Diane Gifford-Gonzales – Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Anthropology

I am deeply honored to have been nominated by my students for an Excellence in Teaching Award. Being asked to draft a statement on my approach to teaching has challenged me to examine what, in particular, I do as a teacher to create an atmosphere that inspires students to learn. I have taken workshops on teaching methods, learned to make multimedia lecture presentations, and engaged in distance learning but believe these can only be minor technical additions to a core of committed teaching.

In the best situation, I try to convey two complementary things. The first is my fascination and excitement with the scope of archaeology and the thrill of developing and using new methods for learning more about the past. The second is the sense of students being my partners in learning, of doing scholarly work alongside me.

With regard to the first, the fascination with archaeology, I try to convey the challenge and complexity of trying to read human history from mute material traces, the circumstantial evidence of lives lived long ago. From these traces we try to gain a vision of the world as it was for people at various points of change in human history, the first use of stone tools two-and-a-half million years ago; the mystery of the sudden emergence of the remarkably tall early members of genus Homo who moved out of Africa and into challenging temperate climates between one and two million years ago; the choices people made amidst chaotic ecological conditions of the end of the Ice Age that, unknown to them, would ultimately lead to farming; the conditions under which the first institutionalized social inequality emerged from the substrate of farming communities; and, at a more local level, my current work on the economic choices and inventions of indigenous people and hardscrabble colonists in the tumultuous 17th Century in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.

As a zooarchaeologist who studies the bones of the animals that people herded, hunted, fished, or trapped, I find myself travelling constantly between the "big narratives" of human history and the humble products of everyday life. I am daily aware that what I analyze is not the evidence of the acts of great persons but simple meals of women, children, and men in their homes, the occasional community feast, or a seasonal ritual. I try to make my students aware that, although archaeologists document systematically, assess alternatives scientifically, and try to evaluate evidence dispassionately, we should always remember that we are tracing the lives of people who, however different their experiences and values may have been, like us lived everyday lives, experienced the effects of big events, and made their own decisions about their futures.

I learned the second aspect of my teaching from the best of my own university instructors, who made me their junior partner in research and encouraged me as a capable intellectual actor, though I knew so much less than they did. I teach a range of courses: a large introductory lecture, several upper division lecture classes of twenty to seventy students, hands-on laboratory courses, and a small undergraduate seminar. In all of these, to the best of my abilities, I seek to challenge students to grapple with cutting-edge intellectual issues or to acquire advanced technical skills-in short, I teach them how to learn. My upper division students routinely read selections from scholarly journals and books because one of my central aims is furthering their skills in reading and analyzing professional-level writings. I design lab exercises in hands-on courses to develop professional skills and practices.

Sometimes my undergraduate courses offer challenges reserved for graduate students at other UC campuses, and this can seem daunting at the outset. However, I strive to offer students the support and encouragement they need to meet those challenges. I have always believed that grading on a curve, even in my laboratory courses, does not serve my central goal of motivating all students to work to the limits of their abilities. I have spent years refining essay-based exams for lecture classes and laboratory practicals that impel students toward 100% mastery. In sum, I try to set a very high standard and to provide everyone with the means of meeting that standard.

I am not so naive as to think all students have equal abilities and talents. My evaluations of student achievement reflect discernment between innate brilliance and sheer hard work-as well as those wonderful instances where the two come together. However, it can fairly be said that students who apply themselves to all required of them in my courses can master the materials at a very high level of proficiency-and that most who don't will admit that this results from their own reluctance to meet the challenge, rather than from some arbitrarily imposed standard over which they themselves had no control.

I thus try to offer students the tools to pursue knowledge on their own, confident of their own intellectual and practical abilities. Student testimony has shown me that this is possible both with the graduate school bound stars and with students whom some would write off as less than the cream of the crop, bright, engaged young persons who will pursue life paths different from mine or my pre-professional students, yet whose entire approach to learning and, by extension, to being an actor in the world can be altered by knowing themselves to be skilled and able in critical reading, analysis, and writing. I could go on about PowerPoint presentations, Web sites, the no-more-than-three-main-points technique I employ in big lectures, but as I said at the outset, these are peripheral by-products of a pre-existing commitment to empower students to become autonomous learners. I am so very grateful to my students for the acknowledgement their nomination represents.