An unexpected visit

My final class of the year was with a small group of high school students. Their teacher had been in one of my sessions when she was a student and wanted to bring some of her students to the Archives. Yeah! This is one of my goals for doing sessions with B.Ed. students.

I divided the allotted time into a combination of looking at records related to their curriculum, interesting books from Special Collections, and a tour of Archives and Special Collections. The exercises with archival documents were very short, asking only two questions about the content and allowing for some discussion time. I also gave them some information about the process of research. During the tour, I had laid out a few documents that I thought would catch their interest.

It all went very well. The documents and books that I selected did make an impact on them. They took pictures of the material they used. The group stayed longer than expected and had lots of questions during the tour. Indeed, we all learned a lot.