Training and Teaching in the Historic Environment

On 19 June 2012, the University of Winchester’s Centre for Applied Archaeology and Heritage Management, in association with Dr Kenneth Aitchison under the aegis of Landward Research, hosted a one-day conference entitled ‘21st Century Archaeologists: Teaching, Training and Professional Development’. The conference was provoked by a need to examine the effectiveness of current archaeological training, and to consider recent developments and initiatives in this field. In 2008 the Archaeology Training Forum had expressed its concern at ‘an ongoing level of disconnect between the expectations of archaeological employers, employees, training providers and students of archaeology in terms of the objectives of training and its outcomes’.1 There was a general widespread feeling across the sector that there was no coherent overview of the differing schemes and approaches to training. This conference sought to investigate these ideas, and to interrogate differing approaches to pedagogy and andragogy.