Category Archives: Summer Teaching

Bill Caraher, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Crossposted to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Last month we were lucky enough to have the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Honors College World Tour 2009 visit us for 10 days in Cyprus.  Contrasting the approach used by this group to the approach used by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project to a study tour/field school was quite useful.  In fact, it led to several productive conversations with IUP Economics Professor Nick Karatjes who asked whether there existed a body of discipline-specific scholarship on study tours and field schools.  I confessed that I did not know whether any existed, and this got me to thinking about what a scholarship of study tours or field schools would look like.  What would be the key issues to a discussion of study tours in the context of Mediterranean archaeology or of humanities based study tours more generally?

Thinking on the fly, I propose 3 issues that would be good starting points to a conversation about teaching in the sun:

1) Assessment. As with all things in the academy today, any conversation on teaching in the sun must begin and end with assessment.  How do we assess student learning in immersive environments? Unlike assessment in a classroom environment where many rubrics focus on what goes on within the limited confines of the classroom itself, assessing the success or failure of a field school or study tour must take into account all of the components under the direct control of the project supervisors.  Thus, any mode of assessment must take into consideration everything from the basic logistical details (food, accommodation, travel) to the more typical pedagogical components of the education experience.  The pedagogical experience expands from the laboratory like environment of the classroom to encompass the full range of student experiences. 

2) The Limits of Student Engagement.  As so much of the value of the study tour or field school is the potential for immersion in a unfamiliar place or engaging in the regular practical application of skills acquired either in the field or in the classroom.  Both the need to survive in a foreign country and the need to consistently perform tasks or demonstrate skills in a “real world” environment requires a degree of student engagement in excess of the typical course in the humanities.  The stakes can be higher too.  The failure of a student to perform a task correctly over the course of a field school could produce results that either undermine the goal of the team or invalidate research results.  The inability to deal with a foreign environment can cause a degree of mental discomfort that may exceed the discomfort produced in all but the most rigorous courses.  The key in aspect then in a scholarly engagement with study tours or field schools will be how to successfully engage the students in their skill building exercises and foreign environment both the maximize their experiences and to avoid difficult results.  At the same time, it is necessary to understand the background and potential of a group of students to determine the degree to which they are capable of engaging their surroundings.  Pushing a group of students to go beyond their comfort zone can be good, but going a step to far could have unfortunate results.

3) Structure and Chaos.  One of the key components of any study tour or field school is balancing organized or structured learning opportunities against unstructured opportunities for students to explore their surrounding and engage the local culture on their own terms.  On the one hand, living and working in a foreign country is a great opportunities for students to engage critically with everyday life in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, to simulate within more familiar surroundings (only abroad can going to the post office be an opportunity for cross-cultural critique).  Unstructured opportunities for engagement put greater pressure on the individual student to create a meaningful space for themselves within a foreign culture.  On the other hand, unstructured time requires the faculty to allow students to find their comfort zone even if that is not the exact type of engagement that faculty might wish for the students.  The more organized and structured the engagement with the foreign culture is, however, the more that the experience of living and working abroad is partitioned off into a specific place and orchestrated set of experiences.  Less structured time, however, runs the risk of allowing students to chose not to engage with the host community and, say, hide in their rooms or only engage aspects of the local culture that seem familiar.

I wrote the body of this blog post when in Cyprus and reflecting on it now, I think that the three issues broached here apply to some extent to teaching and assessing learning in a classroom environment as well — except that when running a study tour or field school, these issues are pushed to the foreground as the instructor has far more control over the day-to-day life of the students than an instructor in a more traditional classroom setting.

William Caraher, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Dakota
R. Scott Moore, Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

(Crossposted to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog)

Classroom teaching hardly prepares you for the adventures and eventualities of teaching (in the broadest sense) while on site in a foreign country.  My colleagues, R. Scott Moore (IUP) and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College, Pa.), conduct archaeological research each summer in Cyprus and over the past few years have gradually increased the pedagogical and student components to this work.  This has forced us to balance our research goals — extracting good quality archaeological data from a site called Pyla-Koutsopetria — with teaching goals — giving the students not only an education in the history and culture of Cyprus but also in archaeological method and practice.  At the same time, we have to deal with the very real challenges of managing a group of students through the various stages of travel and culture shock.  Since many of our students come from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Dakota, schools that tend to produce students who do not have extensive experience outside the country, this can be as big a challenge as actually teaching historical, archaeological, or cultural content.

Many of our students have a tendency to be nervous about venturing out into the city of Larnaka where we live.  Some of this comes from the somewhat disorienting local street “grid” where everything seems slightly off parallel so streets are ever converging and diverging, and some comes from the words in the Greek alphabet (even though most important signs are translated into English).  Scott Moore proposed that we encourage the students to engage their surroundings through a scavenger hunt.  The students will take their digital cameras and crisscross the city taking photos of both practical features (like banks, pharmacies, and mailboxes) and various historical monuments and places across the city.  The goal of the latter is to form the foundation for discussion of religious and cultural pluralism on the island as well as make the students familiar with significant the local monuments and how history is inscribed in the local landscape.

PKAP 2009 Scavenger Hunt

Practical
1) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a pharmacy
2) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a ATM machine
3) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a public mail box
4) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a periptero or mini-market
5) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find an American restaurant
6) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 3 points – find a bookstore
7) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 3 points – find a Greek Orthodox church
8 ) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a bakery
9) ___ 2 points – find a Swiss restaurant
10) ___ 2 points – find an Irish restaurant
11) ___ 2 points – find a Chinese restaurant
12) ___ 2 points – find a Cypriot restaurant
13) ___ 2 points – find a Lebanese restaurant
14) ___ 3 points – find the post office
15) ___ 3 points – find the police station

Cultural
16) ___ 2 points – find Ayios Lazarus
17) ___ 2 points – find a mosque
18) ___ 2 points – find the castle/fort
19) ___ 2 points – find the statue of Cimon/Kimon
20) ___ 2 points – find the image of a chalcolithic figurine
21) ___ 2 points – find a coppersmith/metalworking shop
22) ___ 2 points – find the municipal market
23) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a street without a Cypriot Greek name
24) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a non Greek Orthodox church
25) ___ 1 point each up to 2 points – find a mudbrick building
26) ___ 2 points – find a shark fishing boat
27) ___ 2 points – find a large airplane
28) ___ 1 point each up to 2 points – find a sign in Russian
29) ___ 2 points – find a store selling Lefkara lace
30) ___ 2 points – find the Black Turtle restaurant
31) ___ 2 points – find a school
32) ___ 2 points – find an example of Gothic architecture
33) ___ 2 points – find an example of Ottoman architecture
34) ___ 2 points – find an example of Byzantine architecture
35) ___ 2 points – find an example of British Colonial architecture
36) ___ 2 points – find an ancient ship-shed
37) ___ 2 points – find a Greek flag
38) ___ 2 points – find a Cypriot flag
39) ___ 2 points – find an EU flag

Bonuses
40) ___ 5 points – find a Cypriot wedding or procession
41) ___ 5 points – find an American car make and model

Bill Caraher, Assistant Professor, Department of History

Cross-posted to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Staff Blog.

As the spring semester gradually recedes into memory, the summer beckons.  Many folks at the University of North Dakota, head off campus or switch gears on campus as they begin to focus on new summer research and teaching projects.  These projects, even when it’s just teaching a summer class, inevitably involve a change of pace.  The pace of the summer semester slows down for some; for others who look to the summer as a time of more intensive research and teaching find that the summer brings a new bustle to their routine.

I will be heading to the Mediterranean this summer, as I have for the last 6 years to conduct archaeological research on Greece and Cyprus.  This year, I’ll be joined in Cyprus by about 15 undergraduate and graduate students from across the US.  These students arrive with different expectations, different skills and experiences, and different ways of learning, but all of them expect to leave Cyprus after 4 weeks with a better grasp of the methods, theory, and practice of archaeology.  They’ll attempt to acquire these skills in the most distraction filled environment possible.  Not only will they be inserted into a fully-functioning archaeological research project, but one that is located in a beach side town (Larnaka, Cyprus) in a foreign country!  While it is easy to see how an travel outside the US provides additional opportunities to learn through experience, these same experiences can also provide considerable “background noise” to the more routine and regimented learning processes that we are accustomed to in the classroom.  (As much as we might embrace the chaos of Edu-punk, few of us turn our classroom into a night at CBGBs, but there are days in Cyprus, when the height of our research season meets head on with the annual summer festival in Larnaka (the Kataclysmos) that we’d embrace a daily routine that took on the relatively predictable routine of, say, an Iggy Pop show.)

Teaching in the sun, in Cyprus or anyway away from the standard routines of the classroom involves new strategies that not only allow students to absorb the chaotic realities of experience, but nevertheless ensures that they acquire basic skills essential to the courses (so to speak) that they are taking.  For us, it’s balancing between imparting the rigorous and structured requirements of “scientific” archaeological research and allowing them enough unstructured times to feel comfortable in a dynamic and complex foreign city.  This is particularly challenging for us because we also have research priorities each season.  On the one hand, this ensures that the students feel the genuine (and authentic) experience of professional, archaeological research with all its contingency and excitement.  On the other hand, this creates a place where some members of the project are constantly tempted to sacrifice the unstructured time for the structured and rigorous experiences of primary data gathering.  One season, we famously broke our students.  The senior staff were disappointed that this dedicated cadre of students weren’t taking in the local culture more consistency until we realized that after a grueling day in the field the students were collapsing on their beds and sleeping until dinnertime and then crashing out immediately after dinner clean up.   This was hardly an environment that cultivated students’ access to unstructured time!

Over subsequent seasons we’ve been better balancing work and play, but the balance is always deliberate.  Keep an eye on how well we are maintaining it through our Pyla-Koutsopetria Project Blog page.  And we’d love to hear how you find balances between summertime and teaching!  If you have an idea for a blog post send it along to either myself at billcaraher[at]gmail.com or anne_kelsch[at]und[dot]edu!