From Archaeological Students to Emerging Practitioners: Voice, Autonomy, and Agency as Field School Teaching Tools

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The discipline of archaeology relies on the field school as a training tool to teach practical field skills to students learning to become archaeologists. Despite the discipline’s reliance on the field school as a foundational teaching tool, scholars have yet to investigate the learning processes that occur during field school instruction and participation. Based on interviews with over 30 field school participants and a qualitative analysis of these interviews, we identified teaching practices that support students moving along the spectrum from novice to emerging practitioners. We suggest that archaeological field school pedagogy is at its strongest when field directors draw on the archaeological perspectives of their students to make decisions, when they provide students with a sense of agency, and when they integrate students into the community of practicing archaeologists. We use these findings to suggest ways field directors can strengthen their field school instruction and strengthen archaeology’s future by promoting safe and inclusive field training for emerging scholars.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37617.0