My teaching is informed by a social justice approach – both for the content I include in my classes and in my approach to students. I address the ways that inequality is often built into the structures of our disciplines, but also highlight lessons from the past that we can use to imagine different presents and different futures.

There is a maxim within archaeology that interpretation happens “at the trowel’s edge”. What this idea tries to capture is that interpretation takes place at every step of the research process, and that it is through the interactions and dialogues of investigators, each with their own perspectives and strengths, that knowledge is produced. As a professor of archaeology and anthropology I try to bring this field sentiment into my classroom. I see teaching and learning as interwoven elements where both instructor and student work together to co-create new understandings of things and actions that may otherwise be taken for granted. I extend this emphasis on co-creation to the knowledge that students create amongst themselves, and because of this I emphasize meaningful group work in all of my classes.

The relationship between classroom knowledge and practice is one that is of particular concern to me as an archaeologist. An early switch that I made in my teaching, after my first year in the classroom, was to move away from exams or other high-stakes tests and towards problem-based inquiry and experiential learning. I augment my classroom discussions with hands-on activities and analysis of real or ideal archaeological data sets, some of which I develop out of my own field research. These activities provide students with an opportunity to apply the social issues and theories we have discussed to the physical manifestation of the material record. Archaeology as a discipline is ideal for the use of active learning techniques in the classroom, as so much of what we do requires engagement with the material world. I see so often how students in my archaeology classes are able to understand broad concepts better after having had an opportunity to put a portion of the concept into practice, such as developing artifact classifications or analyzing a hypothetical cemetery and applying concepts of social hierarchy and identity. Because of those successes I now do the same in my other anthropology courses. Even if it is just applying concepts from the course to analyze a popular news article, the results of increased understanding, lively class discussion, and overall improved academic performance are the same.

In my courses I ask students to question taken-for-granted aspects of life. My classrooms are not simply about mastery of topical materials but also about exposure to different ways of life and developing skills to understand and be sensitive to those differences. Presenting controversial topics in class, such as racism, structural sources of poverty, or gender discrimination, is done to challenge students to think about the variety of ways that these issues exist and are dealt with in different cultures, and to frame class discussions and debates in logical and respectful ways. I believe that developing these skills, both of cross-cultural awareness and also respectful debate, are essential in our ever-more interconnected world.

I facilitate a classroom in which all students view their backgrounds as relevant to the themes of the course and appreciate that a diversity of experiences can aid everyone’s understanding. I promote an open classroom that fosters student participation in discussions and encourages students to draw on examples from their own lives that are relevant to the discussion. I bring diverse voices into the classroom through readings and course activities, and I am upfront with students about what the discipline needs to do to address issues of ethnic and gender representation. I ask students to create an archaeologist trading card by randomly selecting a name from a list I prepare. These individuals are often ones not included in the textbook, including African-American and Indigenous scholars, and early women pioneers in the field. I also invite a number of colleagues to Skype into the class and speak with the students about their work. Again, I select individuals that are often from underrepresented groups or who are critically examining the discipline of archaeology itself. These guest contributions give students a broader perspective about the discipline and humanize the study of the past as they learn directly from archaeologists.

Expressing my passion for anthropology as a life-long student of the discipline is one of the easiest ways to engage students in the material. Through my enthusiasm for the subject, students see that I am engaged with the material, and that there are questions that still need to be answered. This encourages them to ask those questions and look for connections themselves. I share stories from my fieldwork and my research – both those moments of frustration and of discovery – to help my students understand that, for me, anthropology is not simply a job but a field I am invested in. I know that that majority of students who are in my classes will not be anthropology majors, so I make the most of the time I have with them, to convey the passion I have for a subject and encourage a similar drive in them. I recognize the responsibility I have to colleagues who will teach my students in the future, and the debt I owe to those who have taught them previously. There are few things more gratifying than when students are able to see a place for themselves in the discipline, through the passion I have shared.

Students bring their own interests and goals to each course. At the start of each course I survey the class members to determine their motivations and goals for taking the course and their major academic and personal interests. I draw on these interests and goals when developing activities and supplemental materials to encourage maximal participation and also to help learners draw connections between course content and other elements of their lives. For example, I find that many of my Introduction to Archaeology students are enrolled in engineering fields. With this knowledge I highlight aspects of technology in class lectures, when appropriate, and look for resources that bridge anthropology and the math and engineering fields to emphasize the multidisciplinarity and wide applicability of anthropology to a variety of topics. This approach is part of a larger personal philosophy of treating students as whole persons, and not just as the students of anthropology in the moment in which I encounter them. This is a perspective I derived in part from my time as an academic advisor, as I helped students not just through their anthropology courses but their college career and occasionally life challenges. I want to know each student as a whole person, whether I interact with them in a class of 10 or 120. Students recognize this concern, and my commitment to this principle led me to be awarded an Accessibility Achievement Award (see Supplemental Material) by University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Student Accessibility Services. This guiding principle of compassion has never been so important as it is now under a global pandemic.