My favorite part of the job is to work with faculty and their students. Going to Session 10 this afternoon about using primary sources in higher education was a great way to start the afternoon. My biggest take-aways were to develop a scaffold approach to instruction and to encourage students to embrace the uncertainty that comes with doing research in an archive.
Margery Sly, of Temple University, shared with us several comments that framed the session. She emphasized the importance of working with students and a selection of items, rather than just one or two, in order to encourage students to understand historical context and the content of the materials. Sly hopes to develop a program that would award a faculty member a stipend to spend several weeks in the archives during the summer using collections and then incorporating those materials into their course content. Most exciting was her description of a digitization project that uses Ed students to create modules used by k-12 groups to document and understand civil rights in Philly.
Robin Katz shared with us her project with the Brooklyn Historical Society to bring in undergraduates from neighboring institutions to use the collections. Her project was the result of a two year grant. Katz explained to us her teaching philosophy which included establishing goals and learning objectives for the classes and faculty she worked with, the decision not to do any show and tell sessions, the choice to develop active use of the materials by students, and the importance of teaching students document analysis work. The website that chronicles the project goes live in December and will offer practitioners a variety of tools and exercises to use and emulate in their instruction.
Diane Riley from Nazareth College spoke about her work as a Freshman seminar instructor. I found the reflections she shared in her presentation a wonderful look into the careful planning and perseverance it takes to do good outreach and instruction. One of my dream assignments includes teaching a semester-long History of the University, or other topic class that brings students into the archives and develops critical thinking and analytical skills through primary source research.
Carla Rineer, an English faculty member, and Marylin Parrish, an archivist at Millersville University, concluded the session and compelled me to consider how my activities with students could be improved. At the end of their presentation, we were assigned a close reading exercise and asked to consider key questions as we examined our document. We then reported back to the group. Questions included: what do you see or notice about your item? What issues of race, class or gender do you see addressed in your item? What cultural values does your item promote? What surprised you or what do you wonder about after looking at your item? I tend to focus on more basic identification questions when I work with students to do a close reading exercise. I’m excited to implement some of these higher order thinking questions and see if we can have a more rich discussion.