Unsettling the Classroom: Teaching Archaeology’s Ties with Settler-Colonialism

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.

For well over a decade, archaeologists such as Pyburn (2005) and Arnold (2005) have highlighted the need for teaching to engage with the larger, core issues that shape our research. Nevertheless, high-profile archaeological conversations about decolonization have tended to focus exclusively on research theory and practice. Yet Atalay (2019) and Cobb and Croucher (2020) have argued that important curricular and pedagogical changes also need to occur. In other words, significant disciplinary change means bringing research and teaching into conversation. How do we do this effectively? In this presentation, we outline our experience teaching a four-fields anthropology course entitled Anthropologists and Indigenous Peoples in North America at the University of Toronto that examines archaeology and anthropology’s historical and ongoing links with settler-colonialism. Through guest lectures by Indigenous academics and community leaders, readings by Indigenous scholars, and in-house lectures, we introduce students to anthropology’s complex ties with settler-colonialism, contemporary examples of Indigenous challenges to the discipline, and hopeful prospects for collaboration. We present the course successes, problems that we encountered, and how we plan to move forward with it in the future.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35557.0