Education and Outreach

[Austin Ainsworth]

quote:Originally posted by mercenary

I'm curious about experiences of any field archs out there who have managed to land education and outreach jobs. My partner has been trying to do this for years with no success. She is otherwise extremely skilled and motivated and has no obvious personality flaws, but has utterly failed to crack this field. We have come to the admittedly slightly paranoid conclusion that there is a prejudice against 'dirty' archaeologists in some related fields. [?]

I was also a 'dirty' field archaeologist with 20 years of field experience behind me; perseverence, dogged determination and a refusal to take no for an answer was my response, in the end it got me where I wanted to be.

Mercenary, your partner needs to be of bloody minded determination and willing to take numerous knockbacks, my best wishes go with her; its a position that I now hold and will continue for as long as is humanly possible in the full knowledge that such is hard fought for and worthwhile.

Advise your partner to stress in any application her skills and strengths in outreach experiences which she may have gained in 'dirty' fieldwork jobs. site tours for school students, lectures for U3A, projects, projects for previously excluded segments of the community are all relevant. Thinking outside the box is also extremely valuable, see my posts in other threads about outreach possibilities; I have BAJR's support for community engagement projects which are connected with diverse elements of the local community, I got my job by talking at my interview about excluded communities and on-line audiences.

May your partner be equally successful,

Oz

[shovelnomore]

Basically, education and outreach is a very technical area to work in with very specific conceptual differences from 'dirty' archaeology. The skills overlap, but you need to totally rethink how you present them in terms of emphasis and language. The PGCE will help, probably mainly to get you thinking in the right mindset and using terms that the outreach bosses (who, after all have an education background...) will understand. That said, relevant qualifications never hurt.

I fell into training/youth work when I packed in archaeology 10 years ago. I then went back to archaeology soon after, but have fallen in and out of education/training since then with some mixed results. It wasn't something I ever really planned, which I appreciate is annoying for those who have tried really hard with no success, but it is possible. It's helped my archaeology and general personal development (I think), so it's been worth it- if nothing else it tided me over a lean period when almost everyone else got laid off. Good luck, but make sure you adapt to a different way of thinking and presenting yourself- that's the key.

[mercenary]

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll pass it on. She is bloody minded, so hopefully it will see her through.:face-approve: