CalRBS 2019 Takeaways

Better Teaching (Pedagogy) with Rare Materials

I attended the CalRBS course Better Teaching with Rare Materials August 5-9, 2019 at UCLA. It was expertly taught by Michaela Ullmann and Rob Montoya. With the expert guidance from the instructors and wonderful group of librarians and other instructors as coursemates, it was a totally enriching experience that left me with many great ideas for the year to come. (Coincidentally we discovered 5 of us in the group had MFAs!)

Key Takeaways

Open up with an Ice-Breaker
Do one of these before lecture or prepared remarks

What is the oldest thing in Special Collections?
gets at notions of age = rarity; age = value 
Cuneiform tablet; papyrus fragment; medieval manuscript leaves
What do these signify? The value we place on our proto-tools that signals the birth of evidence of our intellectual superiority?

What is the most expensive thing in Special Collections?
gets at notions of expense = rarity; information = value
The most valuable things by far are the Mission Manuscripts because they are so vital to the provenance of SCU, to the history of California, and to complement the other Mission Mss collections held at the Santa Barbara archive and other places; expense is of practical concern only, as in how much is needed to fund-raise from a donor. The Saint John's Bible is the best example of this: we needed the donor to give $150,000.

Trash vs Treasure
Pictures of 2 different items, one that looks like trash but is part of the collection for whatever reason (e.g. empty wine bottle from the Jesuits' winery in Los Gatos in the artifact collection) and another that looks like a legit archival item, but is "trash" because it doesn't fit collecting focus (USC analogy to this is a Bruins football program... drums up rivalry but also shows that only USC sports memorabilia is within collecting focus).

Simple Active Learning Lesson Plans
to Replace Lectures and the Need to be a Subject Expert

Groupings of 4-5 documents or artifacts from a discrete collection
-> Student activity: evaluate the documents and distill down to a story, a narrative or theme
Share narratives or themes to larger group at end. I can fill in details that are important during this part. This replaces the need to be a subject expert and prepare a lecture.

A spread of items emphasizing pre-meditated traits
-> Students arrange in chronological order. Discussion follows

Exhibit Interactive Cards
-> Relies on having a current exhibit in the art gallery. Can take place of other types of instruction. Passive from library staff point of view, yet potentially high impact with students

Basic worksheet
-> Create a basic worksheet that can be the go-to for most classes, or that can be easily adapted. In combination with instructor-curated material list, it makes for a quick and easy lesson plan.

Boxes containing artifacts (or facsimiles of artifacts) à la Museum of Tolerance
-> Select a handful of different types of items, have students compare and categorize (primary/secondary; mss vs printed; archival vs bibliographic; etc...)

Other Student Activities (based on class) 

Student assignment to create enough metadata from an item in the cataloging backlog to "catalog" the item (hand off metadata to rare book cataloger). This would work well in the classes that focus on Dublin Core and other metadata. Interesting to think about metadata creation for this vs. metadata creation for a DH project. Which is more useful? Can we do both?

Sample Lesson Plan

Try creating a universal lesson plan for all CTW visits, especially early quarter visits when there is no assignment. Start with an ice breaker and a go-to worksheet. Select enough items so there is one for each student, grouped into 4 or 5 themes. One theme for each team.

Learning Outcomes:
- Students will appropriately handle archival and rare materials
- Students will analyze primary sources for research significance
- Students will distinguish primary sources from secondary sources

Example worksheet questions:
Individual:
- What is your item? Describe its physical characteristics
- Who created it and why?
- What does this tell you about its significance to history and what does it tell you about the life of its creator?
As team:
- Working together, figure out what all the items on this table say collectively
- What are the differences between this and a book about this topic? [Distill primary sources down to a story]

Projects
Things to try

Curriculum mapping
-> Simple to start with the English Department (including CTW), then expand to all of humanities
(has Leanna experimented with curriculum mapping?)
Example of curriculum mapping at USC.

End of Quarter and End of Year A&SC Instruction Report and all staff meeting
-> Infographic fun??
-> How many sessions, students, topics, etc...
-> Goals, key findings, and ways to improve

Assessment...
-> What's worth measuring and how do we accurately measure it?
-> How can I use surveys in my class visits?
-> Questions to ask to probe sense of belonging: Is A&SC a place for people like me? Do I see myself in the collections shared?

Remember... 
Important Basics from Square One

- Start class visit planning by identifying learning outcomes (and how to word learning outcomes so they are specific and measurable)... you cannot leave this up to faculty, as they are not trained to target instruction by identifying learning outcomes the way librarians are

- Experiment with pulling less stuff. More complex and interesting items, less in total.

- Rare material instruction is a collaboration... Insist that faculty do more to curate/select the materials they would like their classes to use

- My lectures can be flipped by turning my claims into questions. Form it as a discussion and fill in the blanks

- If low on time, pull interesting archival boxes on the topic. Assign students task of figuring out story of box and thru discussion, discover if it was a good box for the class. This mimicks reading room experience of doing research.