Writing in archaeology

Somerville, E. M., & Creme, P. (2005). ‘Asking Pompeii questions’: A co-operative approach to writing in the disciplines. Teaching in Higher Education, 10(1), 17-28.

Background

The authors noted that learning both essayist literacy – ways of writing and thinking academically in general – and disciplinary literacy was a challenge for students in higher education. They observed that this was a highly visible issue in a human sciences degree programme that included five disciplines – biology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and linguistics.

Aims

The authors wanted to explore the effects of introducing a writing strand into the first year archaeology course of an interdisciplinary human sciences degree. It was hoped that students would develop their writing during the course, which also required them to think about the nature of the different disciplinary approaches that they would encounter.

Sample

The sample consisted of first-year degree students offering an interdisciplinary human sciences degree.

Method

The course tutor worked with a writing tutor to introduce three two-hour writing workshops run by the writing tutor to enable the students to become more aware of their own writing and of the ways in which writing could be used to help their learning about archaeological topics that were novel to them. Assessment consisted of a portfolio of five written pieces, each completed at the end of a workshop. These included a reflective commentary reviewing the material contained in the portfolio and describing the experience of writing these short pieces to aid understanding of the subject. Finally, students completed an end of course essay.

Findings

The authors found that the free writing task at the end of each workshop allowed students to articulate their own voice more clearly. The work they had done in the free writing contributed to the structure of the final essay. In addition, the free writing was used as a way for students to explore examples of their own cultural change, as a way of relating the individual to the major cultural changes explored in the course. Compared to a previous cohort, the students involved in the study showed greater understanding of the requirement to use ‘archaeological imagination’ by explicitly developing the distinct viewpoints used in the discipline, and by contextualising them more appropriately in the context of archaeology as a discipline. As a result, the students’ marks improved over those of previous cohorts.

Implications

The authors felt that foregrounding writing in a mainstream course such as archaeology could be a powerful way of developing students’ writing, understanding and authority.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.