Dynamic process, static document. How to solve the teacher’s baffling problem?
Alexis Gorgues, Florent Comte
Abstract As Lewis Binford noticed a long time ago, the main issue when dealing with archaeological data is to understand dynamic processes (the way Ancient societies worked) through the use of a basically static documentation, i.e. the material record. As an archaeology teacher, one of us (AG) could observe that it in no way easier to try to explain dynamic processes to student by using only a static graphic support (some PowerPoint slides) –which is the standard practice in French academic teaching-. To explain site formation processes, for instance, only through some slides, and armed with a marker and a blackboard, is possible, but will be time (and energy!) consuming… and can be pedagogically poorly effective. This observation brought us to conceive dynamic pedagogical supports intended to be used in a context of direct interaction with the students. These support were indeed animation videos, often based on real case studies. Their topics were quite diversified: the first we made was about site formation processes, another one allowed to explain how to draw a stratigraphic section and what phenomenon it allow to describe. One of the most successful is about archaeological sites detection. The constitution of the funerary record was also considered. This initiative took place with a very limited financial support. Yet, student’s feedback is very positive, and the pedagogical efficiency of the teaching is improved: more complex idea can be effectively transmitted in fewer time. In this presentation, we propose to show some of these videos as well as to present the comments made by our 2nd year undergraduate students, who are our main “target”, in order to demonstrate the combination of digital technology one the one hand and old-fashioned, direct archaeology teaching can give convincing results.
