Year in the Life: Kara Flynn, part 3

In this installment of Year in the Life, Kara Flynn delves into what it means to be both an archivist and a teacher.

This month, we’ve been working on getting ready for our annual evaluations, and as I’ve had to review all of the work I’ve done over these past 7 months, it’s made me reflect on all of the various roles I fill in my position. I’ve mentioned before that as the Special Collections Librarian, I wear a lot of hats. One of my many roles here is to act as the Liaison Librarian to the History, Anthropology, and Philosophy department (HAP, for short). At Augusta University, all of us faculty-level librarians serve as liaisons, and many fill this role for multiple departments on campus. Working with students is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job, and it’s why I got into archives in the first place. As the Liaison Librarian, I teach library instruction sessions, I host work-shop style classes for History, Anthropology, and sometimes English classes, and I have “embedded” office hours in an office in the HAP department 2 days a week for a total of 3 hours. Coming from previous archival jobs, and being trained as an archivist, filling a role as a liaison librarian is a pretty unique situation, as at a larger institution, this role would most likely be filled by an academic librarian, not an archivist. While this made me a bit nervous at first, it has become one of the most interesting and rewarding parts of my job.

Students hard at work with their primary sources.

As a liaison, I have formed strong connections to a number of HAP faculty, which has provided a wonderful opportunity to interact more not only with students, but also with the teaching faculty outside of the libraries. For as much as archivists and librarians talk about outreach, getting myself physically out of Special Collections has proven to be really beneficial. One of the results of the strong partnership between the library and the HAP department was that for most of last semester, I was able to work with a History professor here to plan 2 consecutive instruction sessions for her Historical Research methods students. Historical Research Methods is a course that all history majors have to take, but the class focuses on a different topic depending on the professor teaching it that semester. This spring, the professor I worked with focused the course around the local area during the period of Reconstruction through Early Jim Crow (~1920s). This provided a wonderful opportunity to really engage students with some of our collections. To prepare for the class, the professor and I met three times over the course of the fall semester, to go over the professor’s goals for the sessions, and for me to show her a few of the archival collections I hoped to focus the workshop session around.

Because we had two 100-minute class sessions to work with, I focused the first session on discussing what archives are and how they work, I had the students look through an annotated finding aid produced by Purdue, and I had the students do an in-class activity—each student was assigned a topic, event, or historical figure that fit the focus of their course, and had to find a primary source online. To help guide them, I had given the students a handout of places they might want to look for sources online, and then had each student fill out the various steps of their research process in a google form.

For the second session, I got to get a little bit more creative and have the students do a more interactive, workshop-style class. When in the planning stages for the class, the professor and I had pored over materials from our manuscript collections to decide not only which materials to have the students look at, but which sections of those primary sources the students would get the most out of. As a former English major, I’m a big fan of close reading, and when I have students working with primary sources for limited periods of time, I want them to get as much as possible out of the experience. For this session, I chose 5 items from our collections: a 1920 speech from the Confederate Survivors Association records, the minutes of the Ladies Memorial Association that discussed the erection of the confederate monument in downtown Augusta, a few pages of the memoirs of Berry Benson, the man featured in Augusta’s confederate monument, a newspaper article from 1876 regarding the Hamburg Massacre across the river in South Carolina, and a treatise entitled Slavery and the Race Problem, written by William Henry Fleming and published in 1906. I had the students break up into small groups, and rotate through each source, using a handout to guide their small group investigations and discussions. The students spent about 15 minutes with each source, and once everyone had rotate through the process, we came back together for a large group discussion with the whole class. Though I guided the discussion, I wanted to let the students take the reins more or less, so that they could discuss their findings with each other, and learn from that, rather than learning from me.

Now of course, this 2-part instruction was one of my more successful endeavors, and it went so well in part because of the professor and the students I was working with. The professor was really engaged in the planning process, so I had a clear idea of what she was hoping the students would come away with, and the students, all history majors, were engaged because they found the process interesting and were excited to get to come to Special Collections and work with primary sources. I was excited to get to be a bit more creative in my own teaching process, and not to worry about having to rush through material, because I had 2 class sessions during which to cover what I wanted to cover. And, because we planned these sessions in the previous semester, I had plenty of time to plan ahead and work out any potential issues—in general, I have a week or less in which to plan instruction sessions and workshops. All this is to say that, as someone new to teaching, I have had plenty of more traditional library research/information literacy sessions where the students are zombies and it is like pulling teeth to get them to engage with the lesson. But I think that’s just the nature of teaching—and it just takes one positive interaction with a student in office hours, or one good class, to reaffirm the value of this part of my job.

Students working in the archives.

As teaching becomes a more prominent part of archival outreach, particularly if you are working in an academic setting with undergraduates, I’m sure more and more of us will be expected to fill this role as archivists. In addition to reading case studies published in archival journals or as chapters in archival outreach-focused books, I’ve found teacharchives.org to be an invaluable resource. The project has tips and lesson plans geared towards students ranging from middle school to graduate school, and while I haven’t used any lesson plans directly from the site, it has provided some great inspiration for things I might try with our collections in the sessions I teach!