In Wheel 2, a second semester pottery class, I wanted to do something that would include ceramic history, archeology, learning how to find information and examining pottery to find out about clays, glazes, design and decoration.

Carole Iacovelli showed me an assignment she used to do with her class called the "Ceramic Archeologist." And after the summer CT workshop I was really able to focus clearly on what I wanted to do in this project basically using the approach of "Observation-Inference-Concrete conclusions".

To begin:

As a whole class activity a few cycles ago, I selected a piece of pottery (an artifact) for us to focus on. We looked closely at this artifact and made as many observations as we could - these were written on the chalk board. Everyone was encouraged to participate and write down all the observations, as well as do as accurate a sketch as possible of the artifact. This part was interesting. Many students did participate, but some remained quiet. It seemed even as if their powers of observation were not well tuned. To really look at something, what does it take? Does one need to already know about it? It is a piece of pottery that a friend gave me some years ago, but I really didn't know that much about it. We were all learning about it together. But questions arose, such as, is there one right answer? Is there an answer? Why should we make so many observations? As we concluded the observation phase, we moved into the "Inference" stage. What inferences can we draw from these observations? What is an inference? We talked about the later first and then moved on to general inferences. This part was very revealing because many students (unconsciously) skipped to stating conclusions with no factual basis. But we tried to stick to making inferences only based on our observations. These were written on the chalk board too and all were encouraged to write these down.

From this point the students were encouraged to go out and try to find factual information to either prove or disprove our inferences. I set up my own website in ezboards (http://pub96.ezboard.com/bceramicsstudio). Students were asked to post factual info that they found about the artifact here. This turned out OK. It was hard to get them to go on line, register and make a comment. In the end I spent part of one class in CL-CC going over it with them. But in the end I think we found out as much as we could about this artifact. It wasn't easy trying to locate websites that had information about our specific artifact. And in the end we still can not find anything out about one final part of the piece of pottery (and it's probably one of the most important parts). We have talked about the artifact and info brought up on the website.

From here, next week, I am introducing our last artifact activity: We will break up into pairs; each pair will have their own piece of pottery to examine and each pair will have to go through the procedures that we all followed in class together. Results will either be posted in the ezboards website or into a Pai folder that I had set up (not sure yet). We'll then try to get minor feedback from each other in class and I'll get feedback on how the project was received.