Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Creating Archaeological Education Resources with Local Teachers' Needs in Mind

Abstract

Archaeological education holds an important place in the advocacy efforts of museums, archaeological organizations, and schools. But for all of their benefits, many of these programs are designed to accommodate a series of competing interests; all too often, the interests of archaeologists win out over those of educators. In order to correct this tendency, we can apply the same theoretical concerns that govern traditional collaborative archaeological research to the design of education programs. Embracing community-based participatory research (CBPR)’s tenets of community involvement at every stage translates to teacher input that ensures that lesson plans and programs designed to introduce archaeology to schoolchildren are designed such that they can be realistically implemented in public classrooms with their own standards in place. This project aims to do just that, by creating a set of educational resources and lesson plans about archaeology for the sixth-grade social studies department at Newfield Middle School in Newfield, NY. By working closely with a sixth-grade teacher, I tailored these resources directly to the needs and requirements that her students and administrators have.