Collection
Archaeology in Support of School Learning
In this special issue, archaeologists and educators alike have come together to create a novel multimedia project to celebrate the ways African archaeology and school learning can and should contribute to each other. Aligning with the UN SDG 4 (Quality Education) , these authors have created a resource that is for everyone, complete with curriculum prompts, original art, and video interviews below. Author and editor Allison Balabuch welcomes you with a video here: Welcome.
A note on the issue from editor Ann Stahl:
Archaeology provides a long historical lens on the paths that shaped today’s world and lends important perspective as we contemplate uncertain futures. Too often, however, school curriculum in Africa and elsewhere emphasizes only recent history, that of prominent people and named states, or histories from places other than Africa. As an integrative subject that crosscuts the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts, archaeology holds expansive potential to enrich school- and community-based learning. Whether as a classroom subject or source of classroom examples, archaeology has the advantage of fostering and honing skills through problems and materials that fascinate. Developing learning resources based in archaeological insights into Africa’s pasts can aid decolonization of curriculum within and outside the continent, at the same time as offering many opportunities for hands-on and active learning aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development goals, ranging from Quality Education (Goal 4) to Zero Hunger (Goal 2), Gender Equality (Goal 5), Decent Work (Goal 8), Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10), Sustainable Cities and Communities (Goal 11), Responsible Consumption and Production (Goal 12), Climate Action (Goal 13), Life on Land (Goal 15) and Cultural Identity and Heritage (Goal 16).
A barrier to realizing archaeology’s potential to enrich school learning is communication. Archaeologists typically write about their work for specialist rather than wider audiences. In this special open-access issue of the African Archaeological Review, a group of archaeologists and educators come together to offer accessible, story-rich reflections on key topics in African archaeology, with an audience of K-12 educators in mind. Our aim is model compelling stories that archaeologists can offer to inspire classroom learning, at the same time as encouraging greater collaboration among archaeologists and educators committed to a pedagogy of renewal and student-centered learning. We aim to inspire development of a growing set of classroom resources on African archaeology like those available through the University of Victoria’s “African Archaeology in Support of School Learning” collection, freely accessible to educators.
Springer is pleased to offer brief video interviews with some of the authors of the papers below. These videos are designed to capture the highlights of the research and their links to the SDGs, and to spotlight some of the many talented individuals who have contributed to this issue. They are just a sampling of the hundreds of authors that have published in the journal over the past forty years.
How does your heritage art engage with different audiences? by artist Naomi Mekonen
How did research inspire your art and how do you see art mixing with heritage?, Naomi Mekonen
What role does archaeology play in studies of diversity and in the death positivity movement?, Dil Singh Basanti
Why do you see art as an important partnership for archaeology?, Dil Singh Basanti
What can archaeologists and educators learn from each other?, Allison Balabuch
Why is archaeology a potentially fascinating topic for educators? Especially African archaeology?, Allison Balabuch
How can your research about past farmscapes in Africa inform or enrich the curriculum currently taught in schools? How is research about past farmscapes meaningful for students today? by Alex Schoemann and Alexa Höhn
A big focus of this special issue has been the intersections of archaeology and education. How did SDG 4 shape how you conceived and executed your research? by Alexa Höhn and Alex Schoemann
What excites you about farmscapes? What motivated your research into them? by Alexa Höhn and Alex Schoemann
What insights does the study of archeology provide to the understanding of sustainable development in cultural / historical education? by Emmanuel Mushayikwa, Alexa Höhn and Alex Schoemann
How does the study of farmscapes in archeology provide insights pertaining to the sustainable development of communities in Southern and Western Africa? by Emmanuel Mushayikwa and Alexa Höhn
What is your paper about and what does it tell us about the human experience? by Anne Haour
How does the paper contribute to the aims of the special issue? by Anne Haour
Editors
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Ann B. Stahl
(PhD, Berkeley, 1985). Professor and anthropological archaeologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Ann's long-term research has focused on how daily life in rural West Africa has been reshaped over centuries by involvement in global exchange networks. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (“Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past,” 2018-2022), she has collaborated with partners in Ghana and the University of Victoria Libraries to develop accessible digital heritage resources that help communities to sustain place-based relationships and foster knowledge revitalization.
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Allison Balabuch
A PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria, Allison earned her degrees from the University of British Columbia – a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science and a Bachelor of Education – and the University of Victoria – a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction. She has been a French Immersion teacher for 25 years in British Columbia and England. Her teaching and research are centered on project-based learning, arts-based learning, land-based learning, and interdisciplinary studies in the classroom. Her current research is focused on community-based and interdisciplinary studies.
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Kathy Sanford
Professor, Language & Literacy, University of Victoria
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Amanda Logan
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
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Katherine Grillo
Katherine Grillo (PhD Washington University, 2012) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and an affiliate faculty member with the Center for African Studies, at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of African Archaeology. Her research examines long-term histories of cattle-based pastoralism in eastern Africa, and she currently co-directs archaeological projects in the Turkana Basin of northwestern Kenya and at the site of Luxmanda in north-central Tanzania.
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Ibrahima Thiaw
Ibrahima Thiaw is a Professor of Archaeology at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal where he directs the Archaeology Laboratory and the Research Unit in Cultural Engineering and Anthropology. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in Houston Texas (1999) and has conducted research on material culture and heritage management in Africa, community engagement, decolonial curatorial practices, the politics of memory and identity and the long-term impacts of slavery and colonization in the making of the modern world.
Articles (11 in this collection)
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Global Connections and Connected Communities in the African Past: Stories from Cowrie Shells
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How African Pasts Can Inspire Alternative Responses to Climate Change: a Creative Writing Experiment
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African Archaeology in Support of School Learning: an Introduction
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
