Collections-Based Learning: Ideas from Your Colleagues in Special Collections and Archives
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Western Museums Association (WMA) annual meeting Tacoma, Washington October 23, 2018
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Collections-Based Learning: Ideas from Your Colleagues in Special Collections and Archives
- 1. COLLECTIONS- BASED LEARNING IDEAS FROM YOUR COLLEAGUES IN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES
- 2. ROBIN M. KATZ A R C H I V I S T, L I B R A R I A N , E D U C AT O R @ R O B I N M K AT Z
- 3. IN OUR FIELD
- 4. CASE STUDIES IN OUR LITERATRE Teaching with Primary Sources bibliography (Zotero) www.zotero.org/groups/76402/teaching_with_primary_sources
- 5. CASE STUDIES IN OUR LITERATRE Who teaches the class? • Class visits to the archives (usually a “one-off”) • Small seminars based in the archives / taught by archivists
- 6. CASE STUDIES IN OUR LITERATRE Outside competitions • National History Day • National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest • Prizes • Undergraduate research initiatives
- 7. CASE STUDIES IN OUR LITERATRE Students “doing the work” • Student-curated exhibitions • Student-mounted digital projects • Student-led walking tours Experience gained via • Courses • Fellowships / internships • Employment
- 8. CASE STUDIES IN OUR LITERATRE Past or Portal? Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives. Edited by E. Mitchell, P. A. Seiden, and S. Taraba. Chicago: ACRL, 2012.
- 9. INVOLVED PROFESSIONALS AGREE • move away from the didactic show and tell • towards hands-on, active learning strategies
- 10. B U T M O S T P R O F E S S I O N A L S F E E L T O TA L LY U N P R E PA R E D T O T E A C H W E L L
- 11. INCREASED DEMAND • Teachers/faculty ask for curriculum integration • Students show up • Other institutions are doing it • Administrators like the idea of it • Funders • Communications / marketing staff love it
- 12. INCREASED DEMAND • Why archives (and museums)? The stuff!
- 13. A TRAINING GAP L. Anderberg, R. Katz, S. Hayes, A. Stankrauff, M. M. Hodgetts, J. Hurtado, A. Nye, and A. Todd-Diaz. “Teaching the Teacher: Primary Source Instruction in American and Canadian Archives Graduate Programs.” American Archivist 81, no.1 (2018): 188-215.
- 14. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT • Rare Book School • California Rare Book School • Society of American Archivists (SAA) continuing education courses • Rare Book and Manuscript Sections (RBMS) pre-conference workshops • Teaching with Primary Sources unconference (TPS Expo) FREE and open to all. Next one: Aug 14, 2018 in D.C. http://teachwithstuff.org/tps-expo-2018august-washingtondc/
- 15. LOOKING TO • Museum educators • Academic / teaching librarians
- 16. HOW WE CAN LEARN FROM EACH OTHER
- 17. BEST OF MUSEUMS VS. ARCHIVES • Museums are much better at interpretation • Archives are arguably better at access
- 18. ADMIRE ABOUT MUSEUM EDUCATORS • Inquiry method • Aligning with standards like Common Core • Facilitation, logistics • Repeatable, scalable experiences • Packaging (“menu of options”)
- 20. STUDENTS & FACULTY IN THE ARCHIVES • Three year grant, 2011 – 2014 • Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) • US Department of Education • Brooklyn Historical Society with 18 partner faculty at – Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus – St. Francis College – New York City College of Technology, aka “City Tech” part of the City University of New York (CUNY) • 1100 students in 65 courses, 100 visits to the archives in 4 semesters • 2 summer fellowships, 2 group exhibits, 25 indiv fellowship projects • Independent evaluators
- 21. STUDENTS & FACULTY IN THE ARCHIVES • Independent evaluators used – Pre/post, observations, interviews, reflections, campus assessment offices • SAFA students – More engaged than peers – Performed better academically than peers • Grades • Course passing rates • Course completion rates • Student retention rates (re-enrolled in college the next year) – Improved document analysis skills • Observe and summarize
- 23. FOR MORE DETAILS, SEE Katz, Robin M. “Documenting and Sharing Instruction Practices: The Story of TeachArchives.org.” Educational Programs: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections. Ed. Kate Theimer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
- 29. OUR TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 1. Define specific learning objectives for the visit to the archives 2. Thoughtfully select individual documents (the fewer the better) 3. Design tailored small-group activities 4. Model document analysis through directed, specific prompts
- 32. THE NEW PRIMARY SOURCE LITERACY GUIDELINES • Approved 2018 • Joint task force –Association of College and Research Libraries’ Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) –Society of American Archivists (SAA) www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/standards/ Primary%20Source%20Literacy2018.pdf
- 33. THE NEW PRIMARY SOURCE LITERACY GUIDELINES 1. Conceptualize 2. Find and Access 3. Read, Understand, and Summarize 4. Interpret, Analyze, and Evaluate 5. Use and Incorporate
- 34. LOOKING AHEAD I T ’ S A L L A B O U T A S S E S S M E N T !
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hello everyone. First, I deeply regret that I am unable to be with you all today. I was really looking forward to learning from colleagues in the museum world, and to sharing my perspective from the land of special collections libraries and archives. I’ve been in my field over 10 years and have worked at museums and on a variety of campuses. Redmond asked me to speak because of a project I did while at Brooklyn Historical Society in New York, but I am currently the world’s first Primary Source Literacy Librarian at the University of California, Riverside. You can find me on Twitter as @robinmkatz (and if you want to tap into Archivist Twitter, try the hashtag #teachwstuff – we do regular twitter chats) I have posted these slides on Slideshare, as well, so you can find them online after this talk!
- I want to start by giving you a little context about where teaching archivists fit into the special collections profession.
- As early as the 1980s - but really starting around 15-20 years ago - we start to see a lot of case studies in our professional literature. Today, we might fault them for lumping together outreach and instruction in unfocused ways, but they show some really exciting projects. And keep in mind that at that point, just bringing undergraduate or K-12 students into an archives really ruffled some feathers. For an excellent literature review, see the Zotero bibliography maintained by the Reference, Access, and Outreach section of the Society of American Archivists called “Teaching with Primary Sources.” You can see a real publication boom happen around 2005.
- Since then we have had endless examples of class visits to the archives. What those classes look like varies, but essentially, students come to see (or better yet, to use) collections. You will hear librarians lament the “one-offs” because of course, we never have enough time with students. (I think museum educators have a better sense that, yes, this field trip is a limited interaction so what can we accomplish with it?) But I have worked with classes that come in 2 – 4 times in a semester, and if we are really intensely building a class around special collections we might have a class come 5 times in a quarter. The case studies in this category get into the nature of what the class was, what activity was done, and sometimes what assignment it was related to. Archivists and librarians are also sometimes in the position of being the instructor of a course. At many campuses, we have faculty status OR are easily able to be the official instructor. You will often see first year seminars take place in special collections, or you may see an advanced elective within a relevant degree program, most often English or History. In the UC system, our contract prevents us from being an instructor of record and many archivists work at institutions that do not teach courses, but this is common enough that there are many, many case studies on it.
- Sometimes there are outside competitions that we can piggyback onto. The most common one is probably National History Day for middle and high school social studies students. Primary sources are key to success in any of the categories, and local archivists can work with an individual student, one class, an entire school, or a regional organizer to connect with teachers and students. One that may be less familiar to this audience is a student book collecting competition. Contestants describe their book collection: what it is on, how it began, and why they are interested in those topics, as well as a wish list of items they would like to add. Campus winners go on to the national event at the Library of Congress. Many special collections department also offer research prizes to undergraduate students that reflect the types of prizes available in the scholarly community. There may be a cash prize to support research in the collection, or simply an award of some sort given after a paper using the collections has been submitted. More and more, special collections are working with campus-wide undergraduate research initiatives to encourage students to do (and get recognized for) the kind of original research that is possible in an archival reading room.
- Of course, much of the literature focuses on students not just using collections but getting a taste of the work we do. Many people have shared successful stories of student-curated exhibits (both physical and digital), student-led digital humanities projects or other digital initiatives, and student-led programs such as walking tours. This often happens as part of an assignment, but the educational mission is similar for student employees, fellows, and interns as well
- While you can search many library and archives journals for such cases studies, or look at that great Zotero bibliography, the first book on this subject, an edited compilation called Past or Portal? was published by the Association of College and Research Libraries IN 2012. The publisher and the subtitle Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives reflect the general bias towards undergraduate education in my field.
- As we look at all of our literature, we can absolutely see a shift in thinking about best practices for when you do (gasp!) bring students into the archives. The traditional way of doing things was to have a show and tell: pull out some collection highlights, maybe let students actually handle things (depending on institutional culture and the materials in question), and have a “discussion” which mostly looks like talking AT the group and making them stand around. Now I have been to plenty of these with museum curators and museum staff, as well, and this certainly still happens in special collections, too. But anyone who thinks deeply about collections-based teaching in my profession agrees that we need to move toward hands on, active learning principles. Show and tell has become a dirty word among those of us who really focus on pedagogy within special collections and archives.
- But one of the big problems is that while the passionate group of professionals is growing, the majority of archivists and special collections librarians still feel unprepared to teach well. Early surveys showed this, and it hasn’t improved. Most archivists didn’t get into the field because they like to teach – in fact, quite a few thought this was a career path to avoid teaching. And yet, demand for instruction services in special collections and archives is growing, for quite a few reasons.
- Most importantly, our main audiences (teachers and students) are asking for it. There’s some peer pressure, and some top down demands (though never with enough actual support by way of time, money, or staff), but mostly – it’s what makes us look good.
- And why special collections and archives? It’s the same reasons as museum – we have the unique, interesting, exciting stuff!
- Unfortunately, there is a skill gap between what most of us can do and what we are being asked to do. I just co-authored a study where we surveyed graduate programs and showed just how little we prepare archivists for any instruction whatsoever.
- A number of professional development opportunities have sprung up to address this need, from one hour webinars to week long courses at Rare Book School. SAA and RBMS, our two major professional organizations, offer different sorts of workshops and classes. In 2015, the Teaching w Primary Sources committee of the national archives organization decided to plan an unconference just before the annual meeting open to all. Each year since, attendance has swelled, incredibly motivated organizers have emerged, and non-archivists such as teachers, museum staff, and academic librarians have attended as well. The next one will be at the Library of Congress on Aug 14 – if you’re anywhere near D.C. you should come. IT’S FREE!!!!!
- But the reason I’m so excited to have been invited to present at WMA is that many of us involved in this community also know that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Our colleagues in both Museum education and our instruction librarian counterparts in academic libraries (which basically means teaching librarians, mostly on campuses) are years ahead of us in terms of thinking about pedagogy.
- I’m most interested in how museum professionals, special collections librarians, and archivists can learn from each other.
- In my experience, museums are so much better at interpretation. Too many archivists cling to a myth of neutrality, that we simply organize and make material available and that interpretation is not our job. This of course lacks a critical understanding of the power that archives and archivists play in shaping the historical record, contextualizing primary sources, and shaping users’ understanding. Librarians of every stripe wring their hands over what the line is between showing someone how to do research, and actually doing their research for them. And while many archivists and special collections “curate” exhibits or digital projects, we don’t often do it well – and by that I mean, we often just put some things together in a case without really crafting a narrative or better yet, an argument. I might posit, though, that collections in archives and libraries are more accessible than in museums. There are increasingly open study rooms in museums, and curators and other staff are working to make museums more accessible, but the vast majority of special collections and archives repositories are organized in a way that literally anyone can stop in and ask to use any item in the collections at any time. Sure, an advanced appointment is sometimes required, and we don’t do the best job explaining how to come in and use our materials - but extra special permission is not required. I wish I was here to flesh out this comparison more with you, and to hear your thoughts (and undoubtedly, your criticisms) so find me on Twitter and let me know how the conversation goes in the Q&A today.
- I can tell you that as a teaching archivist, these are just some of the things I admire about my colleagues in museum education.
- And museum educators greatly influenced a project I did which I know is the reason Redmond asked me to join this panel. He heard about a project I did that led to the website TeachArchives.org. It was based at Brooklyn Historical Society, a history museum, and it absolutely was inspired and informed by BHS’s talented, dedicated Education department. The project was initially conceived of as filling a gap in the museum’s audiences – the Education Dept serves K-12 really well, so how can BHS better support college learning? Well, some professors were already using the rich collections of the Othmer Library and Archives and collaborating with the librarians there, so that was the genesis of the grant application.
- From 2011 – 2014, Julie Golia (a historian) and I co-directed a three-year grant called Students and Faculty in the Archives (or SAFA for short) at Brooklyn Historical Society. It was funded by the US Department of Education’s now-defunct Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. BHS partnered with 18 faculty at 3 colleges within walking distance of the archives: LIU Brooklyn, St. Francis College, and City Tech (which is part of the CUNY system). We established a community of practice among these professors through an annual week-long summer institute and we fostered it throughout the year by holding events, conducting meetings, and maintaining virtual communication. The professors ranged from junior to tenured faculty, in disciplines as wide ranging as communication, architecture, and religion as well as more familiar disciplines like English and history. The project brought early career college students unfamiliar with primary source research out of the classroom and into the reading room. Over the course of two academic years (2011 – 2012 and 2012 – 2013), 65 courses made 100 visits to Brooklyn Historical Society. Over 1,100 individual undergraduate students benefited from a hands-on experience with primary sources. If we look at “bodies through the door,” we count over 2,000 students! More than 100 students returned to the archives on their own after a SAFA visit, and professors requested over 1,000 items from BHS collections. But the single most important thing about SAFA was that we hired independent evaluators to assess the program’s success.
- Independent evaluators from Education Development Center, Inc. collected evidence of student engagement, student performance, student skills, student retention, and faculty learning. They used pre- and post- visit assessments, observed classroom sessions and archives visits, interviewed students and faculty, reviewed written reflections by professors and required student blog posts, and worked with campus assessment offices to look at anonymized data for students in SAFA courses as well as for comparative groups. Independent evaluators found that students who visited the archives were more engaged and performed better academically than their peers. Students felt that: - hands-on access to archival materials was a revelatory experience. working in small groups in the archives created a spirit of collaboration and camaraderie. and intensive interactions with primary sources gave the course content new relevance. The 4 metrics for academic performance were grades, course passing rates, course completion rates, and student retention. Across all 3 campuses, evaluators observed higher course grades and passing rates in courses where instructors employed the set of best-practices for archives-based teaching that we identified through the grant. For SAFA sections with well matched comparison sections, retention rates of SAFA students were higher than comparison students at all three campuses. They also found that students improved in their ability to exercise two foundational document analysis skills: observation and summarization. At the end of their SAFA semester, students were more likely to notice details, and to use those details to support their ideas. Perhaps more importantly, after their SAFA experience, students moved away from unquestioningly accepting the contents of a document. They adopted a more critical approach to primary source analysis as a result of the SAFA program.
- Julie and I knew this project offered a rare luxury to focus on teaching, and to get really important data on the impact of archives-based learning, so we advocated for time to create a lasting resource. Thankfully, BHS and the US Department of Ed supported our idea of a widely accessible website. We conceived of TeachArchives.org and moved the grant budget around to make it happen.
- If you’re interested in the mechanics of actually planning and executing the site, I have a chapter in a booked called Educational Programs that explains all the nuts and bolts of making it happen.
- The TeachArchives site features a ton of project document, key articles on our findings and our teaching philosophy,
- As well as articles on a host of How To topics and Stories from each of the partner faculty members
- There are also sample exercises.
- We worked closely with each professor to pick their best activities and to adapt it to a final, publishable form to be featured on the website.
- Each exercise is put in context of the original course and student level, objectives are shared, how students gained any necessary context is explained, the precise agenda for the class visit to the archives is included (along with any handouts or prompts, and digital versions of the archival documents used), As well as what happened after the visit – what were the assignments, and were any end products made by students? The idea here was not necessarily that other classes in other states would repeat the exact same exercises, but that by making so much information available, other archivists, librarians, teachers, professors, or educators could see HOW we crafted the transformative learning experiences we did, so that our methods could be adapted in other collections and other classrooms.
- Because the real point of sharing TeachArchives.org was to share the teaching philosophy we landed on for the SAFA project. We advocated for very specific objectives for each archives visit – custom to the class. Like Museum educators, we know less is more. The main experience of working in the archives was small group stations, not group facilitation (though a variety of modes were employed at different times). We closely collaborated with faculty to craft really customized prompts – given to students as handouts – based on the items selected, the class goals, and the individual reading of a document that was relevant in the given situation. This is not very scaleable. It is not very repeatable. So it is a world away from what most museum education departments do. It’s also not what all archivists do, either. At the time, we presented a radically different approach from the generic primary source worksheets available on the National Archives site and commonly used by teachers and librarians alike. In the years since we launched TeachArchives.org, many archivists have hopped on our bandwagon. Others haven’t. This customized approach is in many ways the TeachArchives approach.
- But we think it is speaking to people. In the last five years, the site has received over 30,000 global users and was honored by the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York and the American Historical Association.
- I told Redmond that I wanted to share some updated resources from library land, too. I think the most significant development is that our two main professional organizations put together a joint task force to write guidelines for primary source literacy.
- The new guidelines were just approved this year, and if you follow that horrible URL you can read the entire document. I was thrilled to be a part of the dream team that put this together, and the experience inspired me to ask to become the world’s first Primary Source Literacy Librarian. Creating the document was not an easy task. We argued over whether literacy was even the right term, and if singular or plural would be better. We envisioned a document for people of all ages, yet one of our professional organizations is explicitly focused on higher ed. We wanted the guidelines to embrace the fact that primary sources are found everywhere, yet we also took extra care to explain how special collections and archives work
- There are 3 – 6 broad learning objectives in each of these categories. For example: 2C: Distinguish between catalogs, databases, and other online resources that contain information about sources, versus those that contain digital versions, originals, or copies of the sources themselves. or 4D: As part of the analysis of available resources, identify, interrogate, and consider the reasons for silences, gaps, contradictions, or evidence of power relationships in the documentary record and how they impact the research process. I would love, love, love to hear if museum folks were already aware of the guidelines, if you’ve used them in any way, if you think they are helpful or useless… so please, reach out. Email me, tweet at me, and let me know.
- Looking ahead, assessment is key. There have been endless calls for better assessment in our field, and I really do think that the Students and Faculty in the Archives project that led to TeachArchives.org produced some important empirical data that should be used more often to advocate for the value of archives-based learning. But it’s only the beginning. How do we show that students have actually learned in a given instruction session, assignment, or class experience? How do we demonstrate competency with respects to the new Primary Source Literacy Guidelines? How do we know that an archives has had a real and lasting impact on a student? There are many reasons we don’t see enough of this type of research, but we all need a renewed commitment to try to do what we can. Because if we can’t demonstrate our value, how do we really know that we are valuable?
- Thanks! Please feel free to reach out at robink@ucr.edu or on Twitter at @robinmkatz.