Pedagogic problems

You may be asking, how can pedagogy be so important? After all, it is only teaching. This view is largely prevalent in the discipline of archaeology. Fundamentally, pedagogic research is undervalued and therefore marginalized, in archaeology in the UK and worldwide. The reasons for this are as follows:

• • A REF versus NSSFootnote ¹ culture (in the UK at least) in which the measures for teaching and research are separated from each other, and the consequent necessity to categorize academic work as either teaching or research in order to fit such narrow assessment parameters.

• • An epistemological basis in which research and teaching are rendered distinct from each other through the Cartesian dualisms of modernity. Here the division between active researcher/teacher and passive learner are rendered inherent and natural through modern epistemological frameworks, and are perpetuated through norms of academic practice.

• • The perpetuation of traditional power structures which reward research and relegate teaching. This arises partly as a product of the current global trend for the neo-liberalization of higher education (discussed in detail in Edu-factory Collective 2009).Footnote ² But it can also be considered in much the same vein as feminist archaeologists have argued the discipline to be inherently androcentric and heteronormative. It is those academics at the top of hierarchies who have benefited from the current status quo (with feminist critiques noting that these are historically white, male, heterosexual, middle-class (e.g. Gatens Reference Gatens and Thomas2000; Gero and Conkey Reference Gero and Conkey1991; Gero Reference Gero, Nelson, Nelson and Wylie1994; Dowson Reference Dowson and Thomas2000; Reference Dowson, Geller and Stockett2006) and frequently Oxbridge-educated (Pope Reference Pope2011; and see Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2004)). Those who score highly in the current system and consequently go on to judge research and its outputs, dictating research and reward, for instance, on the panels of funding bodies and promotion boards.

• • A current lack of specific funding for pedagogic research, which further reproduces the undervaluation of research into teaching in archaeology, and in turn prevents the development of rigorous pedagogic research.

There are a number of reasons why pedagogic research and the high-quality teaching and learning that it produces are important to archaeology. In an environment where research impact suggests that we should be concerned with the value of our outputs, a significant output (contra REF 2012) could be argued to lie in the education of those who enter higher education. That is to say, a fundamental impact must surely be that which we have on and through our students (Blackwell Reference Blackwell2013). High-quality teaching and training at undergraduate level, for example, has a direct impact on our future archaeologists, providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding that are key to the discipline. Employers are seeking more specific and extensive field skills and levels of experience in graduates entering the profession (Aitchison Reference Aitchison, Schlanger and Aitchison2010), and while a minority of graduates overall may enter into archaeological careers (Collis Reference Collis, Rainbird and Hamilakis2001), the archaeological sector remains the largest single field of employment for archaeology graduates. Placing a greater value on pedagogic research will contribute towards improved student employability, whatever their career paths, developing the more confident and communicative graduates sought by employers. Moreover, pedagogy, for archaeologists, is about both the classroom and the field. Field schools have a crucial impact on the career decisions of students (Perry Reference Perry2004; Aitchison Reference Aitchison2004; Croucher, Cobb and Brennan Reference Croucher, Cobb and Brennan2008; Cobb and Croucher Reference Cobb, Croucher and Mytum2012; papers in Mytum Reference Mytum2012) and therefore rigorous pedagogy surrounding teaching in the field is key in enabling a high-quality learning experience which in turn equips students with the knowledge they need to become good archaeologists and to make informed decisions about their future careers. Improved archaeological pedagogy ultimately results in higher-quality archaeological practice.

So pedagogy is clearly not ‘only teaching’;Footnote ³ good pedagogy, and rigorous pedagogic research, are about sustaining and developing not just those who are learning, but the discipline as a whole. However, the value extends beyond the benefits to students, graduates and the professional sector. Pedagogy can be integral to the development of high-quality research. There is not simply a one-way relationship or a unidirectional process in which good teaching results in good students who become good archaeologists. Students also act back; they contribute to and inform our academic endeavours (Freire Reference Freire1972). This is especially the case in archaeology, where students participate in excavations and play an active role in creating new knowledge about the past, an argument we will explore in detail later in this paper. Ultimately, there exists an enmeshed, mutually constitutive relationship between teaching and research in archaeology, and recognizing this has the potential to enrich students, academics and the profession. This may seem straightforward, but we argue that it takes more than explicit recognition to challenge the undervaluation of pedagogy in archaeology, and its problematic marginalization in much of current archaeological practice. In the next section, we turn to the kinds of relational theoretical framework applied to archaeological practice more generally (e.g. Lucas Reference Lucas2012), to further argue for the importance, and the realities, of recentering pedagogy in archaeology.

Pedagogic assemblages

In recent social and political theory and philosophy, a series of debates have laid the foundations for the kind of rethinking we propose regarding the relationship between research and pedagogy. For instance, we could turn to the symmetry that emerges from the flat ontology of Latourian actor-network theory (ANT). In such an argument agency is decentred from humans and repositioned as an animating force across networks in which people, things and processes are all equal (Olsen Reference Olsen2010; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Whitmore2012). This is a useful perspective, and we can draw upon this to argue that pedagogy should be seen as part of this symmetrical world view – equal to research in a network encompassing the two. However, we could also go further than this and view pedagogy and research as fundamentally enmeshed, not in one network, but in many interconnecting ways, with many interconnecting affects. The very nature of the archaeological endeavour means that pedagogy and research are so often inextricably bound together, not just in the field, but also in the classroom, lab and elsewhere. Moreover, there is a complicated, continually emerging relationship between both, and thus we argue that a series of perspectives, which move beyond ANT, can help us to further theorize and understand the relationship between pedagogy and research in archaeology.

In particular we find that assemblage theory, as expressed by Manuel DeLanda (Reference DeLanda2006), and the similar sentiments developed by Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold2011a; Reference Ingold2013) under the notion of the meshwork, provide useful frameworks for recentering pedagogy. Both approaches begin with a similarly ‘flat ontology’, in which things and people are equal, but both take the work of Gilles Deleuze (particularly Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) as their inspiration to explore the way that people, things and the world are related to one another, and the way that things, relations between things, and collective entities are always in emergence. As Ingold elucidates, relationships are

Assemblage theory provides a similar view, demonstrating how people and things are resonant with capacities to act and affect and that they are bound into continually emerging multiple assemblages as they circulate through the world. Moreover, ‘Allowing the possibility of complex interactions between component parts is crucial to define the mechanisms of emergence, but this possibility disappears if the parts are fused together into a seamless web’ (DeLanda Reference DeLanda2006, 10). Thus DeLanda advocates that we regard the components of an assemblage not as fixed entities, but as able to move between assemblages, producing different properties or qualities as they do, and thus interconnecting and affecting other assemblages, at a range of different scales.

Such arguments have recently been used by archaeologists in a series of exciting and creative ways to consider how we examine the past, how we examine materiality and how we consider current practice, including the notion of the archaeological record (see papers in two excellent edited volumes, Alberti, Jones and Pollard Reference Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013; and Watts Reference Watts2013; and also individual works such as Conneller Reference Conneller2011; Fowler Reference Fowler2013; Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2014; Harris Reference Harris2014; in press; Ingold Reference Ingold2013; Jones Reference Jones2011; Lucas Reference Lucas2012; Robb and Harris Reference Robb and Harris2013). And we find these perspectives incredibly useful here for re-evaluating pedagogy too. Thinking about assemblages in relation to material culture, for instance, requires us to move beyond the physical properties of objects and instead broaden our thinking to encompass their capacities and the relationships which bring them into being, which affect their past, their current being, their future and, through all of these things, the meshworks in which they exist. Crucially this argument can be applied to a pot (cf. Lucas Reference Lucas2012) as much as it can an archaeological site, a set of objects, or a person or event in the past (or present), or even, as we will go on to argue, to pedagogic practice. Thus we can examine how pedagogy, as an assemblage in itself, emerges through its interaction with the assemblages of research and professional practice. In this way we can take a radical step away from the view of students as passive, and lecturers and researchers as active (sensu Freire Reference Freire1972), instead recognizing that all are enmeshed and continually in emergence, empowered with the capacity to act, and affecting one another as they emerge, affecting the wider discipline as different assemblages intertwine at different scales through different practices. Let us move beyond this general argument, however, and think through the implications of this approach in more specific detail.

Research, teaching and fieldwork: enmeshed experiences

As a discipline we find it easy to accept the multiplicity of voices and acts inherent in the archaeological process and the interpretive nature of our profession (e.g. Hodder Reference Hodder1997; Reference Hodder1999; Reference Hodder2000), yet we rarely actively recognize students within this. Moreover, pedagogy is a complicated business. Students do not just sit in a lecture theatre and listen passively. They act back and affect us (Academy of Medical Sciences 2010, 18; deRoche and deRoche Reference DeRoche and deRoche1990; Freire Reference Freire1972; Mathieu Reference Mathieu2004; Perry Reference Perry2004), and in archaeology this is particularly true; as we assert above and discuss later, students are often the active participants in lab work and fieldwork. Even seminars and lectures have the potential to be locales where the relationship between student and lecturer is more than one of passive versus active. This is where adopting relational pedagogy, informed by an assemblage or meshwork approach, is useful as it enables us to examine the complicated ways in which teaching and research are enmeshed, and the ways in which, particularly in archaeology, the categories of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ are not homogeneous, and neither are the practices of learning and research. Rather, all emerge in various complicated ways in relation to one another through the act of doing archaeology and creating new knowledge about the past.

Let us begin by exploring how this is the case in the classroom. Here, for instance, Hamilakis has described lucidly how his classroom is transformed into a research field, for both the students and the lecturer (Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2004, 299). By asking students to consider and research their own approaches to food and diet, as part of their own learning process on the subject, in turn their research and responses equally informed and problematized Hamilakis's research on food and diet. This example illustrates how our development as academics is enhanced by the teaching experience. The requirement to articulate our research through teaching provides a communicative opportunity for thinking through new ideas, and putting into practice emerging themes and thoughts. For instance, many of our greatest academics have used module design and subsequent teaching as a method for preparing publications, particularly books, whether on a particular region and period, such as the Neolithic of Britain or the Near East, or the Iron Age of the UK or Europe, or on methodologies of practice, or on a wide range of themes within archaeological study. It is significant that many note this influence (just browse through a selection of acknowledgement sections in recently published monographs to see a number of works which credit teaching as contributing to the preparation and refining of research: e.g. Conneller Reference Conneller2011; Croucher Reference Croucher2012; Giles Reference Giles2012; Ingold Reference Ingold2013), but it is equally significant that many do not, even when it is the case that course design and monograph writing have emerged together. In doing so, the realities of the relationships within the academic ‘meshwork’, where teaching and research so explicitly and continually inform one another, are overlooked and so the division between research and teaching is artificially perpetuated.

In addition to teaching practices informing our arguments and perspectives in publishing, we can also consider the value of research-informed teaching; that is, where students are active researchers. This is not only beneficial for individual learning (Jenkins, Healey and Zetter Reference Jenkins, Healey and Zetter2007), but can provide new perspectives and insights into research topics. Can many academics truly say that their research has never been informed by a perspective, an opinion or knowledge brought into the classroom by a student? Whether through that student's individual research, or even simply if their questioning encourages a new frame of thought or new angle in an argument? In reality, our research does not simply occur in isolation from our other academic endeavours, but rather continually informs and is informed by our academic practices, including teaching. In part, though, for many, the fallacy that teaching and research remain separate is perpetuated by our own academic vanities or insecurities. To state that a student inspired part of one's thinking is still considered by many to subvert a fundamental power dynamic that exists in education,Footnote ⁴ where the lecturer, with experience, knowledge and position, is the expert, and the student has a primarily passive and unidirectional role of learning from them. In contrast, seeing this process as a meshwork emancipates us from this constraining (and often inaccurate) power play. If we recognize that new knowledge on a given subject can emerge through the interplay between active student and active researcher, we are able to acknowledge, more freely, the student contribution to the development of ideas, arguments, and ways of communicating the past, an approach which has been advocated by feminist thinkers in archaeology (e.g. Gero Reference Gero and Wright1996; Conkey and Tringham Reference Conkey, Tringham and Wright1996; Joyce and Tringham Reference Joyce, Tringham, Wylie and Conkey2007; Joyce Reference Joyce2002; Wright Reference Wright1996).

This perspective is particularly significant when we consider that students also contribute actively in the field (Cobb et al. Reference Cobb, Harris, Jones, Richardson, Cobb, Harris, Jones and Richardson2012b), with the majority of research excavations relying on undergraduate excavators. In these contexts, it is undeniable that students are central to the production of original archaeological knowledge. As discussed above, there is a substantial body of literature which acknowledges that the interpretive nature of the field practices that we engage in results in archaeological knowledge that is the product of multiple perspectives (Hodder Reference Hodder1997; Reference Hodder2000; Lucas Reference Lucas2001; Reference Lucas2012). Furthermore, we should challenge hierarchies of knowledge production which silence the voices of those in the archaeological process who are otherwise rendered invisible (Everill Reference Everill2009). To do this we must acknowledge that archaeology is a collaborative endeavour (Perry Reference Perry2004). As Perry argues (ibid., 239, referencing Gero Reference Gero and Wright1996; Nieto Reference Nieto1999; Wylie Reference Wylie, Preucel and Hodder1996), ‘knowledge builds on prior experience, is actively constructed within a community and sociocultural context and is complex and involves multiple voices’. Understandings and interpretations are generated through on-site discussion and dialogue, a process which makes excavators – our students – central to the understanding of excavated archaeological contexts. Consequently, good teaching of field skills feeds directly into the production of good research for field projects where students are excavators. Once again neither can be separated from the meshwork of relations in which both emerge, and once again, acknowledging and exploring how this is the case enable us to recentre and revalue pedagogy whilst also emancipating us from the perpetuation of traditional power structures which privilege some voices over others.

A case study: enmeshing a student experience

So far we have explored the value of an enmeshed and constantly emerging understanding of pedagogy through relatively generic examples, but in working it through a specific case study, the value of this approach and the reality of the complicated relations into which pedagogy is enmeshed are further elucidated. To explore these ideas, then, we would like to draw upon examples from the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project (henceforth ATP), which is directed by one of this paper's authors (HC).Footnote ⁵ ATP is a long-running research and community project exploring the archaeology of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, Western Scotland, looking at life, death and social change in this landscape through time.Footnote ⁶ It is a project where archaeologists from a range of backgrounds work together; this includes academics, postgraduate researchers and undergraduate students, as well as commercial archaeologists, and archaeologists from educational charities. Significantly, the project has intentionally sought to develop a ‘postprocessual’ methodology in which the digger is foregrounded in the interpretive process whether they are professional or student, and in which the reflexivity inherent in the archaeological process is explicitly examined (Members of the ATP Reference Cobb, Harris, Jones and Richardson2012). As a result the project provides a space to actively acknowledge the role of students in the production and dissemination of archaeological knowledge.

In press, this is most explicit in a 2012 paper authored by Members of the ATP, entitled ‘The struggle within’. Here the team explore the various recording methods employed by the project, which are designed to challenge the subject/object division in field practice, and document the multiple, changing interpretations at play in the production of archaeological knowledge. In particular the paper discusses the reflexive processes that were encountered in the excavation of a prehistoric ditch around a chambered cairn in the project's 2007 season, and the conversation, the debate and the careful, stratigraphic excavation of the feature (Members of the ATP Reference Cobb, Harris, Jones and Richardson2012, 124–25). The authors reflect upon the recording process, and how the context sheets, although designed to capture the reflexive process throughout the excavation of the feature, were initially overlooked by project staff who reverted to a more traditional ‘dig-then-record’ method. Yet what is revealing here, and of most importance to this paper, is that it was the students’ reflections, on the various other recording sheets completed by the team, that, in the end, captured the reflexive process (ibid., 127). The project uses, in addition to context sheets, an intervention form (used when investigation of a feature, area, test pit or trench has been finalized) and a participant form (designed to reflect on practices undertaken, on interpretations developed and on the learning process, and completed regularly by excavators throughout the course of the excavation). Through incorporating the information recorded by students on the participant forms it was possible to reflect on the crucial role that the students played in contributing to two strands of the project's research – not only were they active in the production of new knowledge about the Neolithic of western Scotland, but equally it was their work, and their reflexivity, that not only challenged the subject/object division as the project team had intended, but also prompted the project staff to return to this challenge themselves. In this way, the students on the project actively contributed to project practice in the ATP 2007 season in a manner that has subsequently influenced our practices and our methods, and our struggles with and research into our own reflexive recording, in every season of work since. As such, students here were not simply and passively learning. Rather, student learning, staff learning, project practice and knowledge about the past were all intrinsically entwined, and all emerged through their relationships with one another. Moreover, the assemblage of each of these components as they emerged in the 2007 season has gone on to affect other assemblages: assemblages of future ATP seasons, assemblages of researchers examining the subject–object relationship in field practice and brought together in conference sessions and subsequent publications (i.e. Cobb et al. Reference Cobb, Harris, Jones and Richardson2012a), and the assemblages each of the students went into, back in the classroom, and then as they graduated, in their professional practice.

The above discussion of ATP provides a good example of the meshwork that emerges in the field between students, field practice and research. However, the ATP's aspirations to explore reflexivity in field practice and learning, and to continuously acknowledge and recognize the student voice, are also clear in how student perspectives have become enmeshed in the communication and dissemination of ATP's research, and the impacts this has had on the way that material is understood and presented to wider communities, beyond the discipline of archaeology. While research and dissemination may remain separate considerations traditionally, it is becoming clearer that dissemination and impact contribute to and are active in knowledge creation, informing ongoing investigation by providing multiple voices and understandings of the past, and through the consumption and use of excavation results in further research output.

A good example of this arises from Sarah Paris, a student who began a joint honours degree in ancient history and archaeology at the University of Manchester in 2010 and graduated in July 2013. In the summer at the end of her first year, Sarah undertook three weeks of fieldwork training on the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project. During that season, in July 2011, the project excavated the first intact Viking boat burial from the UK mainland (Harris et al. Reference Harris, Cobb, Grey and Richardson2012). As the project's ethos is one of inclusivity, undergraduate students played an active role in the excavation of this important discovery (see guidelines in Croucher, Cobb and Brennan Reference Croucher, Cobb and Brennan2008, 48; and Cobb and Croucher Reference Cobb, Croucher and Mytum2012, 38). Sarah was part of the team which excavated the find. Sitting by the side of the trench one day, Sarah sketched a reconstruction of the boat burial (figure 1). The burial had not been fully excavated at this stage and her work was speculative to a point, but included important architectural features and a sense of the spatial layout of key pieces of material culture. Critically the sketch provided an accessible image of the burial and how some elements of it may have appeared.

Figure 1

Illustration of the Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial. Source: Sarah Paris 2011.

When the findings of the boat burial were released to the press in October 2011 the discovery received extensive media attention. The project directors had some exciting images to disseminate – an X-ray of the sword and pictures of the site being excavated – and we also held a press conference in which the artefacts (which included a sword, axe, spearhead, ring pin, cauldron, hammer and sickle) were displayed directly to the press (figures 2 and 3). But the question the press asked repeatedly was whether we had any kind of reconstruction drawing. Specifically they wanted something that could really communicate a sense of what this unique site had been like. We did not hesitate to give them Sarah's drawing and this rapidly became a standard image used by some sections of the media to illustrate their accounts of the discovery. The image quickly became, and remains, iconic of the find in the public domain (at the time of writing, three years after the excavation, this is one of the first images displayed when the generic term ‘Viking boat burial’ is typed into a Google UK search).

Figure 2

Members of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project team excavating the Viking boat burial. Source: Dan Addison.

Figure 3

The Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial sword. Source: Ardnamurchan Transitions Project.

We can instantly see how one student's perspective has impacted upon public consumption and understanding of this important find, and contributed to the topic of Viking mortuary practices more generally through providing a tangible image of a unique archaeological discovery. But, crucially, Sarah's work was not simply useful for the media; in lecturing on our findings at the University of Manchester, and in disseminating the project's findings at conferences and in public talks, its value is enormous.

But let us return to Sarah. When writing this paper we contacted Sarah, who explained how her drawing of the Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial had influenced her throughout her degree, and beyond, in multiple ways. For instance, it awakened an interest in art that she had not engaged with since her GCSEs. In turn, it led her to consider the processes involved in the production of art, which influenced broader debates in her undergraduate dissertation on Upper Palaeolithic cave art. It provided insights in her courses on archaeological practice, where she was able to transfer the knowledge that the act of drawing aids observation and understanding (also raised by Ingold Reference Ingold2011b). It also contributed to the research interests that motivated her to continue her studies and undertake a master's degree. Sarah reflected that analysing the boat burial had prompted her to consider the social role of burials in early societies, as well as recognizing the vital information which had been lost through the lack of skeletal preservation in the Ardnamurchan boat burial (further detail in Harris et al. Reference Harris, Cobb, Grey and Richardson2012), an observation which has influenced her decision to go on to study bioarchaeology at master's level.

And beyond her master's study, the production of the drawing has stimulated Sarah's aspiration to ultimately pursue a career in archaeological documentary making. In particular she notes (pers. comm.), ‘through the drawing I feel I have made a contribution to wider public interest in archaeology. By encouraging people to imagine what the Viking boat burial might have looked like I hope the general public feel more engaged with history’. It is this awareness of how the past is communicated to the public that lies at the heart of Sarah's desire to make archaeological documentaries and therefore to continue to work in engaging the general public with archaeology.

Beyond, but tied into, this account, the image itself has gained a biography of its own as it was then altered by the media without Sarah’s permission and reproduced; the website of a national newspaper (www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050619/Viking-burial-site-Ardnamurchan-1-000-year-old-Norse-boat-tomb-uncovered.html) coloured in the original pencil drawing and credited it to another artist. The coloured image is still widely reproduced (with incorrect accreditation, despite challenges), and is frequently the prevalent image used in situations beyond the control of the excavators, including in advertising for public talks and lectures by third parties.

What do the above case studies demonstrate? Recall, for a moment, the question we posed about why pedagogy is important – is it really ‘only teaching’? In the examples from the ATP, where do we divide teaching from research and its dissemination? Whether relating to the understanding of a specific period or site in the past, to research into the archaeological process, or to perceptions of an important find, student involvement impacts on our creation and portrayal of knowledge about the past. We point to these accounts to show that the simple and divided narrative of teaching versus research is inadequate. Here teaching, research, dissemination, national imagination and more are all interconnected in a complex tangle of relations.

How and what Sarah had been taught in the classroom led to her choices to attend the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project. How the project conducts its research, both into the past and into archaeological practice in the present, affected Sarah's engagement with the archaeology, and in turn affected her drawing of the image, her freedom and agency to do so, and her confidence to contribute it to the site archive. Her drawing of the image impacted on the ATP directors’ choices to use the image and make it available to the press, which in turn impacted upon public opinion and understandings of the topic of Viking boat burial, and also upon one of the authors of this paper – furious that the image had been wrongly credited, and repeatedly frustrated when it is reproduced so. Sarah's experiences of the media through her drawing then impacted her degree and her learning process further – not simply stimulating her research interests, but by giving her a concrete and tangible example of why one should be critical when using different sources. It also impacted her peers: it was inspirational and aspirational. And in turn it has impacted teaching: it is an image that is reproduced in lectures and the find of the burial itself, including the drawing, will impact on researchers studying the Vikings. The image is used in lectures, not only on the Vikings, but on archaeological practice. The positive outcomes of this experience, not simply of the drawing, but of engaging with this burial, contributed towards Sarah's career choices as she continues her study in an MSc in bioarchaeology. The drawing has influenced public perceptions of Viking boat burials and views of archaeology in the UK. The excavation and its outcomes influence us, the authors of this paper, as we consider how pedagogy and research are fundamentally entwined. We could go on with many more examples. Clearly this is not a simple narrative of active teacher and passive learner. This perspective precisely maps into relational understandings of knowledge creation and practice, whether in terms of Latour's circulating referent (Latour Reference Latour1999), or of the meshworks and assemblages, as we go on to discuss below.

Meshworks and assemblages

The above examples from the ATP make explicit how the relationships between pedagogy and research are not straightforward – not passive and active – but rather a mesh of interconnecting biographies and affects. Moreover, these are in flux, continually emerging – we may return to this paper in ten years' time and follow Sarah's career trajectory to see one direction of the effects of her experiences in Ardnamurchan, or the career trajectories of those who contributed to practice and research in the 2007 season and who now work as commercial archaeologists. Equally our own research trajectories, and the publications of the excavation's research both into social transitions in Ardnamurchan through time and into postprocessual archaeological field practice – all still emerging, all connected in various ways to the experiences of students who have attended the project, as the meshwork continues to develop and change. The example we have used here demonstrates exactly the value in repositioning pedagogy, and exploring and embracing perspectives that undercut the pervasive dichotomous view of active researcher and passive student to inform teaching and research and to enhance the student experience.

In working through assemblage theory to explore the notion of the archaeological record, Lucas (Reference Lucas2012) uses the example of a pot to illustrate how a finished ceramic container could be regarded as the residue of multiple assemblages:

Let us rethink this, for a moment, with the example being an archaeology student, rather than a pot. A student could be regarded as the residue of multiple assemblages: of the courses they have been and are participants in, which have contributed to their knowledge and to which they have contributed back; of the field projects on which they have learned the practicalities of archaeology whilst making new discoveries about the past and about present practice; of the seminars and pubs in which they have discussed what they have learned with their colleagues; of the various other unique assemblages (their appearance in the background on an episode of Time Team, or the reconstruction drawing they did that was embraced by the media); in addition to all of the non-archaeological assemblages that they belong to (families, partners, housemates, work colleagues). As archaeology graduates, then, like the finished pot in Lucas's example, they are the residue of many different assemblages, resonant with the traces of the many scales in which they dwell in the world, and central to our argument here is that in this way they will always be incorporated into other archaeological assemblages – for instance the work they undertook on the excavations that they attended where they actively contributed to the development of new knowledge about the past and about the doing of archaeology in the present. The category of student, therefore, is not homogeneous, but is contextual, ephemeral and emergent through different assemblages.

Considering students, and by association practices of teaching and learning, as continually emerging in this way, liberates us from traditional approaches to pedagogy. Instead an empowering and integrated view is enabled in which it is clear that students do not simply passively ‘learn’, that they are not separate from the research process, and that pedagogy is rarely just teaching. Instead students, and the practices of teaching and learning alike, actively contribute to the assemblages, networks and meshworks which comprise academia, archaeological practice and archaeological epistemology.