Evidence-based studies demonstrate that engaging all the senses in object centred learning (OCL) heightens student engagement, provides memorable learning experiences, encourages lifelong learning and enhances appetite for further study or employment. This paper describes and critically analyses the OCL that is employed in two second year Egyptology modules, and an extra-curricular project at Swansea University. I consider from my own experience the challenges of implementing best practice in OCL in a UK HE context. These include challenges encountered at module level (e.g., embedding OCL in course design and lesson planning), at a curriculum-level as well as at an institutional-level (e.g. access to collections, staffing, and crossing administrative/faculty boundaries). The paper concludes that while there are clear benefits to the current offer of OCL design as measured by student attendance, performance, module evaluation and post-graduate study choices, certain areas, for example, opportunities for skills progression and embedding OCL in degree schemes require further refinement.
Wonderful so thank you very much uh Ken and the team for this opportunity to say just a a very brief few words about University teaching in the collection I think as has been really clear from this morning’s session the Egypt Center plays a a vital role in the University’s
Outreach program and also teaching in the communities um through its very highly successful schools and also the volunteer program what I’d like to give you I guess this afternoon is something probably a bit more like douy gave and also Wendy gave which is a a personal
Insight into what I think is really the very vital and irreplaceable role that the center plays in the provision of our undergraduate teaching and also our extracurricular portfolio of activities for students um you’ll probably know that the department of History Heritage and Classics interacts with the Egypt Center
In a variety of of ways we organized conferences together for example the back in the last Academic Year the Sudan archaeological research society’s events in the in in in the coming year the Egypt Center also provides exceptional training opportunities which have been mentioned in some of uh the previous
Talks now for those of you who are not from Swansea University and possibly from abroad name is it Jus could hopefully move now so for those of you who are fortunate or not fortunate enough to be intimately acquainted with the administrative and financial structures of the University um it’s worth stressing that
The Egypt Center is in a different part of the University from the academic Department the teachers undergraduate teaching undergraduate teaching is the job of the Department of History Heritage and Classics we’re a part of the school of culture and communication and the faculty of humanities and social
Sciences so the Egypt Center and the department we in essentially different parts of the University with different human resources and different budgets so it’s complex um the department for those of you who don’t know much about us we currently have two tame egyptologists on staff that have been captured and tamed
And put in our officers uh there’s Dr Troy sigillo who’s looking startled at the top and myself um we offer a single honors bachelor degree in egyptology and ancient history some of you might say that sounds like a double degree it’s not but I think it’s worth stressing
That this is the only egyptology degree available outside of the Russell group of universities so unless you’re studying at Oxford Cambridge or Liverpool Swansea is the destination for undergraduate students uh our current first year that have just started last week we have over 20 students in our egyptology and ancient history
Degree to my great delight and horror I also see that I have 60 enrolls enrolled students in my first year egyptology uh course so it’s wonderful to see so many students and it’s going to be wonderful to read all of their essays um and we also then have offer a
Master’s by research and we have PhD students and we currently have four PhD students on the books um and we also then run excavation in the Sudan with a colleague from Rota Ireland um in the United States of course that excavation not happening at the in the
Meantime now I guess part of the idea about bringing the welcome collection to SW wanty was of course that it would be used in teaching and this has always been part of the offer of egyptology in the 20 odd years of egyptology as a separate field of study here at Swansea
Our object-based teaching was certainly championed by the Cur uh uh the previous curator uh Dr Carolyn Graves Brown and also on the departmental side from kasas Bowa my previous colleague and of course a number of my colleagues for example erson who’s going to be speaking after uh after me Nigel Pollard Steven
Harrison they all incorporate objects into their classes uh my own personal interest in this approach to teaching Ken I can’t uh scroll down on this page so if you hit on the white bit there okay yeah great move down it’s because it’s moved over the other okay so my personal experience um
Uh or interest in this approach can be traced essentially back to the first time I ever held an object in my hands in a museum and I had to catalog it I had no idea what I was doing but quickly with tuition I essentially developed a completely new attitude to my studies um
What up to that point had been slides I started studying when the professor rolled out an overhead machine and a slide machine at the beginning what up to that point had essentially been abstract and very academic and unfocused quickly became extremely visceral practical and also vocational and my personal experience
Agrees with studies of course that demonstrate that engaging all your senses not taste we’re not encouraging students to lick objects but engaging senses heighten student engagement it provides memorable learning experiences and it encourages lifelong learning and appetite for further study this is something that we’ve obviously clearly seen in our student
Cohort I’ve also been lucky enough to work as an instructor on archaeological excavations in Egypt and the Sudan for about 20 years um and I’ve been able to witness how it’s simply changing the physical context of learning can be really a transformational experience by doing not just reading and writing some
Students find themselves in a way they never did in a classical classroom and they then consequently approached their studies in a complete completely uh new way in recent years we’ve tried to develop a pathway through the second year of our undergraduate uh degree that puts uh engagement with objects at the
Core of these modules and also to create a clear skill set progression uh during during uh the second year the key is that objects shouldn’t be just a fun Sideshow to keep the students interested rather it should be they should be at the heart of the syllabus and that
Should be reflected in learning outcomes as well as the assessment structure I’d like to just give you a couple of examples of the types of courses which we’re offering in second year I think the my favorite course is clle 22 Egyptian art and architecture which essentially gives a chronological
Overview of Egyptian Arch um art and architecture from the prehistoric period uh to the end of the fer fonic era um the way that we’ve developed this course I think is something uh quite uh unique uh for teaching this subject at universities what we have is in the
First half of the week students acquire theoretical knowledge hopefully by doing their readings and by attending uh lectures where we have lectures about the topics that we’re going to be looking at um this is a two-hour session in the beginning of the week in the second half
Of the week then we have practical experience in the Egypt Center where students apply the knowledge that they’ve learned during those first two hours and their readings to interpret objects that they’re looking at in class these sessions are always in the same format so students develop Independence and they learn completely
Without my interference I hang back and let the students do their thing the students divide themselves into groups and they work for about 10 minutes on an object that they know nothing about and I tell them nothing about together they try and work out what they’re looking at
And they record their observations and reactions to the pieces on a form with lead pencil after about 10 minutes we have some tasteful Bavarian beer hall music which is played and the students dance or should I say they move rhythmically with restraint uh to the next object pardon me each week we look
In detail at about four or five objects and over the eight sessions of the semester the students then analyze around 35 to 40 different objects the nice thing I think and something that keeps them engaged is that these objects that they’ve studied then form the basis of uh the end of semester examination
Which constitutes 40% of the assessment Mark when the student have to write responses to the objects drawing on the one hand on their observations but also then on the lectures and also their readings the object handling therefore supports the module aims um and the relevance of what they’re doing is clear
To the students attendance is generally exemplary they come obviously for the beer hall music but they stay for the sessions attendance is always close to 100% throughout the entire semester if you’re in undergraduate teaching you know that this is quite well impossible um the sessions are very loud and
They’re fun and the module feedback always stresses how much students enjoy this aspect of the course um another activity and module which we teach in second year is the introduction to Egyptian archaeology this was the brainchild of Kes spala um who taught this module originally um and the idea is that we
Learn about Egyptian archaeology through the principles of the students writing an object life cycle so the biography an object of an object that is in the Egypt Center collection so students essentially choose an object to research during the semester and then we introduce the students into ways of recording observing analyzing and interpreting
Objects throughout the semester when students who are used to reading books are suddenly confronted with an ancient Egyptian pot for the first time it’s obviously quite difficult to work and get information out of a pot how do you do it we’ve structured the semester essentially so that we have about eight
Hours where students work with a single pot and you’re probably thinking my God this must be the most boring eight hours this student has ever spent in their life and in fact when the students first come in and work with the object they look at it for about five minutes and
Say yeah I think we’ve got it for the next eight weeks we develop new skills new ways of looking at things and we always go back to the object with these new approaches and at the end of the semester the students want to hug their
Pots never let them go and say we could do another eight hours with these pots and I’m not making that up um so this is just another example of the type of teaching that we’re doing here um all up students get about eight hours of object handling as part of this particular
Module I’d like to Pivot to something that’s um extremely close to my heart and this is then a case of uh extracurricular student engagement that we offer here at Swansea University it’s the Swansea University Potter project I think like pretty much all egyptology collections in the UK uh
The when you go to a collection you’ll see the iceberg of Egyptian collections at the top you’ve got all the pretty things with inscribed hieroglyphs and statuary but the hidden part of the Iceberg are thousands hundreds and thousands of ceramic vessels which in egyptology collections all the way
Across the UK and this is also one of the strengths of the Egypt Center where we’ve got over a thousand individual complete vessels representing about a fifth of the entire collection most of it’s never been studied nor adequately recorded and of course due to limitations on Space only a fraction is
On display meaning that the public and also researchers have never seen it the AIM of our uh of sub our Potter project um is to provide a complete upto-date record of each object in the online collection so it’s accessible to all for free at the same time we want to promote
Student involvement in research we want to engage students in roles that enhance employability and also enhance our Learning Community um this project is a collaboration between students staff and also uh the Egypt Center and our research group in our department the object and Landscape centered approaches
To the Past directed by myself and erson husin for this exciting project I think exciting I love Potter um but usually I have to lock the door when I start speaking about it so people don’t leave um but we essentially have 12 student volunteers each set each
Semester who donate two hours of each week during semester time to the project students receive full training and handling recording Museum objects as well as organizing the data for online use using the stateoftheart online platform the students work in teams under staff they use skills to record objects publish them online moving to
Independent work as the semester progresses and I think one of the really nice things is that students who wish to remain with the project in the next semester provided they haven’t broken too many pots they’re allowed to stay with the project and then they train the next generation of students we just
Started a new semester and it was the most wonderful experience to see the new people come in sit down with experienced people and Ken and I didn’t actually say a word and suddenly all this training was going on we still have to check the entries uh but we’ll be doing that and
Doing the auditing process so I think this is an exciting uh project um it enables students to contribute to research but also building up key Heritage and Museum skills you don’t have to be an egyptologist student to do it and we have students from PhD level
All the way down to second year so we have this wonderful mixing of people of different experiences and different degree schemes um we’ve got really tangible results so far we’ve provided well over a 100 hours of training to students across four semesters every complete vessel in the Egypt Center collection is
Now fully documented I believe there’s over a thousand objects but I went and looked at some them this morning and realize that we’ve got to go back and look some of at some of the records the Harriet material is substantially completed and it’s online and available
For research um now the next project is everyone ask so when you’ve done the Thousand pots what do you do the great thing is the pot Egypt Center has thousands of shs and shs as all archaeologists know are much better than complete vessels because you can look at
The fabric so the next stage is to get all the shed material at the Egypt Center Online once we get that we’re going to Pivot to training in archaeological illustration and we’re going to be doing technical drawings of every vessel in the collection um and that will take uh I
Imagine another couple of years and after that will become the Swansea University Stone vessel project um now obviously uh the un uh the this is we can only do all this work on the one hand because of the passion um of the Egypt center staff and also certain agreements between uh the
Different parts of the University that allow for resourcing of these activities but at the same time I think it’s also important to stress the really important role that the University of as swans University students have in the upkeep of the University students are incredibly important for making the collection
Available online we are also creating new knowledge about the collection by continuously engaging with it conducting new research I think one of my proudest moments as that I’ve got Bachelor of Arts students who are actually writing their honors thesis thesis in about Egyptian Potter some of you are probably shaking
Your head and saying why would anyone want this Katie Morton uh topped her year doing a thesis on the blue painted Amana Potter last year Jess Evans who is going to speaking also did is thinking about doing sorry maybe I won’t mention that um but we have other people working
With the collection I think of our 10 or 11 uh honors thesis this year in egyptology three or four are going to be working on object-based topics in the collection which I think is a really excellent development and of course Swansea University students they volunteer a lot and contribute a lot of
Ours to keeping the Egypt Center open um I think there’s around there was around 30 but now there’s 20 but there are nine new applicants so it’ll probably go up I think um when we think about challenges and future collaborations between the Egypt Center and the department um I
Think given the current economic climate and the difficulties um across the university I think if we can just maintain what we’ve established to this point I think that’s already a a major achievement um people have already mentioned things about space and of course when you’re working with uh undergraduate teaching across different
Parts of the university and then involving spaces such as the tesin you can only imagine what a difficult triangulation that is between timetabling um organizing uh rooms and things like that um so it’s all kind of complicated but we make it work but the reason why we can make it work is
Because the Egypt center staff is passionate about what they’re doing and they’re passionate that the collection should play an under uh play a major role in undergraduate teaching and that’s what really makes uh the big difference um in an Ideal World maybe we could expand the principles of object-based teaching to language teaching
Unfortunately Troy is not here so I can’t berate him with this um but also we could start developing uh object centered ways into third year to allow the students to have some kind of skills progression into the third year um and possibly also then looking at first year
As well but this all requires additional resources and funding and that’s not going to happen in the short term so all we can do is sing about what we’ve done so far and hope that somebody’s listening thank you very much