SAFA Faculty Workshop (Philadelphia, PA)

Faculty Workshop
Students and Faculty in the Archives
Philadelphia, PA
Monday, October 7, 2013

Welcome!
10:00 – 10:30 Introductions
10:30 – 10:45 What is SAFA?
10:45 - 11:30 Pedagogy: Big Picture
11:30 - 12:30 Using the Collections
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch
1:30 – 2:30 Pedagogy: In the Archives
2:30 – 3:30 Planning Your SAFA Experience
3:30 - 4:00 Wrap-Up
Students and Faculty in the Archives ● Brooklyn Historical Society

Introductions
Julie Golia, PhD
Historian / SAFA Co-Director
Robin M. Katz, MLIS
Archivist / SAFA Co-Director

Introductions
• Your vitals (name, institution, department)
• Your experience teaching with primary sources
• Where are you in your planning?
• What is your biggest question at this point?

What is SAFA?
Innovative postsecondary education program
which uses primary sources to teach document
analysis, information literacy, and critical
thinking skills in first-year undergraduates.

What is SAFA?
• Three year, $750,000 US Dept of Education FIPSE
grant
– Jan 2011 until Dec 2013
• Three schools within walking distance
– City Tech (CUNY), LIU Brooklyn, St. Francis
• 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
• Item level document analysis
– not independent student research
• Over four semesters (Fall 2012 - Spring 2013)
– 1,100 individual students
– 63 courses
– 100+ class visits to Brooklyn Historical Society
• Breadth of project allowed for
experimentation, lessons, crafting pedagogy

What is SAFA?
• Brooklyn SAFA: student population
– Mostly first-year / early academic career
– Very diverse: many minority, non-traditional
students, and other under-represented groups
– Mostly products of NYC public schools
– Many international students, new Americans, or
non-native speakers of English
• Your student population? (audience)
• SAFA’s secondary goal: familiarize students
with cultural institutions and resources

What is SAFA?
• Our Teaching Philosophy
– Goals and objectives
– No show-and-tell
– Actively use materials
– Less is more
– Modeling document analysis to beginners
• Specific vs. generic prompts to model analysis
– Ex: “Why did Henry Ward Beecher write this letter?”
– Not “Who is the creator? What type of document is
this?”

What is SAFA?
• Sampling of SAFA classes
– 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

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

SAFA Findings
• This year, we will receive and analyze retention
data
– 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 Sample POST responses
This is a photo from the past To show how society valued
entertainment
Because it showed what was going
on at that moment.
[It] shows how technology was
progressing in the US.
It gives insight... to what life was
like during the 1960s.
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, 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, City Tech: “Through SAFA, I have been able to create a
research project that mirrors that of the academic research process.”
• Deborah Mutnick, 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.”

Why does SAFA work?
• High Impact Educational Practices
– 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

More soon from SAFA
• Project level website to launch later Fall 2013
– Project documentation and findings
– Sample exercises (with some digitized documents)
– Articles on pedagogy by us and faculty
– Teacharchives.org
• More dissemination
– Presentations
– Publications

What is SAFA?
• General questions about the project?

What is SAFA?
• General questions about the project?
• NEXT UP: SAFA’s pedagogical lessons…

Pedagogy: The Big Picture
• Learning goals vs. learning objectives
– Why we came to find the distinction so important

Learning Goals
• A statement that describes in broad terms
what a student will learn from your course.
– adapted from http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/fd/writingobjectives.pdf
• General statements about knowledge, skills,
attitudes, and values.
– adapted from
http://www.lmu.edu/about/services/academicplanning/assessment/Assessment_Resources/Understanding_Mission__
Goals_and_Learning_Outcomes.htm

Professors’ course goals were often the same as
SAFA’s goals
• Student engagement
• Building a sense of community
• Interaction with neighborhoods
• Interdisciplinarity
• Student identity as creators, not just consumers,
of knowledge

Learning 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.

Learning objectives should
• Use measurable verb
• Articulate how students will demonstrate learning
• Provide criterion of acceptable performance
• Address knowledge, skills, and/or attitude

Sara Haviland’s goals vs. objectives
• GOAL (broader)
– Students will learn the unique history of the Civil
Rights movement in the North.
• OBJECTIVE (specific)
– 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.

• Assignment Design
– We wanted to demonstrate a wide range of
assignment models
– Refining and tweaking over five semesters

• Types of Assignments and Visits
– 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

• Assignments: questions to ask yourself
– How much time do you have to spend in the archives over
the course of the semester?
– What knowledge or skills will your students gain in the
archives? What kind of assignment will best manifest
those?
– How important is student collaboration vs. independent
work?
– Who are your students? (Majors vs. non-majors, first-years
vs. advanced students, etc.)

• How to provide context to students
– Our experience: not enough or too much context
– Finding the “Goldilocks” of context

• Kinds of Context
– Historical
– Technical / Format
• Processes
• Paleography
– Collection Info
• Provenance or donor
• How organized
– What is a historical society/archives?

• Possible sources
– Secondary sources
– Other primary sources
– Popular or experiential readings
– Finding aids or other library descriptions
– Class lectures
– In-archive lectures
– Other ideas?

• Context: questions to ask yourself
– What knowledge/skills/attitudes might your
students need to acquire before encountering the
archives?
– If more than one archives visit, what knowledge do
you want them to acquire between visits?
– How can context readings help them answer
questions raised (and unanswered) in archives?
– Will you preselect a reading, or will students find
one themselves?

Using the Collections
• Document Selection
– We quickly learned that less is more!
– We’ll talk about research this afternoon

• Document selection: how much?
– For first-year students, item level is best
• Some experiences with providing folder from manuscript
collection
– Small number of items for students
• Especially textual material
– Arc of visit relies on the document(s)
• What is the journey students will take?
• Identify pitfalls and challenges
• You do have a reading in mind

Channel your students when selecting docs!
• Think about your student’s first encounter with
the document. Consider:
– physical size
– condition or handling needs
– length of text
– legibility (especially handwriting)
– vocabulary
– visual literacy skills of students

Channel your students when selecting docs!
• Also remember:
– How much more contextual knowledge you have
– The feeling of overwhelm in an archives
• Manageable vs. unmanageable

• Picking your documents is just the beginning
– Tweaked room set up over five semesters

• Room setup: the “SAFA” model
– Stations and groupings
• Rotate or not? Timing?
• Even groupings
• Sitting at table or standing with clipboards?
– Logistics
• Remember size, condition, other layout issues
– Independent or group work?
• Small groups of 3 - 4 students are ideal

• Hands-on: Jeff Hyson’s document selection
• Consider
– Individual document choices?
– How would you stage these?
• Jeff: tell us the parameters
– Number of students
– Time available, number of visits
– Course, brief goals/visit objectives

LUNCH BREAK!
Next session at 1:30

Using the Collections (cont’d)
Researching as a teacher – not a scholar
• Identifying teaching docs very different than
identifying docs for scholarly research

Researching as a teacher – not a scholar
• Identifying teaching docs very different than
identifying docs for scholarly research
– Not looking for everything – looking for one
effective teaching document
– Do you want a representative document or an
outlier document?

Identify your research resources
• Finding aids, subject guides, digital sources,
and more
• Other educators teaching similar topics
• Brooklyn SAFA’s successes in identifying and using
docs for educational purposes
• Major service to BHS and other faculty!
• Ask about ways you can draw on
experiences/knowledge of other educators

Visiting the Archives
• SAFA Brooklyn: class visits in a nutshell
– Had as many as 7 and as few as 1 during a
semester; we find 1 – 3 visits to be best.
– Anywhere from <10 – 40+ students attend a visit
– Faculty pre-select docs with staff help; request
them 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

KEY FINDINGS
• Less documents make for a more
engaging/effective learning experience
• Logistics matter – a lot
• Students need to learn how to analyze primary
sources

• CREATING SPECIFIC PROMPTS
– Why we think tailoring your student’s interaction
with the documents is important

• Generic questions can be confusing
• Date created vs. date covered
• Author/creator
• Format
• “What is the source,” “why was this doc made,”
“who is the audience” are actually difficult to
answer

• Student prompts/handouts: why tailor?
• Primary source docs are infinitely interpretable –
but educators often do have a reading in mind
• Handouts should reflect your specific visit
objectives
• Tailored handouts help anticipate regularized
experience for students
• Rather than an educator providing context to students on
a piecemeal basis (when floating or zoning)

• Student prompts/handouts: why tailor?
• Don’t give students too long a handout
• Articulate to students that they should closely
observe and read the entire document
• Consider including context or other sources in the
handout

• Examples of effective SAFA handouts
• In your folders

• Facilitating an effective visit
– Thinking deeply about logistics makes for a better
pedagogical experience

• Facilitating an effective visit: plan ahead
– Over budget time
• When to arrive and leave
• Don’t forget intros and wrap-ups
• It takes students a while to physically move
– Grouping students allows for discussion,
collaboration, community building
• Consider the room, the size of the docs, how long
– What tools or other sources do you need?
– Spell out roles of faculty and staff

• Facilitating an effective visit: in the archives
– Make introductions both clear and enthusiastic
– Think about logistics
• where to sit or stand, tables vs. clipboards, acoustics
– How available will you be to students?
• Floating vs. zoning
• Hang back or hands-on?
• What context provided as-needed?
• If you give one group a hint, tell the whole class

• Plan an effective wrap up
– Planning often overlooked by Brooklyn faculty
– Consider a way for the entire class to reconvene
and share
– You can connect the “micro” (document) back to
the “macro” (course content)

• Wrap ups: what to do
– Think about logistics again
• Change it up, make sure they can see/hear each other
– Facilitate community interaction – students
speaking to each other, not you
– Ask hard questions! Demand a lot from your
students at this moment
– Consider shaping wrap up around a “takeaway”
• Course goal or objective, contemporary theme, personal
reaction, etc.

• After the visit
– Give clear instructions on follow up assignments
• What do students do with in-archives handout?
• Consider assigning a visit reflection
• Relate the visit back to larger assignment?
– Clarify how/whether they should come back to
archives independently
• Enlist staff member for help
• Our experiences: don’t make it optional

Collaboration
Library and archives staff bring important
pedagogical/institutional skill sets – use them!
– Content knowledge
– History and theory of archives/collections
– Teaching experience in archives setting
– Extensive doc analysis skills
– Extensive logistical experience

Collaboration
How to teach about the institution
• Care and handling
– Not punitive
– Stress universality
– Policies vary, but see our example guidelines
• Have students read aloud
• Ask, “why?” or, “security or preservation?”
• What is an archives/historical society?
• Pre-visit experiment

Getting Started
Resources at HSP and beyond

Getting Started
Let’s workshop.

Wrap Up
Group-determined questions and discussion.
KEEP IN TOUCH!
Julie Golia, Public Historian / SAFA Co-Director
jgolia@brooklynhistory.org | (718) 222-4111 x203
Robin M. Katz, Outreach and Public Services Archivist / SAFA Co-Director
rkatz@brooklynhistory.org | (718) 222-4111 x299
http://safa.brooklynhistory.org/ #safabhs

SAFA Faculty Workshop (Philadelphia, PA)

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