Yaron with Jackier prize winners (from left) – Alyna Orecharova, Bethany Wise, and Max Schwein – and with Kelsey Museum director Chris Ratte, and Donor Larry Jackier. The Jackier prize is one of the highlights of the Land of Israel/Palestine project.

Transforming the Ways We Teach the Ancient World

A Multi-Member Teaching Project at the University of Michigan

During the past 14 years, Yaron has been teaching a large enrollment survey on the history, archaeology, cultures, religions, and conflicts of the Land of Israel/Palestine. The course is titled – The Land of Israel/Palestine through the Ages. This course was used as a laboratory to experiment with new pedagogies and teaching methods on how to engage students with the ancient world and with the far away regions of the Mediterranean. At its full extent the project involved a team of 11 members from different units at the university of Michigan – professors, scientists, a post graduate, graduate students, media and IT specialists, as well as museum staff. The team produced and tested a series of teaching tools – video clips shot in various sites in the Middle East, slides, hands-on museum exercises with archaeological artifacts, and various ways to explore maps, art, and literary sources for the study of this region and its people.

Read more about this project and see a list of people who were on the team and their contribution here.

Publications: Members of the team presented and published studies about the project and its results; See the blog post here; read about a collaborative presentation at a conference in Oregon discussing the project here.

The fruits of this ongoing project and its future plans are presented in a series of integrated web sites:

Course website: https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/israel-palestine/

Slide interactive database: https://image-database.nes.lsa.umich.edu/

Kelsey experience: https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey/

Project website: https://ancient-world-project.nes.lsa.umich.edu/tltc/

Prizes: One of the highlights of the project is an annual essay competition for undergraduate students, named the Jackier Prize. Read more about this prize and its winners here.

If you wish to join the project’s team or have some of its tools tested at your institution or classroom, please contact the project’s director, Prof. Yaron Eliav here.