Today I was thrilled and honored to be awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for Service-Learning Leadership. Great reception in the Chancellor’s mansion “University House”, sunny warm evening, yummy food. There were other awardees in various categories. My award was for the after-school program “Expedition”, that we have held at Roosevelt Middle School since 1999 and the service-learning course that has been taught to provide mentors for the 12-14 year olds.

This was my acceptance speech: “We started this project as part of an initiative funded through the UC Interactive University in 1999. Tamara Sturak had a connection with the Oakland Unified School District and was looking for a collaborator within the university. I was very interested in broadening the audience for archaeology and digital technology to K-12 students. So we were a match made in heaven, as they say.  In 2001 the project transferred its funding and support base to the UC Links program run by Charles Underwood.

“The three of us, Charles, Tamara, and I, along with my dear colleague Meg Conkey who also has a great passion for outreach of archaeology, and a series of wonderful assistants, like Mike Way, have taught a service-learning course - now called Archaeology and Education - every semester since Fall 1999. This award is as much theirs as it is mine! We feel a sense of great joy and pride as generations of undergraduates have had the opportunity to experience as anthropologists the strange culture of 12-year-olds, learning through practice to be guides and friends rather than controllers. many of them have gone on to be teachers!

“I think I speak for the whole team in saying that we are all enormously appreciative of this award and the recognition that it represents for our efforts during these last ten years. I don’t know how much longer we’ll go on doing it, perhaps for ever. We would finally like to thank the children of Oakland and their teachers for allowing us to collaborate with them all these years.”

More about Expedition here