New Angles on Life's Big Questions—"The Poetics of Time and Place: Viewpoints on the Millennium"

By Genevieve Shiffrar

December 21, 2000

In the fall of 2000, three anthropology professors co-taught a course designed in keeping with their dreams for how a lower-division undergraduate course should be taught. The faculty, Drs. Ruth Tringham, Rosemary Joyce, and Margaret Conkey incorporated their visionary philosophies in "The Poetics of Time and Place: Viewpoints on the Millennium," a class offered through the College of Letters and Science's College Courses program.

L & S College Courses aims to embrace the highest ideals of the liberal arts education. It offers courses that demand greater challenge and risk to both students and faculty than many introductory courses satisfying L & S breadth requirements.

In this case, Professors Tringham, Joyce and Conkey asked their students to tackle two of life's biggest questions—what is the meaning of time and place—through the study of prehistoric, early historic and ethnographic contexts in various parts of the world.

Offering the course in the 2000-2001 school year begged them to address the notion of the millennium. We use the millennium as a tool to help us make sense of our world, just as Neolithic and Bronze Age people constructed Stonehenge and the ancient Maya designed their calendar to demarcate the passage of time.

Dr. Conkey, far right at left, working with students on a laptop computer.

Each of these faculty members are dedicated to creating rich and lasting learning experiences. Most notably, Dr. Tringham is serving a three-year term as the fifth Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education. She believe that opportunities for learning increase dramatically when students create knowledge for the benefit of others—a task usually reserved for faculty. Her goal as Chair has been to develop with her colleagues courses in which students create web- or CD-ROM-based multimedia learning environments for the study of archaeology.

While two-thirds of the class time of College Course LS120 was devoted to lectures on topics such as archaeoastronomy, the remaining lecture time and all discussion/lab sessions focused on the production of seven student-team multimedia modules. These projects explored topics such as the ways in which contemporary people perceive the importance of Stonehenge and the intertwining of time and place among Australian indigenous societies.

Nearly 100 students enrolled in this course. Despite this larger class size, emphasis on the projects demanded that the student groups worked closely with faculty and graduate student instructors, giving to everyone involved the feeling of a small seminar.

Production took place in the MACTiA lab, the Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology, where students learned the professional tools of multimedia production.

Working in teams, students found themselves in "real world" scenarios. Each student brought to their team a unique perspective to the material. The teams had to grapple with how to accommodate these multiple perspectives while developing cohesive and meaningful instructional modules.

In this situation, students tended not to reiterate what they believed their professors wanted them to hear. Rather, they were more likely to articulate persuasively their individual perspectives when among their peers. Professors Tringham, Joyce, and Conkey believe that through this peer-to-peer learning students are better able to integrate multiple perspectives into the subject matter, leading to more nuanced understanding of the issues at hand.

Ultimately, they hope that students learned ways to come to terms with their differences, to weave them together making each voice stronger.

Students presented their work December 11 in a gala celebration; the projects are available for viewing through the MACTiA website. The modules include:

• "Aboriginal Dreaming" describes ways in which Australian indigenous societies understand time and place through storytelling.
• "Ancestral Monuments" studies stone megaliths such as Stonehenge and related structures as nexus of understanding for people today.
• "King's Lists of Egypt" investigates the chronological concept used by ancient Egyptians to structure time according to the lineage of kings.
• "Journey to Angkor" explores the ways in which art and architecture illuminate the cosmology of the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor Wat.
• "Cahokia" describes the largest earthen mound in North America. The site included an observatory built of wood.
• "Culture Clash" compares the similarities and differences between two cultural encounters—that of Cortez and the Aztecs with that of Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians.
• "Incas of the Andes" uses metaphors of architecture to study the uses of modularity in expansion of the Incan empire.

	Students presenting "Angkor Wat"
	Students presenting "Aboriginal Dreaming"