Teaching from the Trenches: Graduate Student Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Graduate students occupy a unique space in undergraduate archaeological education. We serve as teaching assistants, field school instructors, and trusted mentors to our undergraduate students, yet unlike professors, we are not viewed as commensurate authorities in the classroom. Simultaneously, we are positioned professionally as “professors in training,” but our experiences and growth as instructors are little prioritized in comparison to conducting research, writing dissertations, and other types of professional development. Graduate students are the future of archaeological education, yet the development and practice of our teaching strategies and philosophies are often overlooked or undervalued within our educational system. This paper considers pedagogy in the undergraduate archaeology classroom from the perspective of graduate students. Drawing on experiences shared by graduate student instructors and tenants of evidenced-based practice from the scholarship of teaching and learning, I address the role of graduate students in teaching college-level archaeology and illuminate the struggles, and successes, we face as educators. Further, I identify unmet needs of graduate student instructors and offer suggestions for graduate students (and their faculty mentors) for cultivating and encouraging more effective teaching practice. Ultimately, this paper seeks to make space for the development of graduate student pedagogy within undergraduate archaeological education.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35544.0