One From the Song Book

Some time in August, the planning began for a course for which I had done a session before, but not using my new methods. Of course, I had to completely change the session to incorporate speed dating, discovery, interrogation, and – yes – music. The prof, who is open to new things, was in total agreement. We decided to offer the session twice so that the class of 40 students could be divided into two sessions of 20, each lasting 1.5 hours in length. The class assignment was a choice of one with historic textbooks, an archival collection, a historiographic essay, or an oral history.

To get those creative juices flowing, part one was a speed dating exercise with the historic textbook collection – I called it Timeless Texting. I have used this method many times for various classes. The challenge is to select only 20 or 25 books out of the 2200 titles we have in this special collection, ranging in dates between 1800 and 1983 on all topics. Normally, the class has a subject area to which I can limit my search, but Educating Canadians covers the entire scope of this collection. I limited myself to two titles for each decade, spreading out the subjects as evenly as possible to provide comparisons. During the 30-minute activity, we discussed biases when approaching a book, making fun of old textbooks, and expectations on content. This was also an opportunity for me to explain the purpose of speed dating, which is not apparent to everyone. I explained that the students need to learn and practice skills for assessing a source and collecting bibliographic data – speed dating.

Between this exercise and the next one, I played some music for the students. Years ago, the Archives recorded the campus Choir singing and chanting Acadia-related songs and cheers. Many of the students had not heard these before. The music interlude was directly relevant to the class and the students enjoyed them. Very effective.

The next part was discovery with archival collections. As I have in other sessions, students were given five collections related to the topic with the correlating finding aid. They looked through the boxes for one item of interest, completed an information sheet, and we openly discussed the records and items at each table (lesson plan here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/hunting-and-gathering.html). The purpose was to practice gathering historical details and information. This part took about 30-minutes. Then, I had more Acadia-related music and song books to share with the students before we began the next exercise.

Part three was the interrogation section and would help with the oral history assignment. The purpose was for students to practice interrogating sources and to brainstorm new ideas. First, I instructed the students to switch tables. You see, in part two they had heard about the records at the other tables and I suspected that something may have caught their interest. Now was their chance to check out another group of records. After the switch, everyone selected one item, completed a sheet of questions, and then brainstormed about other sources of information that could be helpful. (lesson plan here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/thinking-outside-box.html). As the students packed up to leave, I played the song that is part of the Acadia convocation ceremony. Many had not heard it before, but everyone understood the significance of playing it at the end of this class.