Prehistory and Archaeology workshop for primary and secondary teachers


On Thursday 11 March 2021, our member Dr Sofía Samper Carro presented her first Prehistory/Archaeology Workshop for over 30 ACT primary and secondary teachers.

Dr Carro’s workshop included many fun, hands-on learning activities, and the first two topics dealt with Chronology and Stratigraphy.

Working in small groups, participants embraced challenges such as working out the chronology of key steps in human story; interpreting an image showing stratification; and sequencing hominid skulls.

The feedback from participants was uniformly enthusiastic. Sofia’s model is ‘teach the teacher’, with an aim of building up teachers’ and students’ skills through rich teaching materials and replica artefacts directly relating to the ACT primary and secondary curricula.

The workshop was held in collaboration with the ACT History Teachers’ Association and Canberra Archaeology Society, and under the auspices of the ARC-funded Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

The second workshop will be run on the 27 May 2021, focused on contextual data and archaeological artefacts.


Angel.Lopez-Sanchez

About Angel.Lopez-Sanchez

Dr Ángel R. López-Sánchez is an astrophysicist and science communicator working at the Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Macquarie University (MQ) in Sydney (NSW, Australia). His research is focused in the analysis of star formation phenomena in galaxies of the Local Universe, especially in dwarf starbursts and spiral galaxies, using multi-wavelength (UV, optical, IR, radio) data. He presented his PhD Thesis at University of La Laguna and the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias (Spain) in 2006. In 2007 he joined CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science (Sydney) with a postdoctoral position. He then joined the AAO (formerly the Australian Astronomical Observatory) and MQ in 2011. In July 2018 he was appointed as Senior Lecturer at AAO-MQ. He has been providing instrument and observing support at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT, Siding Spring Observatory, NSW) since 2011, being the instrument scientist of several instruments: the multi-fiber spectrograph 2dF+AAOmega and the near-infrared imager and spectrograph IRIS2. He also has large experience with integral-field spectroscopy (IFS), being a very active member of the SAMI collaboration at the AAT and part of the HECTOR Science Team. He currently is the Instrument Scientist of KOALA+AAOmega at the AAT, and leads the international astronomy survey "HI KOALA IFS Dwarf and irregular galaxy Survey" (Hi-KIDS), that is getting unique, high-quality IFS data of a sample of 100 nearby dwarf and irregular galaxies for which 21cm H I interferometric data is available He has large experience teaching undergraduate and PhD students and giving lectures and classes about Astronomy. Dr. López-Sánchez is passionate science communicator who continuously gives talks and public lectures, writes popular science articles and organizes science communication events and stargazing activities. He is very active in social media, his Twitter feed is @El_Lobo_Rayado.