Teaching With Collections: The Power of Object-Based Pedagogies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Collection-based pedagogies present an exciting platform for active, inquiry-based learning and advancing the goals of equitable teaching. They engage interactive, critical, reflective, creative, affective, and other approaches that anchor learning and build community in the tangible, physical presence of objects. This presentation is about teaching with, not strictly about, artifacts and material culture. There is a range of curricular possibilities for object-based teaching: collections can serve an illustrative role where connections between course material and objects are content-related. Collections can also play an effective role in developing or strengthening essential and transferable skills, like critical thinking and evidentiary reasoning, and help cultivate dispositions or habits of mind, such as patience, deep attention, empathy, grappling with ambiguity, and accepting multiple perspectives. Collections here are expansively conceived, including artifacts, ethnographic or historic objects, and fine art. A nineteenth-century landscape painting can activate a conversation about settler expansion and Indigenous erasure, for example, while a comparison of contemporary and precontact Mexican ceramics can reveal stories of survivance and adaptation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39622.0