Welcome to the podcast series that my students from both UCLA and Brown University created called, “Now as Then: A Cultural Examination of the Reception of “Ancient Egypt” as Myth Through Time.” I initially developed this project as part of a Cluster series course at UCLA. The Cluster program is a unique series of classes designed for freshmen to help them get their GE credits out of the way. Thus, because my particular cluster series offered credits in the humanities and social sciences, it was taken largely by STEM majors.
I wanted to develop a course that would help students develop the skills needed to be responsible researchers, without forcing them to memorize facts about a long-dead culture that they would probably never have to learn about again. So, I decided to treat ancient Egypt as a case study for these students to examine how bias affects interpretation–an important theme relevant to every area of inquiry. It was also important to me that the students leave the class with a sense of why the past matters and how its study is relevant to their own lives.
The students were tasked with choosing a topic from ancient Egypt and developing a podcast in groups. The podcast was meant to examine how the reception of their particular cultural material changed through time and the significance underlying those changes. The only requirements were that: 1) they incorporate a graduate student interview; 2) they discuss an item from UCLA’s Library Special Collections; and 3) they discuss their cultural material from an ancient Egyptian perspective, an “early traveler” perspective (think, Herodotus through the Victorian period), and from a modern, Egyptomania viewpoint. Deadlines were set up throughout the quarter to help them with time management, and class-time was spent developing a fluency with methods of assessing and conducting independent research. Overall, the class depended largely on the students’ self-motivation to learn and grow.
I continued this project once I began teaching at Brown in a course simply called Egyptomania! which was also exclusively for first year students. The requirements were similar to those at UCLA, but were geared toward taking advantage of the resources available to them at Brown.
I hope you enjoy their final projects!