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Pedagogy

Classroom Use

We encourage the use of WIRE as a general education resource, and for the exploration of a range of topics related to the database items in the high school and higher education classroom. We are testing the integration of WIRE into a range of undergraduate courses, including large lecture classes (100+ students), upper-level major-specific seminars, and independent undergraduate research projects. We have developed some suggestions for integrating the database contents and tools, but welcome you to create new and interesting ways of employing WIRE in the classroom. If you do use WIRE, please let us know how you used it, and consider allowing us to post your lesson plan or instructional idea (with attribution) as a feature on this page for other instructors.

Tutorial Modules

Tutorials are short video or multimedia modules intended to introduce non-specialists to the study of a particular category of ancient artifact or thematic concept from the ancient world. The modules go over basic terminology, describe how and why objects were produced and how they were used in the ancient world, and discuss how scholars use those objects to learn about the past. Each module integrates objects from the WIRE project database. Several tutorials are accompanied by guided assignments that allow the user to implement their new knowledge using the WIRE database.

Upcoming tutorial: Roman civic (city) coins