Interview with Maura Seale

The idea came because I work as a research librarian at Georgetown. And I spend a lot of time with students, both undergraduate and graduate students who are being asked to find primary sources. And we get a lot of impossible requests for primary sources. For example, I’ll be poking around or like French Foreign Ministry documents from the 1920s and find out that the building was bombed in World War Two. So to my sense like students, they really assumed that things exist and that they’re accessible and that they’re translated. A lot of times museums, it’s like I want to write about the Russian Revolution. I know many primary sources, but don’t read Russian. So the project is sort of rooted in my experiences as a librarian working with students.

The goal of the project is to get students thinking about primary sources as historically contingent in thinking about that, realizing that when they’re doing their own projects something might not exist. It might have been bombed during World War Two or it might have been lost in a fire or no one collected that because no one cared at the time. Or you know, that sort of thing. I thought silent film was just sort of an interesting example, because there are digitized silent films available online. And they can be really fun to look at. And I guess I would say that’s the same with the best series. There are digitized best series online. So students can look at that because I also want them to get excited about primary sources and about using them and about finding. And I think the best way to do that is to expose, you know, expose them directly to the primary sources. And then the Evans one too, I also liked it, because it points to a lot of aspects of library resources that students don’t think about. Number one, that there are things that we purchase, that there are things that take a lot of labor to create, and the Evans collection points that out, because it’s based on this bibliography that was compiled by someone in the 19th and early 20th century. So he did all the work of compiling it, and then it becomes microfilm, and then it becomes digitized. And there’s a digital project. it’s very expensive. And sold only to University Libraries. And that’s like the only way you can get access to that stuff. So the question is of like economics and labor. I also wanted to get at that with that example. Well it was sort of difficult to limit the number of case studies just because I’ve been a librarian for almost ten years at this point. So I have so many examples of these types of things that I could draw on. It’s a sort of narrowing it down, and narrowing it down to materials that could be found online that were not hidden behind paywalls or things like that. That was a bit difficult. I think often with projects like this, we all want to take on you know, we want to solve all the problems. We want to say all the things. But making it cohesive and coherent and doable, I think is probably the biggest challenge, but also the most important, because if you try to be too broad, you end up saying nothing of substance.

Interview with Jennifer Coggins

My project was a module made up of four sections and the module was intended to be sort of a prototype of something that students could go through before a visit to the archives. It’s made up of four sections, and each one asks students to look at some materials, then reflect and answer some questions about the materials that they reviewed. The topic of the whole module is student activism at UNC. It was a topic I was interested in. I work in the University Archives at UNC, and so I had access to these materials and knew about them already. And you know had thought about this topic and what these materials were. And so starting with a topic that you already know something about, and you already have an interest in and aren’t going to get tired of I think is really helpful.

[On-Screen Header] Audience

The audience that I had in mind was undergraduate students at UNC. Thinking about students coming to North Carolina for the first time and maybe needing an exercise on durable thinking and in the kinds of questions that they would want to have in mind when coming to the archives for the first time and approaching primary resource materials in the archives for the first time. That was something that evolved over the course of working on this project. I started out really excited about talking about the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes process of how a record goes from being in someone’s filing cabinet in 1970, to now being on the table in the reading room. But working through the different puzzle pieces, I realized that’s probably not the best focused and not something that could be as easily conveyed digitally and is successfully made.

[On-Screen Header] Scope

And with any project just the issue of scope. I know that I started out with probably more complicated ideas than were manageable for a project and a project being done for a class. And so narrowing that down to what was essential and what would be most effective I found most interesting too.

Interview with Devon Hardy

So it’s a teacher’s guide that you’ll see on a lot of museum websites. The concept is that any teacher should be able to take this guide and then take their students through the exhibit and hopefully learn about the exhibit through the teacher’s guide. And for this particular guide, I did it for the On the Water exhibit at the Smithsonian. And I kind of imagined that there was a lighthouse keeper exhibit that was part of this On the Water exhibit at the Smithsonian which is a huge exhibit at the Smithsonian. There’s an initial assessment at the very beginning where students would take a quiz at the exhibit, so that kind of tests their foundational knowledge. And then again there’s about 10 or 11 activities throughout the exhibit and then at the end of the exhibit they will retest their knowledge.

[On-Screen Header] Peer Feedback

I think hearing other people’s project is always so interesting, because people are so creative. Well, I mean, I love hearing other people’s projects. And it definitely gives you ideas of things that you might not have considered. It might help you focus a little bit more. I’ve loved taking all of the history classes here at Mason, because students are so helpful to you. So they definitely gave some good feedback. I think another thing that helped was sometimes talking about their project. It just got you really thinking about your own project.

[On-Screen Header] Challenges

I think the one thing I’ve struggled with the most, and Dr. Kelly kind of kept pushing, is what is the goal of the objective in this project? And who is your audience? And that actually is a struggle. And I think that might have led me down more towards the teacher’s guide, because I said you know let’s focus on students. Learning objectives and learning assessments, that can be tough. And I think it’s easy sometimes to come up with learning objectives. But then how do you measure if students have learned anything? And that can be really tough. And I felt like I was asking those right questions. And then I would have someone review it, and they would say how do you measure this? They would just keep saying, how do you measure this? Coming up with interesting activities that I think students: A. would be interested in doing and B. learning from, so I think those were the biggest challenges.

Interview with Greta Swain

My name is Greta Swain. I’m a PhD student and a D-H Fellow here at George Mason University. And the project that I worked on is called Voices of Sackville. The educational portion of Voices of Sackville is about six or seven online learning modules that can be used for fourth or fifth grade students. And they basically take students through a historical thinking skill by looking at primary source documents. So the one that I fully-fleshed out for this class is a lesson on corroboration which means taking two documents and comparing the details in them to see if they agree or disagree. Normally, as historians, we have this sense of what we do with historical documents. It’s we’ve been through school for so long, and it’s really kind of innate in us by this point of this is how you read a primary source, and this is what you do with it. And I think really realizing that those particular skills need to be taught and kind of going back to the first stage of that, and really thinking through if I’m reading a primary source for the first time, what am I actually doing step-by-step to kind of arrive at the conclusions that you want. For example, there’s one page on there that’s talking about distances and one of the distances in the first source that they’re looking at is given in miles, and the other source gives the distance in leagues. Well how do you know if they’re the same distance? What’s a league? And so kind of walking students through, how do we think about or go about finding out if these two distances are the same or if they’re different?

[On-Screen Header] Advice

I would say to make something that is actually useful that can either be used in your own classroom can be used in your own teaching or can be used in a classroom of somebody else that you know. My mother actually used it in her classroom with her fourth-grade students. And so it was really great to talk to her the day after that took place to kind of get her feedback to figure out what you know needed to be adjusted. Was it at the right level? And that kind of went into creating the student note-taking worksheet that accompanies this lesson. It’s going to be a lot more rewarding to you to make something that actually gets used as opposed to just making a project to take a class.

Interview with Andris Straumanis

My name is Andris Staumanis. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin River Falls. And the project I worked on was called the Paraclete Project. The project began really taking its inspiration from the work of Lendl Calder which I’m sure students in the course are still reading. And his idea of ripping apart a survey course in history and focusing on specific projects that really teach students historical thinking. Working on this in class, I decided I wanted to take a look at a specific newspaper published in Pierce County Wisconsin called the Prescott Paraclete. And the plan originally was to have students begin reading the Paraclete, dealing with that primary source, and beginning to ask questions about what they were reading. Because this is something that’s really foreign to them, they’ve never seen anything like this one that has no photographs, no color, really tiny print, and so forth. And then to begin to sort of unpack what they’ve read by looking at other primary sources published around the same time, beginning to look at what scholars of journalism and media have written since then about Antebellum journalism, about why there’s poetry published in every single issue on the front page. There’s a whole slew of questions that are being asked by students. And we’re slowly getting to all these questions in the course I’m teaching right now. The sort of output will be students will end up writing articles for Wikipedia which is also something that I think they’re not quite accustomed to, because I’ve been guilty of this as a professor as well, you know. We rant and rave about the evils of Wikipedia and now we’re saying actually you can write articles for Wikipedia but we’re going to do it in a much more regimented and regulated way. So they’ll be learning as we did in the course about what really makes Wikipedia work. What’s behind the curtain basically. And once they understand that they can be much more critical creators of content on Wikipedia.

[On-Screen Header] Role of Feedback

Well I think certainly from the professor, the feedback was especially critical because he really got me to think about how to play off the secondary sources, how to play off the academic literature, rather than simply relying on the students dealing with the primary sources themselves. I also got some good feedback from a couple of my classmates who really got me to think about the scaffolding of the course, you know, how to build everything up and have it make sense for students. The struggle is that I’m dealing with students who are, they’re third and fourth year students, but for all intents and purposes many of them have taken no other history courses in college. So this is their one and only change to take a history class. And that’s something that I think been really helpful in terms of the feedback I got from my classmates, as well, because they were all coming from different areas you know, some from art history for example or from literature, whereas my background is in journalism and media studies. And they could teach me a number of things and point me to literature that I was not familiar with.

Interview with Jess Ritter

I’m Jessica Ritter. I’m a student in the program. The project is called What Happened to Hettie Cooley? Hettie Cooley was the mistress of Belle Grove plantation in the 1860s. Belle Grove plantation is in Middletown, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley. She disappeared on February 26, 1861, and when she was found later that evening she was found severely bruised and burnt in a locked smokehouse that she could only lock from the outside not the inside. It was really intense both then and today and her enslaved woman Harriet Robinson was actually arrested two weeks later for murder tried and convicted for murder. There was very little to no evidence to to incriminate Harriet, but she was still sentenced to death

The reason I picked up the story is I volunteer at Belle Grove and it's turned into more of a ghost story than an actual historical account and so I decided to take the project and anchor it in real sources to make it more credible. Part of why I think this was a great project to turn into a digital exhibit is because their the story has never really been put on paper in such a way. It has a lot of moving parts there are a lot of sources that we have but no one has ever really it was hard to really understand fully what happened because everything was very disjointed and so there are a lot of people that were involved there were a lot of . . . it was like I said as mysterious in 1861 as it is today. And so I thought that to be able to create one site to create a timeline of events anchor those events as we understand them — which is a big caveat because we're looking back and trying to piece together a mystery and you know all these years later — but I thought it would be good to have a central source with and anchor those the story to actual sources that we have so it was a resource for folks to know that it wasn't a ghost story, these are real people. This was a real tragedy across the board and I thought the online would be a great vehicle for doing that. Virginia was flirting with the Civil War — May 1861 Virginia seceded. There were so many things happening at the time and I felt like there were so many topics that teachers could unpack using this story and it was a little overwhelming so what I decided to do instead was create a mock trial. The biggest source that we have that sort of gives us a glimpse into what we think may have happened in 1861 are the transcripts from Harriet's trial in 1861. it's a piece of Swiss cheese to say the least it's a handwritten transcript of an enslaved woman on trial for the murder of a white woman, but it's better than nothing so I thought that because there are almost more questions than answers on the transcripts, even as historians, I thought that for students it would be a really great way for them to engage in historical thinking because there are so many questions that I think we all still have and the story is really intense and it sort of has a natural hook to it.

There are a few pieces of advice: dream big but maybe plan small. I think it's better to have one really well thought out activity that whomever you're looking for can pick it up and run with it whether it's really young students or even college students but just really think about one activity well because the semester is going to go by quickly and so if you find yourself with free time maybe you can add on but it's a lot easier to add on and try to pare down at the last minute. And then try not to reinvent the wheel — I know that that's something I struggled with. There are a lot of resources online and so I found some credible sources that I thought well they've done a really great job outlining how to create a mock trial for high school students so I’m going to give credit where credit's due and then the time that i freed up not reinventing the wheel I was able to do other things with the project. I created a video for students to try to help explain to them what some of the final assignments they could do — so it freed up time for me to do something more creative that was more custom for this project so don't be afraid to use some things that have already been done really well and just credit them to the people you need to credit them to and then try to be flexible if you can create assignments that can either be kind of blown out or pared down. If you're able to do that that would be great. I know that that was some of the advice i got from a local high school teacher that i worked with on this assignment i was trying to kind of pick his brain and say how can i help you and he said that that was give teachers that flexibility.

Interview with Nashieli Marcano

I am Nashieli Marcano. I am the humanities and social sciences librarian at Kennesaw State University where I get to support graduate students and faculty with their research and learning endeavors. I decided to name my project More to This Than Meets the Eye: American Imaginings of the Caribbean through 1898 War Political Cartoons. I envisioned a prototype site that would serve as a guide for students to to work with a complex primary source — in this case political cartoons and for them to be able to decipher the meanings behind these and through examinations of cartoons I figured they could learn about American perceptions of the Caribbean during the period of U.S. expansionism at the turn of the 20th century. And so I wanted to create a site that was geared toward helping learners engage in what Levesque called the practice of uncovering the past and to really encourage them to come up with historical questions and I felt that this inquiry approach would facilitate their development of historical thinking skills so they can critically evaluate evidence but also so they can create and evaluate their their own interpretations of this particular moment in history and then as far as the educational components. During the construction of the site I created components for learners to get into this historical thinking mode as they were presented with evidence and starting from the smallest portion or detail of a cartoon to the big picture or the main message. This was a big undertaking for me in many ways because number one I had to learn about you know how to work with these primary sources myself. Also I have to be very careful about the scope I was going to cover and the collection of images i was going to select for this project but also I wanted to feel comfortable enough with the technology and the platform I was going to use.

The first activity is a zoom in inquiry exercise where I would have students — well, I would help students think about an unfamiliar piece of evidence and then sort of jump-start that process of examining and interpreting a primary source. And then the second activity I wanted students to make use of a secondary source that would help them better interpret the cultural meanings behind these political cartoons and then having this close reading. It would help them sort of sophisticate their inquiry process so they would have they would start asking more complex questions like what type of audience would agree or disagree with this cartoon's message and if there was a diminishing process behind these depictions now of Caribbean populations and can these past viewings be persistent and problematic even in today's context. And then the final activity I instruct students to create their own presentation zoom in presentation using Google Slides. This exercise would help them sort of articulate their own processes of historical knowledge building and just think of it as a spiral path of inquiry which they had already rehearsed in the other activities.

My main advice for other students developing this kind of project would be to keep it simple. Aim at creating a product that is going to facilitate the students reading of a complex piece of evidence or primary source so if you choose to include interpretive content, try to keep it short and avoid falling into the trappings of inundating you know the site with long pieces of text dense narratives. I think that teachers can take care of that substantive knowledge so just keep it simple. And then another critical aspect to consider is to define your audience from the beginning. I found myself switching audience in the middle of the process and that was a difficult change because I intended to build a site that was teacher-centric with lesson plans and teaching guides, which was my my vision, but I found myself throughout this process devoting time to acquiring historical thinking skills myself so that kept me in student mode pretty much. So I said okay let me just focus then on having some ready to go activities for instructors to assign students to do and then also just focus on the curation of the primary sources on the side so then students can have interaction with these sources.