12 Location, Location, Location: Maximizing a Community’s Shared Place to Enhance Instructional Engagement

Many archivists cannot control the collections they care for, so identifying ways to make those collections relevant to a broad audience of students, faculty, and community members can be a challenge. Students may not know archives exist or what the purpose of the archives is, let alone see the relevance of archival material to their studies and personal lives. Some may even view the department with wariness, believing it may be an extension of the public relations aspect of the institution rather than the academic one, or because of their own reluctance to think honestly about our collective history. Faculty members are often unaware of the potential archival records have to bring new voices and perspectives to their course content. Many anticipate that a visit to the archives will offer nothing more than a show-and-tell instruction session offering only the oldest, most unique, or most curious items in the collections to be admired rather than being used as learning objects. Finding ways to demonstrate the usefulness of the archives as a valuable resource and to connect students to the records can be as simple as grounding the session in something familiar to everyone in the room: campus itself.

Centering the school’s location will ensure that the lesson will be personally relevant and relatable to everyone in the classroom. By focusing on the location across time, students will be engaged by something familiar while also being challenged to consider it from a variety of new viewpoints. Working jointly to understand the material presented offers students the opportunity to learn from one another and experience the transformation of something they see every day into something new and thought-provoking. Most academic archivists can adapt this type of lesson since many institutional archives possess materials relating to their land and location, making this a practical lesson for all.

Transforming the Everyday

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discussed the complicated process of creating meaning, which relies on recognizing the unfamiliar within the familiar to experience a new way of thinking.^[1] For Derrida, meaning is related to an interplay between an object (e.g., a text, image, or sound) and the thoughts and ideas it elicits. This relationship, which he refers to as the trace, is characterized by the learner referring to their previous experiences and understandings in order to place the object in context and extract meaning from it. Derrida noted that this process conjures a sense of “other as other in the same” or dissimilitude in similitude.^[2] In other words, before the learner can understand a new object or concept, they must first have a working idea of prior concepts from which to differentiate it. This creates a collage of reminiscences that combine to create an experience for the learner. Thus, in processing the object, the learner is not only creating their own meaning through their own past thoughts, they are also in effect decoding the trace imbued in the object’s details.

The constructivist theory of engaging with learners underscores this idea. Understanding that learners bring their own values and experiences to the classroom gives educators the opportunity to use that knowledge to explore more complex ideas. As Booth writes, “individuals construct knowledge by building their own context for the information they encounter, which incorporates elements of individual agency and social learning.”^[3] By providing an opportunity to explore new objects, reflect on personal experience, and discuss with peers, special collections and archives can offer students a safe space to develop their own ideas and be curious.^[4]

Lu et al. have identified phases of collaborative inquiry-based learning which include finding topics to engage students, allowing them to work together to explore those topics and share how they have experienced them in their own lives, and eventually deepening their understandings of the original topics based on what they apply from their own lived perspectives as well as those shared by their peers.^[5] In the archives, we connect students to their peers who may have attended the school generations ago, but who nevertheless have similar experiences to those currently enrolled.

Creating a Safe Place to Wonder

Incorporating visual sources into your lesson presents learners with the challenge to observe, question, and create meaning free from someone else’s words. Yenawine’s visual thinking strategies include the development of viewing skills, considering alternative meanings, and giving learners “permission to wonder.”^[6] This freedom to observe, question, and wonder underscores the value of multiple perspectives and the lack of one “correct” answer.

By providing a visual object (e.g., an image, poster, or art) that reflects a familiar location on campus in a different time, learners can draw on their own experiences, memories, and context to inform their understanding of this new object while also appreciating how it differs across time. This approach encourages learners to build on what they already know to develop new knowledge, supporting the constructivist worldview, which posits that meanings and views are developed and continually evolve through social and cultural experiences and exchanges.

Crafting questions that engage as well as inspire new modes of thinking is an important aspect of encouraging students to interact with unfamiliar material. Asking questions that allow students to formulate answers that center their personal knowledge has the potential to deepen their understanding of the lesson rather than just trying to discern a “correct” answer. As Francis notes, one “important aspect of cognitive rigor is that it promotes intellectual involvement by challenging students to explain what they have learned in their own unique way.”^[7]

Inviting students to collaboratively answer these questions has the benefit of offering them the viewpoints of others. Additionally, it may help students feel more empowered to share their observations if the work is done from a position of sharing the collective rather than the personal.

Building a Bridge Between the Familiar and the Challenging

Several archival scholars have drawn attention to the significance of location. Foote likens archives to cultural landscapes in that they both hold a “representation of the past.”^[8] Bastian furthers this idea by encouraging researchers to view landscapes as “a text that is continually shaped and re-shaped, a collection of information amassed and redefined over centuries and millennia, layered records of the relationship between the land and its occupiers.”^[9] By using views of campus at different points in time, students can feel safe immersing themselves in wonder and critical thinking while benefiting from the safety net of familiarity. Since they have the touchstone of location, they may feel more comfortable making guesses about other contextual details, such as date, activity, or people represented.

Focusing on location also provides the opportunity to leave space for conversations about often challenging topics such as colonization, the impact of slavery, segregation, and urbanization. By demonstrating to learners that you will not shy away from these difficult conversations and will own the unpleasant parts of institutional and community history as much as the celebratory parts, you have the chance to build trust. Students who see the archives as a trustworthy and relatable source will be more open to considering the material they find within the archives as valuable and will return to the collections for additional research.

In Conclusion

Archivists who are eager to find ways to connect students and faculty with institutional records can use their own collections to create engaging lessons built around the school’s campus. Including visual material such as photographs and maps can help students connect to the past, and offering space for conversation and collaboration around those items can help students better understand other perspectives. Faculty and students who work with the material in the archives will have a better understanding of their campus, both as it was before and how it came to be the place they now know.

Bibliography

Bastian, Jeannette A. “Records, Memory and Space: Locating Archives in the Landscape.” Public History Review 21 (2014): 45–69. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v21i0.3822.

Booth, Char. Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators. Chicago: American Library Association, 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Foote, Kenneth. “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture.” The American Archivist 53, no. 3 (1990): 378–92. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.53.3.d87u013444j3g6r2.

Francis, Erik M. Now That’s a Good Question!: How to Promote Cognitive Rigor Through Classroom Questioning. Alexandria, United States: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2016.

Lu, Kaili, Feng Pang, and Rustam Shadiev. “Understanding the Mediating Effect of Learning Approach between Learning Factors and Higher Order Thinking Skills in Collaborative Inquiry-Based Learning.” Educational Technology Research & Development 69, no. 5 (2021): 2475–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-10025-4.

Vong, Silvia. “A Constructivist Approach for Introducing Undergraduate Students to Special Collections and Archival Research.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 17, no. 2 (April 2017): 148-71. https://doi.org/10.5860/rbm.17.2.9666.

Yenawine, Philip. Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning across School Disciplines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013.

endnotes

[1] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016),

[2] Derrida, 62.

[3] Char Booth, Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators (Chicago: American Library Association, 2011), 39.

[4] Silvia Vong, “A Constructivist Approach for Introducing Undergraduate Students to Special Collections and Archival Research,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 17, no. 2 (April 2017), https://doi.org/10.5860/rbm.17.2.9666.

[5] Kaili Lu, Feng Pang, and Rustam Shadiev, “Understanding the Mediating Effect of Learning Approach between Learning Factors and Higher Order Thinking Skills in Collaborative Inquiry-Based Learning,” Educational Technology Research & Development 69, no. 5 (2021): 2475–92, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-10025-4.

[6] Philip Yenawine, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning across School Disciplines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013), 38.

[7] Erik M. Francis, Now That’s a Good Question!: How to Promote Cognitive Rigor Through Classroom Questioning (Alexandria, United States: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2016), 11.

[8] Kenneth Foote, “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture,” The American Archivist 53, no. 3 (1990): 384, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.53.3.d87u013444j3g6r2.

[9] Jeannette A. Bastian, “Records, Memory and Space: Locating Archives in the Landscape,” Public History Review 21 (2014): 384, https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v21i0.3822, 47

About the authors

name: Ashley Todd-Diaz

institution: Towson University

Ashley Todd-Diaz is Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections and University Archives at Towson University. Prior to that she served as Curator of Special Collections and Archives at Emporia State University. Her research interests include libraries and archives as organizations, leadership emergence, graduate archival education, and archival literacy. She has taught as an adjunct for over 10 years at Emporia State University’s School of Library and Information Management and Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics.

She received her Ph.D. in Library and Information Management from Emporia State University, her MS in Information Science from UAlbany, and her MA in English from NYU.

name: Felicity Knox

institution: Towson University

Felicity Knox is the Assistant University Archivist for Special Collections and University Archives at Towson University. She is interested in connecting students and other community members to archival records, and measuring the impact archives can make on those communities. She specializes in Towson University history and is co-author of the book, Towson University: The First 150 Years. She holds an MLIS from the University of Maryland, College Park.