Teaching Update

I thought I'd write a little about my First-Year Writing classes in which we're exploring and writing about the university's archives and special collections. The students just turned in the final drafts of their exploratory essays, where they were supposed to, as I told them several times, "go from what you already know about the archival site you're looking at to what questions you have that you can try to answer in future research." That is, they spent some time reading in the archival collections of Northeastern University or the special collections of a social movement organization of their choice to identify a topic of interest. Then they read more closely in those archives and also tried to find relevant secondary sources. Then they summarized what they had learned and wrote about what questions they still had. 

We've visited the archives 3 times so far as a class--the first for a more general introduction to the archives and the other two to give them a chance to do research. (Most of the students are engineering majors and don't have a great deal of time to visit the archives outside of class. Fortunately, the library also has an extensive collection of digitized records that they can use.) 

When I asked them about the experience of doing the research, one frequent complaint was that they wish their process could be more efficient. This led me to realize that something I should be emphasizing in this class is the value of going more slowly, of not trying to do everything "efficiently." Sure, there are some ways that we can improve our experience and make it more efficient, like learning how to write good search terms for the digitized records, using research tools like Zotero or Google Keep for recording notes, and (at minimum!) recording what box and folder they found that interesting flyer in. (By the way, am I the only person who write "flyer" instead of "flier" anymore?) But I realized that in this course, I could perhaps try to stress the value of going slowly to develop familiarity with the archives and to develop questions about the collection they're working with. I preached to them a bit about this, though I don't know how they took it. I think some of them, particularly the ones who seem really connected to their topics, liked the idea, but some students might just think it's all boring. Guess I'll find out at the end of the semester. Maybe this is something I should talk about at the beginning of the semester the next time I teach this course. 

As I said before, I'm not trying to turn them into historians, but maybe they can develop a historical perspective on Northeastern or Boston. That would be valuable. And I have to admit that I'm learning a lot about Northeastern and Boston through their work! Lots of topics that I didn't know much (or anything) about in the past, like Northeastern's Faculty Wives organization, the African American Master Artist in Residence Program at Northeastern, La Alianza Hispana and Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, the Chinese Progressive Association and the Asian American Resource Workshop, Pride at Work, Freedom House, Roxbury Youth Council, etc. 

Now we're working on their final projects, where they're going to try to answer those research questions. I've given them options on how they can present their work. We'll talk more about that in class tomorrow.