Snapshot impressions #8 – third class of the Winter 2013 term

Once a term, it seems, I have a session that allows me to really bring out my creative side. This session provided a chance to do just that. You may remember my blogging about some of those books I read during the summer that seemed to have little relevance to my research but that had spawned a few ideas for the back burner. Aha—what sources of inspiration they proved to be!

The students in this class had been tasked with a challenging assignment. To help them, Amber and I set out to create a workshop-type session for the students to practice/brainstorm for their assignment. (To see how it was done, check out http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/03/more-than-just-pretty-face.html). Briefly, we had pre-selected five groups of records that could potentially be made into five, individual displays. The students were asked to review the materials, think about how to use the materials in a display, and prepare to defend their display idea to the class.

I enjoyed observing each group of students exploring their pre-selected materials with the aim to “pitch” their display idea to the class. Every group had only two minutes to convince the other groups to vote for their display idea. After a secret ballot was taken, the votes were tallied immediately and the winner was declared before the session continued with further discussion about important record-keeping issues.

All that said, there were drawbacks with the session too that may or may not be overcome. For example, we divided the room into five groups, each with a different set of pre-selected records. Students sat randomly at tables as they entered the reading room. We did not provide any indication of the topic at each table. This meant that some students were not interested in the records at their table while others found their records fascinating. Amber and I have discussed this “luck of the draw” method and see it as both an opportunity and a challenge for the students. I am not sure if I will change my approach in the future. Another example of a drawback was that only one student was the spokesperson for each group’s pitch. We have limited the timing of each pitch to two minutes. Perhaps there is a way to allow more students in each group to speak or pitch the idea so that we can hear more voices. We want the students to have the opportunity to be heard if they want to speak.

Overall, this session was successful. It was fun to develop and fun to deliver. Perhaps I will make few changes if I have the chance to use it with another class. Generally though, I felt that this was such a successful workshop that I plan to use it as an example when I give a presentation this Spring.