Survey of student experiences of fieldwork

Calling all 2nd and 3rd Year Undergraduates, and MA students! Do you feel like you made a difference in your summer fieldwork last year? Do you feel like you are a visible digger? The University of Manchester are undertaking a survey to find out the answers to these questions and more by examining UK student perceptions and experiences of archaeological fieldwork, and they need your help!

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Please follow this link https://selectsurveys.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=ll0Inol1 to answer a few short questions. This will take you less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is totally anonymous so feel free to be as honest as you like. The survey will stay open until Monday 9th March 2015.

 
This survey is being conducted by a team of students and staff from the University of Manchester, and is funded by the University of Manchester Learning through Research fund. If you want to hear more about what they find, their results will be presented at the CIfA conference and in a short publication which they hope to submit to the CIfA’s The Archaeologist Magazine. They will also be blogging about their project and presenting some of the findings on the project website https://visiblediggersmcr.wordpress.com/ so please do log on to find out more!

The Goals of this Project:

‘This project is led by students Matt Hitchcock, Stephanie McCulloch and Liya Walsh, along with lecturer Dr. Hannah Cobb, from the University of Manchester. We aim to capture the views of UK archaeology students surrounding their experiences of fieldwork. We want to find out whether students feel like they are valued in the field or whether they just feel like a ‘number’ or a ‘cog in the machine’. While a certain amount of direction is necessary, we aim to ascertain whether student are merely told about the theoretical direction of the excavation as it progresses, or whether they are given the theoretical tools necessary to make and contribute their own interpretations. This feedback will be used to highlight some of the current issues within archaeological pedagogy and offer some potential solutions.’