Education as Liberation: Using Archaeology to Serve Modern Working Class Needs
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Springer Nature
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8
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Acknowledgements: I wish to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions that have strengthened this article, as well as Kyla Cools, Katie Boyle, and Paul Shackel for their stewardship of the Anthracite Heritage Program. I am further grateful to Maria O’Donovan and Jay Stottman for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work was completed with financial assistance from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Funder: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100023581
The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.
Funder: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100023581
The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.