Rambles and Reflections: An introduction

Tuesday 17th Jan 2023 I am a Professor of Archaeology and Pedagogy at the University of Manchester. In the broadest terms this means that I teach about Archaeology and Heritage and I think about, research and lead on teaching and learning in all sorts of different ways at the University and beyond. I believe passionately …

Inclusive teaching and mentoring for structural change: Reflections on the CIfA conference 2023 (Part 2!) – 11th May 2023

This is the second part of my reflections on April’s CIfA conference in Nottingham. The first part (which you can read here) focused on my thoughts around EDI, CIfA’s code of conduct, ethics and structural change that is needed in the profession. Those themes underpin this second reflection but also connect much more with teaching …

EDI activism and the need for structural change: Reflections on the CIfA conference 2023 (Part 1!) – 28th April 2023

Buckle up folks, it’s quite a long one today….! Though if you haven’t the time, the TLDR is that what I learnt from attending the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA) annual conference in Nottingham last week is that brilliant people are doing amazing work to try and change our profession, but we still need profound, …

18th April 2023: AI Bingo and a radical rethinking of Higher Education at the Times Higher Education Digital Universities Conference

I wrote a blog entry about the T&L roundtable that Karina and I ran on AI back in February of this year. It has only been a few months since then but the frenzy around AI seems to be continuing apace within Higher Education and beyond. At my own institution a number of working groups …

29th March 2023: Field-tripping!

The other day I watched an episode of Digging for Britain and, rather like when one sees a beautiful cake and can almost taste it, I found my hand curling as if round a trowel handle! I watched the people excavating and I wished so much I was in the field. I often wish this …

17th March 2023: AdvanceHE’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference 2023

This week I was really lucky to attend AdvanceHE’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference in Hull (supported to attend very kindly by the University of Manchester's Institute of Teaching and Learning). If you’re not familiar with them, AdvanceHE are “a member-led charity of and for the [Higher Education] sector that works with partners across the …

10th March 2023: Decolonizing as process in teaching and learning archaeology and heritage

Decolonization, as Tuck and Yang (2012) so brilliantly highlight, is not a metaphor, and in my teaching in the last couple of weeks this has been really clearly highlighted. I’ve been working on decolonizing my teaching for some time and I’m really inspired by some of the papers that came out in the last couple …

8th February 2023: AI, Ungrading and Authentic Assessment

I don’t know about you, but since December I have found the conversations I am having with colleagues around AI have been increasing exponentially! This was stimulated by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the very end of November. This AI platform has sent academia into a tailspin because of its ability to generate relatively …

18th January 2023 – Enabled Archaeology and Universal Design for Learning

This week my pedagogic partner in crime, Karina Croucher, and I held our first Teaching and Learning in Archaeology and Heritage Roundtable of 2023. We’ve been running these lovely, monthly online sessions for nearly two years now! (You can see details of upcoming events here and our not-quite-completely-up-to-date archive of past sessions here, including details …

Digging Diversity 2 – Interim Results

In 2011 I undertook Digging Diversity, a study to examine diversity in UK Archaeology (Cobb 2015, Cobb and Croucher 2016). I repeated this survey in the autumn of 2017, with some extra questions added, and will publish this in full in due course. In the mean time, I have presented findings from Digging Diversity 2 …