Teaching Cultural Astronomy to Undergraduates with an Interdisciplinary Frame

Abstract

Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary connecting the arts, humanities, social & physical sciences. Data collection methods and theories are used from many disciplines and meld with methods and theories within cultural astronomy. The burden on the student is that to do cultural astronomy research it is necessary to be widely read within and across disciplines. I developed a series of courses that divided cultural astronomy content into broad regions such as Africa, North America, and the Pacific. The courses were structured to accommodate students from all parts of the university, but had to have enough mathematics and science to serve as a general science requirement. The majority of the grade for the course lay with the final project, which included a presentation and a written document. Thus, the course was designed to give the students a foundation for doing this final project that had to be original research. The students rarely opted to collect their own data, instead they reanalyzed existing materials. The students learned critical thinking, formulating hypotheses, and how to test their hypotheses, as well as how to understand cultural astronomy data.