teaching material . . . strategies

One of my motivations for putting together a digital archive of images from "Roman Judea" is to find new ways of incorporating material culture into my teaching. Currently, I use images of material objects (e.g. monuments, votives, statues, coins) to illustrate the points I make in class lecture and discussions. I show these using power point, because it is easy to use, although I only use minimal text. (I've noticed a number of my teaching colleagues proudly proclaim their dislike of PP or happily point to the fact that students praise them for not using it. I find it helpful for showing images, but like other tools it takes time to use it in effective manner.) I think using images as illustrations is important and my students often comment that it makes things "more real." Seeing, for many of them, is believing and if I can help them that Rome celebrated the destruction of the Temple by showing images of the Arch of Titus, than I've done something pedagogically important. Or, to reference one of my favorite images, if I can show my students that ancient Romans looked to the gods for healing, which can help understand Jesus' healing ministry, by showing pictures of votive uterii (see above), I've had a good day!

While material culture can be used for illustration, I'm interested in other ways it might be used pedagogically. This interest is related to how I use visual art images to prompt student to think about biblical texts. Dan Clanton and I actually cowrote an essay on using art to teach the Bible an edited volume entitled The Bible and Popular Culture and the Arts: Resources for Instructors (Roncase and Gray, eds., SBL) which outlines different models for using images to teach texts. An excerpted version of the essay can be found at the SBL forum. One of the models we propose is using art as illumination. By this we mean that images can be used to prompt students to engage complex ideas. Images can be used as entry ways into abstract thinking about texts and interpretative issues. I offer some examples of this in the Roncase and Gray volume.

Now that I'm thinking about material culture, I want to find ways of using material culture in a similar way . . . as more than illustration. I'm interested in thinking about ways that the things I see and experience in Roman Judea might be used to develop case studies for students to use in conjunction with class readings or a type of problem based learning that focuses on the past. I can imagine using material culture images to get students to discover for themselves that the boundary between "Judaism" and "Hellenism" was blurry to non-existent. Or, perhaps, I can put together a set of images and readings that allow students to see the complex ways that space and gender interact, complicating the simple notion that female space was private and male space was public. I guess one of the things that I need to think about now is how to collect images (i.e. take pictures) in a thoughtful enough manner to facilitate this. I'm sure I'll be talking about this more as I actually begin my archive.

Also, a topic for the future . . . teaching students to read material culture objects. I've worked on guides for teaching students to read images in a way that is analogous to texts, but now I need to think more carefully about reading stones and bones!