Robert Schon Named CUES Distinguished Fellow for Innovative Digital Fieldwork Project

Today
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The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences has been a university leader in contributing scholarship to the advancement of educational innovation and exploration in teaching and learning through the Center for University Education Scholarship, or CUES, at the University of Arizona. 

CUES serves as a model for change and improvement in university education by fostering exceptional scholarly experiences for faculty and staff—primarily through financial grants that fund fellowships, project-based challenges, and workshops.

Since 2018, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) has promoted impactful research across diverse fields, including bilingual journalism, intergenerational poverty, technology-based mentorship in Navajo language acquisition, and addressing social contextualization in quantitative analysis.

Continuing this commitment to innovative scholarship, SBS faculty member Robert Schon, associate professor in the School of Anthropology, has been named a 2025 CUES Distinguished Fellow for his project, “Back from the Field: Supporting Student Researchers through Digital Laboratories and Multi-Semester Mentoring.”

Field schools are widely acknowledged as essential training in archaeology and related disciplines, and the University of Arizona has an 80-year tradition of offering these immersive experiences. However, field training is often a standalone activity, with little opportunity for students to continue their research after the season ends, and often, few materials can be brought back to campus for further analysis.

Schon’s project addresses these challenges through the Arizona Sicily Project’s excavations at Segesta, using them as a case study to develop Digital Learning Models: 3D scans and multimedia records of artifact assemblages that students can continue to study back on campus. The project will test the impact of multi-semester mentored research in comparison to traditional field school models. By extending hands-on learning through digital tools and evaluating their effect on student engagement and research continuity, the project directly supports CUES’s mission to advance innovative, research-driven approaches to teaching and learning at the University of Arizona.

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