Help me make decisions!

[brigdh]

This summer, I'm teaching the 'Introduction to Archaeology' course at my university. I am super excited! I've TA'd this class four times (TA'ing in the sense of actually lecturing, not just being a grader), so I'm excessively familiar with it, but this is the first time I've gotten to be completely in charge: picking out the textbook, deciding what topics to cover, writing the syllabus, everything! I LOVE IT.

However, the actual process of writing a syllabus has made me realize what an enormously broad topic "Introduction to Archaeology" is. It's basically four courses in one: 1) the entirety of human history, including pre-human ancestors (quite a broad topic by itself); 2) how to do archaeology (field techniques, dating methods, etc); 3) archaeological theories that can be used in interpretation (gender, Marxism, structuralism, environmental archaeology, etc); 4) the history of archaeology as a subject, including modern consequences of archaeology (topics like NAGPRA, for example). That is way too much for 24 sessions, especially once you subtract sessions for the midterm, final, and introduction. Thankfully, having TA'd this course with four different professors, I know that we're allowed to basically pick whatever we think is the most interesting and focus on that. But sometimes decisions are really hard to make! Which is why I come to you, o LJ. For reference, most of the students who take this course tend not to be archaeology majors, but come from all departments- music, acting, biology, math, law, pre-med- you name it, I've had a student in it. In addition, they're letting some pre-college (i.e., high school) students sign up for the summer semesters.


[Poll #1740795]

Also, yes, I know the problems with the term 'civilization', but LJ polls do not allow enough characters to get into the whole thing about urbanization vs increased political complexity vs population increase vs writing as information storage vs the possibility of heterarchy as deliberate resistance to hierarchy, ETC ETC ETC, so basically I just mean the 'big name' cultures people think of when they think of archaeology.

Comments

[graene.livejournal.com]

That was really a hard choice to make. I went with one or two (two!) with paper/presentation on choice of the others, but I'm sort of assuming that means one or two lessons lost to super-quickie summaries of the list of others and/or overview readings on them. But doing two in greater depth would seem to give you more time to deal with the rest in more detail, including all the stuff about how as methods/theories/modern politics changed, our understanding of the data changed that I came to really quite late as a casual reader in the subject(s).

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Well, what I was thinking was I'd do one or two in depth, and then the students could do the super-quickie summaries of the others for their presentation, in front of the rest of the class. That way I wouldn't lose much time. No matter what, I've got six days to spend on civilizations, the question is just: one a day? Three for two days each? Two for two days each by me, then two days of student presentations? Two a day for four days by me, and then two days of student presentations?

I'm definitely giving a lot of time to theories/modern politics/etc in other parts of the class, as these are mostly going to be students whose main interaction with archaeology will be Indiana Jones/2012/Atlantis, and so I want them to have good critical thinking skills about that sort of stuff.