greetings from the field
Sorry this week's newsletter is a couple of days late! I'm in the field at the moment helping run a field school in southern Victoria.
Cape Schanck lighthouse... aka my office for the next fortnight
Field schools - real-world excavations developed specifically with the aim of doing excellent research while training archaeology students in the craft of archaeology - are among my favourite pedagogical spaces. Here we get to break out of the social relations of the classroom and support students as they develop the embodied knowledge of how archaeology is practiced. This is the savoir faire (or "know-how") part of the discipline that compliments the connaisance (or "knowledge") they develop in classes, labs and structured training on campus.
A big part of the field school experience is also focussed on learning to work collaboratively and in groups to achieve tasks and create knowledge. This is not always an easy skill to learn, but it's crucial because each of us brings different experiences, background knowledge, and perspectives to the unruly, deeply complex archaeological record. All of those experiences together, in dialogue, are the source of our knowledge about the past.
Teaching field schools is one of the ways I work to build a stronger, more respectful and future-focussed archaeology. I do my best to train the students I work with to take the values of respect, care, and equal collaboration forward into their careers (in archaeology and elsewhere). Pedagogy gives me hope exactly because we are each of us capable of working with and for our communities to build the better futures we want to see. Field schools, with their mix of craft and classroom, professional and social, are one venue in which I find this eminently possible.