestions for what archaeology’s impact can be/could be in the social studies of the future.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Project Archaeology Makes a Difference: The Next 25 Years   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage