Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism

This collection emphasizes the importance of archival instruction in a cultural moment when institutional repositories hold valuable secrets to the present and past. It explores how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can engage students in archival research, model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations, and reveal, critique, and intervene in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 354 pages
Publication date: 09 June 2022
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

In a cultural era where institutional repositories hold immense treasures of the present and past, this collection makes a compelling case for the critical, intellectual, and social significance of archival education. Graban and Hayden, along with 37 other contributors, delve into the effective ways in which undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can engage students in diverse forms of archival research, fostering mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations. By bringing together fresh and established voices from related fields, the three sections of this book encompass a diverse range of form-disrupting pedagogies.

Section I explores the transformative power of approaching the archive primarily as text, nurturing habits of mind crucial for creating, utilizing, critiquing, and inventing knowledge-making practices. It emphasizes the importance of being responsible stewards of private and public collections.

Section II advocates for conducting archival projects as collaborative endeavors through experiential learning, cultivating a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. It emphasizes the value of working together to uncover, critique, and address historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives we all engage with.

Section III provides practical guidance on revealing, critiquing, and intervening in these archival omissions and gaps, with a particular focus on promoting social justice and shifting archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy.

Contributors to this collection also explore archives as sites of activism, raising important questions that continue to shape rhetoric and composition scholarship. They address topics such as decolonizing research methodologies, promoting social justice through teaching and research, and cultivating a more democratic archival consciousness.

Overall, this collection showcases innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition. It serves as a valuable resource for educators, archivists, and community members alike, as it promotes a deeper understanding of the past, the present, and the potential for meaningful engagement with the archives in the future.

Weight: 230g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780809338573