Improving practical skills in bioarchaeology: enhancing web-based resources for teachers and students

Description

Round 6 Teaching Development Grant

This project addresses a number of key issues relevant to how students gain practical skills in zooarchaeology (the branch of archaeology dealing with the analysis of faunal remains from archaeological contexts).

Practical instruction in the identification of animal remains is included in many university courses. Owing to the lack of specialized collections of experimentally modified bones in which both causes and effects are known (e.g. butchery marks and gnawing marks), there is a need for a web-based set of tutorials that would allow students to gain further skills in the identification and interpretation of such marks. These tutorials would provide a means of self assessment for students and could be used as stand-alone materials for students seeking more detailed instruction, or be integrated into existing practical courses.

Zooarchaeology, along with other aspects of bio-archaeological research, is an important growth area in archaeological teaching at all levels of higher education, from courses aimed at widening access to higher education through to taught Masters courses. Despite widespread interest in the field, relatively few university departments have both the personnel and teaching collections required to teach students how to identify and interpret butchery and other modifications found on animal bones. The proposed project addresses this shortcoming by creating web-based tutorials detailing how to identify bone modification that are based on an existing experimental collection curated at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge.

The proposed project will create a set of tutorials that teach students how to distinguish between different kinds of butchery marks (e.g. stone tool, metal knife, metal cleaver, saw) and gnawing marks (e.g. dog, rodent) based on annotated digital photographs of recent bones modified under controlled conditions. The project seeks funding for the collaborator (Mr Seetah) to make the digital images and annotate them and develop the web-based tutorials. These web-based tutorials will thus ‘plug the gap’ between the few institutions with research collections detailing bone modifications, and the wide range of potential users from throughout the HE sector as well as archaeological units, further education students, and other interested parties who do not have hands-on access to comparative collections of modified bones. This project also takes advantage of an established and ever-expanding trend amongst students to forego written texts and explore ‘on-line’ reference material. Crucially however, this resource will also have an interactive interface that will provide instant feedback through which students can assess their practical abilities and measure their improvement and identify areas in their knowledge that require more practiced learning. This will make the learning experience more enjoyable and fruitful, making a positive contribution to class and laboratory based study.

This project will:

• establish a web-based interactive resource with categories of agents of bone modification represented by high resolution (to facilitate printing) annotated digital imagery;
• incorporate interactive tutorials with real-time evaluative component in the form of on-line assessments that will allow students to test their practical abilities and identify strengths / areas that need improvement;
• make the proposed web-resource accessible to institutions and interested individuals from a range of educational backgrounds that might not otherwise have access to accurate and annotated examples of faunal remains showing evidence of taphonomic alteration;
• present transferable model that can be adopted by other bio-archaeological sub-disciplines.

Key areas of teaching and learning that will be developed are as follows:

• Curriculum development:
  This project will be developed around teaching resources and collections currently used for undergraduates taking practical courses in zooarchaeology at University of Cambridge. The effectiveness and utility of these web-based tutorials will be tested in a range of contexts, ranging from courses aimed at access to HE (through Higher Education Field Academies run by Carenza Lewis), Diploma courses taught as part of continuing education (through Madingley Hall), core undergraduate teaching, and teaching on taught master’s courses in archaeological science and world archaeology. These web-based tutorials will become a crucial aid and enhance the learning experience by allowing students to practice their identification and interpretive skills taken from archaeological material and modern experimentally created analogues. In the future this resource could be developed to incorporate other aspects of zooarchaeological teaching in order to improve skills associated with basic bone identification and the aging of faunal remains. Furthermore, it presents a valuable model for other bio/environmental archaeology sub-disciplines.
• Widening participation:
  As discussed above, these tutorials could be used to widen participation. Use of these tutorials may require increased instructor input at the HE Access and Diploma level. The tutorials will be designed, however, to be used as a stand-alone resource by students from a range of backgrounds and with varying levels of experience.
• Groupwork:
  An underlying problem facing teaching staff within zooarchaeology is that students show varying aptitudes for acquiring the practical skills necessary for identifying bone modification. Additionally, there is often disparity in the amount of time individual students are able to devote to extra-curricula lab based practice sessions. The proposed project addresses both of these issues as it will allow students who may require more practice in order to gain identification skills to do so in their own time. Furthermore, it removes the restriction of ‘lab-opening-times’ allowing students to learn at their own pace, within an environment in which they feel comfortable. Ultimately, this improves overall groupwork within the lab environment (where much of the practical zooarchaeological teaching occurs) as there is less disparity in the skill level of individual students.
• Alternative approaches to assessment:
  These tutorials would provide students with the opportunity to assess their progress; the confidence they will acquire should yield benefits in terms of individual performance on quizzes, practical projects, and other more traditional forms of assessment within the classroom.

The proposed project has the potential to have a far-reaching beneficial influence on the discipline as a whole. Zooarchaeology is recognised as an essential aspect of archaeology; however it is a highly practical sub-discipline and teaching zooarchaeology depends on material that is not always readily available. University departments need to procure, create and curate a specific type of archaeological artefact-modern analogue, namely modified animal bones. Increasingly, health and safety regulations make creation of recent analogues a complex and difficult undertaking; in any case, it is ever more important that we make fuller use of the resources we have already. By digitising an available resource, this project will make it possible to disseminate the valuable data (annotated images of modified bones) and teaching resource (web-based tutorials) to other departments, institutions, and individuals interested in archaeological animal remains. Ultimately it benefits the subject as a whole, not just the individual departments, as it generates interest in archaeology, facilitates the learning of key skills, and removes barriers to learning in circumstances where material is not available for students.

The project will, among other outputs, lead to a report, teaching resources and course materials shared or linked through the Subject Centre website.

Start date

Amount