Schedule Instruction

We encourage faculty and instructors who are interested in incorporating primary source material into their classes to schedule an instruction session with one of our archivists. During our instruction sessions, we strive to accomplish the following:

• de-mystify Special Collections and orient students to different types of archival materials and formats;
• encourage students to develop research skills and methods by helping them access, use, explore, question, and interpret archival materials;
• provide guidance for analysis of primary sources and close reading of documents;
• and support innovative pedagogical approaches, classes, and research projects.

The session will be tailored to your curricular needs and will provide advice on defining a topic, developing research strategies, and locating and using subject-specific primary sources. Past partnerships with instructors have also focused on enhancing our holdings, especially the creation of oral histories, exhibits, and lesson plans. 

Special Collections instruction sessions typically take one of the following forms:

• Single session with in-class activity
• Single session with in-class activity and follow-up assignment
• Multiple sessions with in-class activities and multiple assignments

All of our sessions offer hands-on learning experiences. We teach and encourage students to responsibly handle the unique and sometimes fragile materials in Special Collections in order to better understand them.