Primary Source Instruction in Higher Ed

Students and Faculty
in the Archives
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Philadelphia, PA

Friday, November 8, 2013

Introduction
Robin M. Katz
Outreach and Public Services Archivist
Co-Director, Students and Faculty in the Archives
Brooklyn Historical Society

Students and Faculty in the Archives ● Brooklyn Historical Society

What is SAFA?
• Innovative postsecondary education program
• Uses primary sources to teach
– document analysis,
– information literacy
– critical thinking skills

• First-year undergraduates


What is SAFA?
• Three year grant
– US Department of Education
– Now-defunct FIPSE program
– $750,000 over 3 years
– Jan 2011 until Dec 2013
• Supported
– 2 FT professional staff
– 1 PT staff member
– Stipends for participants
– Supplies

• Sustainability and Faculty in the Archives ● Brooklyn Historical Society
Students

What is SAFA?
• Three schools within walking distance
– New York City College of Technology (CUNY)
– Long Island University Brooklyn
– St. Francis College
• Nineteen local partner faculty
– All ranks and stages of career
– Wide range of disciplines (not just history)
– Variety of classes (seminars, surveys, etc.)
– Intellectual and professional community
• National partners

What is SAFA?
• Centered around class visits to the archives
• Over four semesters (Fall 2012 - Spring 2013)
– 1,100 individual students
– 63 courses
– 100+ class visits to Brooklyn Historical Society

• Summer fellowship


What is SAFA?
• Class visits in a nutshell
– Each course: as many as 7, as few as 1
– Ideally: 1 – 3 visits
– Anywhere from <10 – 40+ students
– Faculty request docs 3 weeks ahead of time
– Staff pull, prep, cite, assess copyright, set up docs
– Staff greet class; review care/handling; occasionally
lecture; co-facilitate exercise & wrap-up


What is SAFA?
• Student population
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Mostly first-year / early academic career
Both professional and liberal arts majors
Mostly products of NYC public schools
Very diverse: minority, non-traditional students
Many international students, new Americans, or
non-native speakers of English

• SAFA’s secondary goal: familiarize students
with cultural institutions and resources

What is SAFA?
• Sampling of SAFA classes
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Robin Michals, Introduction to Digital Photography
Jen Wingate, Visual Culture of the Civil War
Sara Haviland, U.S., 1896-present
Geoff Zylstra, Early American History
Leah Dilworth, American Literature
Matthew Gold, English Composition: Fire, Disease, Disaster
and the Shaping of Urban Public Space


What is SAFA?
• Our Teaching Philosophy
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Goals and objectives
No show-and-tell
Actively use materials
Less is more
Modeling document analysis to beginners


What is SAFA?
• Document analysis
– Not traditional bibliographic instruction
– Preselected, pull at the item-level

• Specific vs. generic prompts
– Ex: “Why did Henry Ward Beecher write this letter?”
– Not “Who is the creator? What type of document is
this?”


What is SAFA?
• Summer Fellowships
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Application process
Produce own scholarly or creative projects
Only undergraduate fellowship of its kind
Gabriel Furman papers, ARC.190
http://safa.brooklynhistory.org/fellowship2012
http://safa.brooklynhistory.org/fellowship2013


SAFA Lessons
• SAFA as professional development
• Opportunity to tweak and refine


SAFA Lessons
• Learning goals vs. objectives


SAFA Lessons
• Goals: a statement that describes in broad
terms what a student will learn from your
course.
• Prof goals same as SAFA goals
adapted from http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/fd/writingobjectives.pdf

•
•
•
•

Student engagement
Building a sense of community
Interaction with neighborhoods
Student identity as creators, not just consumers, of
knowledge

SAFA Lessons
• Objectives: Statement in specific and
measurable terms that describes what the
student will know or be able to do as a result of
completing course activities.
•

adapted from http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/fd/writingobjectives.pdf


SAFA Lessons
• Sara Haviland’s goals vs. objectives
• Goal
– Students will learn the unique history of the Civil
Rights movement in the North.

• Objective
− In their final research paper, students will identify
and analyze the different issues, strategies, and
constituencies of the Civil Rights movement in the
North, as compared to the South.

SAFA Lessons
• Types of assignments and visits
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One-off in-archive activity
Semester-long, multi-visit structure
Building a collaborative resource as a class
Scaffolded document-to-folder model
Scholarly research paper
Other scholarly work (oral history, walking tour)
Research for a creative project

SAFA Lessons
• Types of context needed
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Historical
Technical / Format
Collection Info
What is a historical society/archives?

• How to provide?
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Secondary or primary sources
Popular or experiential readings
Finding aids or other library descriptions
Class or in-archives lectures

SAFA Lessons
• Document selection
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physical size
condition or handling needs
length of text
legibility (especially handwriting)
vocabulary
visual literacy skills of students

• Research as a teacher, not a scholar

SAFA Lessons
• Logistics
• Room Set Uo
• Stations and groupings
− Rotate or not? Timing?
− Even groupings
− Sitting at table or standing with clipboards?

• Independent or group work?
− Small groups of 3 - 4 students are ideal


SAFA Lessons
• Tailoring student prompts/handouts
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Educators often do have a reading in mind
Handouts should reflect specific visit objectives
Regularize experience for students
Not too long
Tell students to read


SAFA Lessons
• Facilitation
− Determine roles of staff/faculty
− Over-budget on time
− Care and handling
− Not punitive, stress universality
− Ask “preservation

− Floating vs. zoning
− Wrap ups
− Coming back

SAFA Findings
• Independent evaluators have found that SAFA
students are more engaged and perform better
than their peers.


SAFA Findings
• Receive and analyze retention data this year
– Final Report due December 2013

• Data from 2012 Evaluation Report
– Available in your folders
– Online at
http://safa.brooklynhistory.org/docs/EvalReport201
2.pdf


Findings: Observation Skills
• Q: Why might this document be worth
preserving in an archive?
PRE

POST

Students noting a single feature
of giving a vague response

72%

49%

Students noting multiple physical
features

28%

51%


Findings: Articulating ‘a
usable past’
• Q: Why might this document be worth
preserving in an archive?
Sample PRE responses
This is a photo from the past
Because it showed what was going
on at that moment.
It gives insight... to what life was
like during the 1960s.

Sample POST responses
To show how society valued
entertainment
[It] shows how technology was
progressing in the US.
It shows how people were
sending postal cards through the
telegrams and how it was
different... than... today.


Findings: Academic
Performance
• Just one class at LIU Brooklyn
SAFA

NON-SAFA

Completion Rate

96.9%

76.7%

Passing Rate

91.9%

48%

Grade B or better

60.7%

30.3%


Findings: Professional Development
Peter Catapano, History, City Tech:
“My teaching always improves when I have time to stop and reflect on
my current practices. What I learned is that sometimes less is more.
Better to have fewer learning objectives... This experience has helped
me trust my students, who have taken to the site visit and the web
assignments much more than expected.”


Geoff Zylstra, History, City Tech:
“Through SAFA, I have been able to create a research project that
mirrors that of the academic research process.”


Deborah Mutnick, English, LIU Brooklyn
“I have rethought how I teach research, inverting the movement from
breadth to depth, the general to the specific, in order to engage students
in ‘deep learning’ based on close readings and observation.”


• Professor’s website submissions:
– Archives allow them and students to “slow down”
– SAFA allowed them to focus on teaching


Why does SAFA work?
• High Impact Educational Practices
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Work with first-year seminars, learning communities
Common intellectual experiences (among a cohort)
Collaborative assignments and projects
Undergraduate research
Diversity/global learning
Community-based learning
See www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm


TeachArchives.org
• Will launch December 2013
• Project-level website
• “Teaching effectively with primary sources”


TeachArchives.org
• Three audiences:
− Local community
− Educators nationwide
− Librarians and archivists nationwide


TeachArchives.org
• Three content areas:
− Exercises
− Articles
− Project documentation


TeachArchives.org
• Exercises
• To use outright or as a model
• Each will include:
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•
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Info about course and prof
Narrative and title
Objectives, context, end products, assessment
Attached handouts/prompts
Skills used
Some digitized documents

TeachArchives.org
• Articles by SAFA staff
• Including:
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Our teaching philosophy
Faculty / staff collaboration
Document selection
Creating handouts
How to teach care and handling
Citations: it’s not about plagiarism
Digital cameras and tablets in the archives

TeachArchives.org
• Articles by partner faculty
• Including:
• “The Appeal of the Archives: Engaging Students in More
Meaningful Research”
• “Why Less is More in the Archives”
• “Fitting It All In: Incorporating Archival Materials into a World
History Survey Course”
• “Texts as Objects: Complementing the Literary Anthology with
Primary Sources”
• “How Archives Can Teach Design Students to Effectively
Communicate Ideas”

TeachArchives.org
• Project Documentation
• Including:
− US DOE annual and final reports
− Reports by independent evaluators
− Materials and tools created by SAFA
− Online call slip, care & handling handouts, etc.

− Comprehensive lists of classes taught, materials used


TeachArchives.org
• Launch Party!
• Thursday, December 19, 2013
• Brooklyn Historical Society (Brooklyn, NY)


Thank You
Robin M. Katz
rkatz@brooklynhistory.org
@robinmkatz
TeachArchives.org (Dec 2013)
#safabhs and #safafellows


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