The Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting was held in New Orleans, LA on April 17-21, 2024. I chaired a session on Education and Archaeological Careers, and gave this talk titled “Teaching With Collections: The Power of Object-Based Pedagogies.”
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Teaching with Collections: The Power of Object-Based Pedagogies
Talk Description
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 was 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 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.