Teaching Philosophy and Methods: My goal as a teacher is to impart new knowledge while training students to think critically about the topics at hand from holistic and multi-cultural perspectives. For undergraduate introductory courses in Archaeology and Indians of North America, I lecture primarily on assigned-reading topics. In doing so, I draw heavily from my experiences as a field archaeologist who addresses research issues from decidedly ecological perspectives and who has worked extensively with Native Americans groups. I encourage students to learn experientially by: (1) placing themselves in the "shoes" of those they are studying; (2) talking directly to descendants of people they are studying, especially Native Americans; and (3) structuring my lectures around PowerPoint presentations that feature a multitude of ethnographic and archaeological slides. These same methods promise to serve well as I develop and teach, for the first time, Indians of Texas, an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate course that deals primarily with the ethnographic period and modern era. In teaching that course, I will draw substantially from my experiences working with representatives of the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, and Comanche tribes, the Tap Pilam-Coahuiltecan Nations, and the Texas Band of Lipan Apaches.

My graduate courses are taught as seminars that combine lectures with student presentations and discussions of the assigned topics. They are "hands-on" courses, usually with field trips and guest lectures. Students take a written mid-term exam and write a term paper that analyzes case studies or undertakes research for their thesis and dissertation topics (see syllabi links below). My own research projects provide frameworks and case-studies for my seminars in Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology, Human Ecology of the Pacific Northwest, Heritage-Resources Management, and, in the spring-2006 semester, Prehistory of Texas.

Fifty students, mostly undergraduates, participated in four externally funded archaeological field schools I taught at sites in Montana (pdf) and Texas (pdf) . Plans are underway to teach additional archaeological field schools at the Land Heritage Institute of the Americas , which is located along the Medina River about 15 miles south of San Antonio . During each of the last six years, I have instructed graduate students in independent studies courses, chaired at least four MA/PhD committees for students whose research was primarily through my projects, and served on four or more other graduate-student committees. Five of my graduate students have completed their thesis since 1999 and accepted employment in archaeology and museum fields.

Given my broad experiences in CRM, I regularly teach the Department's graduate course in Culture Resources Management, which routinely includes students from Architecture, Rangeland Ecology and Management, and Recreation, Parks and Tourism Science. This course is designed to present the legal principles, methods, and ethics of effectively managing important cultural properties and places (i.e., heritage resources). As such, it effectively incorporates CRM into the university curricula, which is a significant issue in academic archaeology today, as evidenced by fully one-third of the articles in a recent (2000) publication by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) entitled Teaching Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century .

Another important 21 st century issue given considerable attention in SAA's Teaching Archaeology report is the need to work more effectively with local and/or descendant groups. Throughout my career at TAMU, I have endeavored and will continue to bring improved working relationships with Native Americans into my archaeological field schools and classroom courses. My field-school students in Montana worked daily with Kootenai tribal representatives and, at Camp Ford in East Texas , students worked with representatives of Civil War descent and re-enactor groups. I routinely invite tribal representatives to lecture in my CRM seminar and my large-section (ca. 250 students) Indians of North America class. For most students, these courses represent their first opportunity to examine American Indian diversity and the trials and tribulations of Indian history and their resulting lifeways in the 21 st century.