“Students in the Archives: Archival Pedagogy in Practice”

Edited Collection CFP Heather Fox & Amanda Stuckey

In early 2020, we developed a pedagogy-driven digital humanities site to feature pedagogical approaches to archival research and teaching. Prompted by Barbara Biesecker’s premise that “whatever else the archive may be, it always already is . . . our collective invention of us and of it” (2015, 156), this site was designed to investigate the collaborative relationships that archival research and pedagogy engender. As life-long learners, we are all “students” in the archives, and our collaborations have the potential to reshape an archive’s narrative and the methods we bring to it. Drawing upon this initiative, alongside a decade of pedagogical and scholarly collaborations, we are compiling contributions for an edited collection--“Students in the Archives: Archival Pedagogy in Practice”--to connect conversations between teacher-scholars across disciplines, grade levels, and learning spaces. Since archivist Ken Osborne’s 1980s call to integrate archival sources in the classroom, educators have sought to connect how we research and how we teach. This volume takes a broad view of what it means to be a “student in the archives,” expanding upon and/or complicating previously published archival pedagogy collections like Lori Ostergaard and Henrietta Rix Wood’s In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools (U of Pittsburgh P, 2015), Sarah Robbins’s Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching (U of Michigan P, 2017), Nancy Bartlett’s Teaching Undergraduates with Archives (Maize Books, 2019), and Tarez Samara Grabin and Wendy Hayden’s Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism (Southern Illinois UP, 2022). This collection aims to bring together assignments, curriculum design, and practices that illuminate the intersection of archival research and pedagogy.

“Students in the Archives: Archival Pedagogy in Practice” situates collaborative archival relationships within and outside of the academy as sustainable teaching and learning practices across disciplines, grade levels, and types of learning spaces. We envision it as a resource, record, and theorization of archival explorations through pedagogy, written by scholars, archivists, librarians, and educators whose work furthers an understanding of how engagements with collected materials shape pedagogy. Contributions to this collection will prioritize students’ inquiries, discoveries, frustrations, and overall engagements with archives. Reproductions of assignments that demonstrate archival pedagogical strategies are welcome to accompany chapters. This edited volume is intended for presses publishing archival pedagogy collections, such as Southern Illinois University Press, University of Michigan’s Maize Books, University of Pittsburgh Press, or Routledge’s Studies in Archives series. It is planned for publication in 2024-2025.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

● University classroom pedagogy projects, including recovery projects that involve students
● Undergraduate archival research and/or faculty-student collaborations
● K-12 classroom integrations
● Accessibility/equity issues related to archival pedagogy across digital and non-digital sources
● Collaborations across libraries, educators, students, and/or communities
● Interdisciplinary archive-based projects
● Histories of pedagogical spaces that include archival research
● Teaching historically marginalized voices through archival sources
● How archival research and teaching supports inclusive approaches to pedagogy
● Students’ reckonings with archival absences and silences in archives

Please submit abstracts (250-500 words) and brief biographies (100 words) to Dr. Amanda Stuckey (amandastuckey@centralpenn.edu) and Dr. Heather Fox (heather.fox@eku.edu) by March 17, 2023. Co-authored submissions are welcome. If accepted, completed chapters of 6,000-10,000 words will be due in Summer 2024.