Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, what I care about most is student growth. I strive to create an environment in which everyone’s objective is learning rather than performance. Though they concern a wide range of topics, all my courses share a curricular structure organized around conceptual fundamentals, practical rudiments, and application of new skills. This format gives students the chance to take progressively take more ownership over their own process as the semester proceeds. I believe the best way to learn about archaeology is to learn to think like an archaeologist—the only way to truly do that is to work with real objects, records, and data. For example, in my GIS course, we learn about cultures of mapping and the mapping of cultures, before learning how to use mapping software—with this knowledge and these skills in hand, we then conclude the course with a hands-on project of digitizing, annotating, augmenting, and presenting historical maps. In my Radiocarbon class, we follow a similar progression, but with an emphasis instead on data re-use and replicability in archaeological practice. Ultimately, I want my students to come away from my courses with more than just content knowledge, but with new aptitudes and the confidence to deploy them for their own purposes beyond my classroom.
I am committed to exploring several key questions in my teaching across topics, including but not limited to:
Why and to whom does archaeology matter?
What impact does archaeology and knowledge of the past have in the world?
How should archaeologists orient themselves to the future in light of our real-world situation and the legacies of past archaeological practice?
How can we better understand ourselves and our connections to the places where we live now through an appreciation of the lives of its past inhabitants?
Courses
Anthro 2009: World Archaeology
Anthro 3261: Reading “The Dawn of Everything” in context
Anthro 373: Introduction to GIS for Anthropologists
Anthro 379: The Archaeology of Climate Change
Anthro 4050: The Archaeology of Politics and The Politics of Archaeology
Anthro 4104: Advances in Chronological Modeling