To See the World in a Marble Toe: The Graeme Clarke Teaching Collection at the Australian National University's Classics Museum

Abstract

Hands-on, object-based learning has become a focus of pedagogical development and audience engagement for museums globally. The ANU Classics Museum has a rich history of engaging tertiary students in hands-on learning since its foundation in 1962. In 2022, Emeritus Professor Graeme Clarke (1934–2023) generously entrusted a group of artefacts as a hands-on teaching and research collection to enhance the educational and outreach activities of the museum. The items stem from excavations conducted by Professor Clarke at Jebel Khalid in Syria, a Hellenistic site on the banks of the Euphrates River, undertaken between 1986 and 2010. The items include artefacts and small finds in ceramic, metal, stone, and glass, with highlights including a Parian marble toe – a fragment from a larger-than-life size sculpture. In order to capitalize on the new teaching collection, the Classics Museum has developed teacher training and school education programmes that engage with the collection, demonstrating how a simple object, such as a marble toe, can lead to an engaging and multidisciplinary investigation into the Hellenistic world. The hands-on collection is housed in a newly developed object-based learning room. This chapter reports on the teaching collection and its provenance and the early development of the museum’s new hands-on, object-based learning programme, highlighting the pedagogical and training models employed to support access from afar to the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, for undergraduate students, high school students and their teachers, and for community engagement. Show more