Jean Baudrillard, the only vaguely theory-relevant photo I could find. Photo by litmuse.
A couple of years ago that title would have sounded a siren in my head, “Run away! Run away!” It’s an article I found while browsing in the library to see if we had anything new. I found that we’ve got Public Archaeology, and this article stood out in the current issue.
One reason is that I’m a lot more interested in how teaching works since I started working with the i-Science group. The Interdisciplinary Science course is taught entirely by Problem-Based Learning, and I had more or less a free hand to develop a Stonehenge module, so long as it was taught by PBL. Which meant finding out what PBL was. It’s radically different to the other courses on offer at Leicester. Rather than running for a term it runs for just four weeks, and there are very few lectures in the course. I think it’s about four or five hours. On the other hand there’s an awful lot of seminar work, so it’s not a soft option. Playing around with what you can do to teach something has opened my mind to all sorts of possibilities in teaching. While I was sceptical of the paper, I thought it was worth reading through to see what Smith and Burke have to say about teaching, and I’m glad I did.
There’s a section of the preface in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett which, I think, sums up a lot of the problem in teaching theory.
In the front of his marvellous new book, Metaphysical Myths, Mathematical Practices: The Ontology and Epistemology of the Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), my colleague Jody Azzouni thanks “the philosophy department at Tufts University for providing a near-perfect environoment in which to do philosophy.” I want to second both the thanks and the evaluation. At many universities, philosophy is studied but not done – “philosophy appreciation,” one might call it – and at many other universities, philosophical research is an arcane activity conducted out of sight of the undergraduates and all but the most advanced postgraduates, At Tufts, we do philosophy, in the classroom and among our colleagues, and the results, I think, show that Azzouni’s assessment is correct.
I think one of the problems in teaching theory to undergraduates is that teaching is exactly what many courses do. The idea behind PBL was not only that students learn but that you equip them to apply what they know to new problems. If you give students theoretical tools to think about archaeology then it’s not just useful, it’s more enjoyable because the students can see a connection between what they’re doing and the rest of archaeology. A lot of archaeological theory courses are more history of archaeological thought. This isn’t exciting. Students signed up to learn about Celts or Mayans, not middle-class white professors of the twentieth century. Further the historical aspect suggests that a lot of theory is now irrelevant. We don’t need to bother with culture history because it’s been superseded by processualism and we don’t need to bother with processualism because it’s been superseded by post-processualism. So two-thirds of the theory course is dead before it’s begun.
From the classical perspective this isn’t an issue. Neville Morley has recently written an excellent book Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History which tackles theory in Classics. This might come as a bit of shock to some archaeologists. Some love to talk about how under-theorised Classics is. Morley shows this is just rot. The average archaeological theory textbook starts with a brief chapter saying “Hello, I’m the author, this is a book,” before moving into chapter two which is an earnest discussion of why theory is important. Morley’s chapter one also says, saying “Hello, I’m the author, this is a book,” but chapter two is a dive into the ancient economy, with chapter three then as a discussion of what was theoretical about chapter two and other problems in ancient history. His book, which I might review in more detail when I remember where I’ve stowed it, is geared around problems students might have like economy, gender or identity rather than Big Theorists. Archaeologists say that theory not isolated, but inherent in reconstructing the past. Classicists act like they think this is true, which is why so few Classics departments offer Classical Theory as a module, it’s in all the courses they teach. Archaeological Theory is frequently taught in isolation as a staple of the second year of an archaeology course.
Smith and Burke’s article is so interesting because they tackle Dennett’s problem straight on. They outline an approach which leads not just to students learning about theory, but also doing theory. They do it with two techniques which aren’t often found pushed to the front of an archaeology course. Fun and Rôle-play.
They’re quite emphatic that fun is a way of getting the students to engage with the topic. This does clash with the puritanical approach to education in that’s its for self-improvement not fun. No pain, no gain. This is nonsense. Archaeologists research the areas that interest them, not the most worthy areas (whatever they are) because they wouldn’t be so much fun. Why shouldn’t undergraduates also be motivated by interest and fun? To suggest that they wouldn’t implies they’re somehow sub-human. You can insert your own punchline here. Rôle-play as a learning technique is more challenging and something I could have doubts about. In the way they approach the subject it does look like it would work.
The big advantage that the history of archaeological theory approach has is that it introduces theoretical perspectives one at a time. If you were to simply start with ‘gender’ and expect students to discuss theory then you’re rather expecting them to have read culture-historical, processual, Darwinian, structuralist, post-structuralist, phenomenological etc. etc. papers on the subject. The historical approach at least works on the assumption of no prior knowledge. If the students rôle play positions then it removes the quantity of reading necessary before a lecture/seminar. So one student or group merely has to represent a feminist position of gender to the rest of the group, and then another group present a Darwinian approach and so on. You can then structure the lecture around the differences in the approaches and talk about where these differences come from. The historical approach can sometimes lead to the impression that subsequent theoretical positions replace earlier positions because they were wrong. The comparison of places theoretical positions onto the same problem can in fact show that often while the concepts are similar, the theorists are actually asking very different questions of the archaeology, and that some questions are not intrinsically superior to others.
So what happens if you get lumbered with a theorist who’s a nutter? What if you’re an ardent post-modernist and you get Binford? Smith and Burke clearly show a difference between rôle-play and advocacy. They note that by tackling a theoretical position that they oppose the students nevertheless learn more about that position than the caricatures that theoretical opponents often present of each other. Students might not get converted to the opposite side, but they at least question where their own positions may come from. It’s an imaginative approach. I liked the theorist trading cards. The example they have is of Louis Binford, Pokémon style, with notes on strengths, weakness and special skills. Comparing strengths and weaknesses suggests that the students are forming a balanced view of their archaeologist. This is built on in the model.
Smith and Burke also had their students make models of their archaeologist. This was the element I struggled with earlier. I have no skill in modelling. I did Art with a specialism in Pottery* and got GCSE ‘U’ (ungraded – 7% would have got me a pass at G). Creating a model of an archaeologist would be a frustrating thing. With some more thought, I can see that I could have used an Action Man as the base, though I can’t recall which theorist has a Kung-Fu grip. I’m still agnostic to the idea, but I can see how thinking about the model might help thought about where the person behind the theory came from.
Usually papers have a cumulative effect. An individual paper nudges you along one line of thought or another. Neville Morley’s book was different because it got me thinking that theory could be taught in a different way. Similarly Smith and Burke’s paper has got me thinking how I could apply some of the things I’ve learned from PBL to theory. I don’t think I can just drag ‘n’ drop their method into a lecture course, different people have different lecture styles, but the paper is certainly provocative and worth reading even if you don’t plan to take many/any of their ideas.
The full reference is:
Smith C. and Burke, H. 2005. Becoming Binford: Fun ways of teaching archaeological theory and method. Public Archaeology 4, 35-49.
*I wanted to do technical graphics, but that was full at my school. The only CDT subject I had any talent for was Technical Drawing, so I was thrust into Pottery which was in a side-room to keep me out of the way.
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