Please follow this link https://selectsurveys.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=ll0Inol1 to answer a few short questions.
This will take you less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is totally anonymous so feel free to be as honest and it will stay open until Monday 9th March 2015.
Project outline
The project is led by students Matt Hitchcock, Stephanie McCulloch and Liya Walsh, along with lecturer Dr. Hannah Cobb, from the University of Manchester.
Their intention is to capture the views of UK archaeology students surrounding their experiences of fieldwork. To find out whether students feel like they are valued in the field or whether they just feel like a ‘number’ or a ‘cog in the machine’.
While a certain amount of direction is necessary, they aim to ascertain whether student are merely told about the theoretical direction of the excavation as it progresses, or whether they are given the theoretical tools necessary to make and contribute their own interpretations.
This feedback will be used to highlight some of the current issues within archaeological pedagogy and offer some potential solutions.survey is being conducted by a team of students and staff from the University of Manchester, and is funded by the University of Manchester Learning through Research fund.
The results will be presented at the CIfA 2015 conference in Cardiff on March 15th.
Visible diggers? Engagement and communication: a student perspective.
Matthew Hitchcock, Stephanie McCulloch, Liya Walsh (University of Manchester)
This is a session that is about the future of engagement, and we are the future of engagement! We are a team of students undertaking a piece of research to understand whether students feel valued, and indeed whether they are valued, in the interpretive process. In this paper we will present the findings of our study and we will think about the implications of them for how engagement occurs – can the experiences of students help us think about how we communicate in the field with other audiences who do archaeology?
There will also be a short article which may hopefully appear in the CIfA’s The Archaeologist Magazine.
Keep an eye on the project and some of the findings on the website https://visiblediggersmcr.wordpress.com/