Two national lockdowns, museum and school closures, and interrupted travel to Greece inevitably have altered the form of museum outreach in Ancient Corinth. The Steinmetz Family Foundation Museum Fellowship, which aims to disseminate the archaeology of Ancient Corinth to audiences around the world, has provided continuous engagement with the local and global community since the onset of the pandemic. Although many on-site programs were cancelled in the spring and summer of 2020, the brief reopening of museums and schools in the fall allowed for an International Archaeology Day event to be held at the Corinth Museum, while students from Grades 1-6 of the Elementary School of Ancient Corinth participated in brand new on-site programs on topics such as Ottoman Corinth, political systems, and Roman tombs.

As one can expect, online outreach efforts expanded greatly. Educators, families, and students can now find links to Corinth content on a number of distance learning platforms, such as Skype-a-Scientist, the AAM’s Museum Distance Learning Repository, the National Art Education Association, and more. We have established a new virtual partnership with AVASA, the Italian-Syrian archaeological organization that launched the Urkesh One-on-One Project last summer. Virtual field trips to Ancient Corinth continued uninterruptedly throughout the pandemic, with students connecting from school and from home. To date, Corinth Excavations has led 380 Skype sessions for over 11,000 students in 48 countries.

Most recently, Corinth Excavations joined the Flipgrid community, a video discussion platform powered by Microsoft and comprised of over 100 million teacher, student, and family users. Flipgrid allows educators to have online video discussions with students or other educators. Teachers can provide feedback to students and students can provide feedback to one another. As a content provider, Corinth Excavations designs “topics” or mini-lessons that explore topics in Greek archaeology.

On our content page, students and teachers can explore our “Mystery Identity” series to learn how archaeologists determine the identity of Greek statues. Our "Museum Peek" series takes a sneak peek at various museum artifacts that teach students about Ancient Corinth specifically and about ancient Greece more generally. Finally, the “Archaeology 101" series teaches students the basics of archaeological fieldwork: tools, stratigraphy, team members, etc. Each topic has a downloadable PDF with information, links to the ASCSA database, ASCSA videos, and other supplementary material.

Do you have an idea for a Flipgrid topic or would you like to collaborate on one? Email us at steinmetzfellow@ascsa.org