Benedict Anderson observes that “Communities are to be distinguished...in the style in which they are imagined.” In classrooms, what Anderson calls style of imagination is introduced as literary stylings or textual genre—but archives present students with the material framing such imagined communities, indicating how issues of race, class and gender are built into printing and publishing. In an article in Pedagogy, Americanist Amy Gore collaborates with librarian Glenn Koelling, describing how students recognized the political and social power operating print cultures in working with archival objects. The advantages of embodied learning they described were reiterated by academics across disciplines in Teaching the History of the Book (2023), and online by Brooklyn Historical Society (which leads TeachArchives.org), Rockefeller Center, and the National Archives (to name only the top search results).
As the final literature course for non-English majors, General Education Literature introduces archives to students who must apply their skills beyond literary studies. In studying archival objects, students develop an understanding of the text’s political and ethical dimensions that they carry into their own communities. As Joanna Drucker points out in her talk “Mimicry or Invention,” “No text was ever produced in isolation. All texts are dialogs. All scholarship is a work of community practice.” This panel recognizes that teaching resources are part of that community practice, and the panelists will share their methods for introducing students to special collections as well as integrating archival work into class discussion and written assignments.
Jamie Chen’s paper is titled “Teaching Intertextuality in the Archives: Tracking Down Texts in The Underground Railroad.” The Underground Railroad (2016) switches perspectives between Cora (following her escape from a Georgia plantation) and other characters (including a slave catcher), introducing each non-Cora section with a slave advertisement taken from 1850s and 1860s newsprint. Colson Whitehead integrated texts from the "North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements Project," developing his own anti-slave advertisement that declares “SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.” In the presentation, Chen shares discussion questions on literary references, short response prompts on Whitehead’s archival references (which can be accessed digitally), culminating in a Special Collections visit to work with materials corresponding to Whitehead’s refences (illustrated newspapers, U.S. farmer's almanacs, editions of Bibles used by 19th-century American missionaries, editions of The Last of the Mohicans and Gulliver's Travels).
PJ Zaborowski’s paper “Making the Book: Curating Textual Communities in the General Education Classroom” demonstrates the value of materially-engaged pedagogy in a general education setting. Zaborowski argues that material analysis—scrutinizing substrates, assessing scribal and printing techniques, deciphering unique formats, uncovering evidence of use—induces more thoughtful textual analysis. Visits to Special Collections prompt students to consider their own definition of a book and then confront and analyze a curated assortment of objects—from medieval manuscripts and incunabula to contemporary artist’s books—which challenge that definition. Through these encounters, a new "Textual Community" (as defined by Brian Stock) is formed in the classroom, one centered around the physicality of books and the makers behind them. Analyzing these objects fosters a deeper engagement with the text itself, prompting students to consider the book as a cultural artifact and not just a vessel for words. PJ shares details of a semester-length project involving a hand-crafted commonplace book and analytical exercises.
Maria Capecchi’s paper is titled “Access and Equity: Practical Applications of the Digital Archive in the General Education Literature Classroom.” She posits that archival excitement partly stems from the object’s performance: imagining the many hands that turned the page, wrote the text, created the object. Yet for many instructors and students, a trip to the archives is costly and time consuming. Her presentation explores alternatives to archival travel: how to use digital archival materials to deepen students’ understanding of texts. Digital collections serve as important historical bridges in the General Education Literature classroom. Her course “The Canon and the Remix” uses Saidiya Hartman’s “Critical Fabulation” (the combination of archival materials, historical research, theory, and narrative) to help students both understand the archive’s power and interrogate the present voices excluded from archival materials. She will share lesson plans for Kyle Baker’s graphic novel Nat Turner, which uses archival materials to expand students’ understanding of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion.