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Bringing History to Life: Information Literacy in Action
By Tami Smith
In the spring of 2006, Elizabeth Nix, visiting assistant professor Division of Legal, Ethical and Historical Studies, approached me about doing one or more library sessions for her Fall HIST 300 class, “Exploring the Past.” This course teaches students how to do historical research. I had led a library instruction session for Betsy’s class the previous fall, and we enjoyed working together.
Since Betsy was in the process of revamping her course, she asked me for input on ways to improve student application of the research techniques discussed in the course textbook (After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, 5th ed.). I had just read an article by University of Washington librarian Theresa Mudrock entitled, “Engaging Students in the Game of Research.” In Mudrock’s course, students were assigned a fictional character from the period being studied; instead of writing a research paper, they put together a scrapbook about that character using primary sources (photos, newspaper articles, etc.) and secondary sources (journal articles, books, etc.). Students also had to write a letter or diary entry in their character’s voice. As the final assignment, they were instructed to write an obituary for their character; some lived a long, happy life, while others died quite young.
Betsy and I discussed the article, and we decided to try a modified version of the “game” last fall. In order to help fund the project, we applied for and received a UB Teaching and Learning Grant from the Office of the Provost in the spring of 2006.
After meeting several times last summer, we decided to make some changes to Mudrock’s original game. Betsy assigned students actual figures from the Reconstruction/Early 20th century era, and tried to match them to each student so that there would be some common link, such as a positive personality trait, a career choice, a neighborhood, and so on . Betsy and I combined readings from the text with several library sessions at Langsdale and a field trip to the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street. Over the course of the fall semester, students used resources from Langsdale, Pratt, and other area libraries and archives to create a scrapbook for their assigned figures. These books contained an annotated bibliography, images of their historical figure (as well as people or places associated with the figure), a letter written in first-person, and a brief essay describing the research process. Students were also given a pre-test and a post-test to assess their library skills, and the results were compiled and included the grant report we presented to the provost in June.
The student’s scrapbooks looked wonderful – they put a lot of creativity into them. The response to the assignment and the class were overwhelmingly positive – some students really connected with their characters – and Betsy and I learned quite a bit as a result of this trial run. We will do the project again this fall, with a focus on the Baltimore Riots of 1968. Students will use more of Langsdale’s Special Collections, since each student will be assigned a person interviewed last fall for the "Baltimore '68: Riots and Rebirth" collection by her HIST 376 class, "The New South and Civil Rights."
For more about the HIST 300 project go to http://langsdale.ubalt.edu/hist300/
For more about the Baltimore '68 Riots and Rebirth Collection, visit http://archives.ubalt.edu/bsr/oral.htm
For more about Theresa Mudrock’s original game, go to http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/perspectives/
Article Citation:
Mudrock, T. (2005). "Engaging Students in the Game of Research." Perspectives Online, 43 (9). Retrieved August 10, 2007 from http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0512/