During the spring 2013 semester, students in one section of English 030 took part in a unique experiment to bring together research, writing, and technology in a way that was both meaningful to the students and relevant to the Penn State community.  The resulting project, “Mapping the Penn State Archives,” will be featured in this blog over the next three days. 

Today, in part one, instructor and graduate student, Laura Michael Brown, reflects on the project, the process, and the transformation she witnessed in her students.

By Laura Michael Brown

In our Honors First-Year Composition class this semester (ENGL 030), my students were tasked with an archival research project. This challenging assignment was initially met with a healthy level of skepticism, but these students dove into the research process with positive attitudes. We visited the Special Collections Library for the first time together as a class. Archivists Jackie Esposito and Paul Dzyak introduced us to the incredible variety of sources available in the University Archives, which houses the collections that my students worked from. They each investigated a particular aspect of Penn State’s history that they found interesting, using primary sources to stitch together a story about our university’s past. For their research papers, they used that history to inform a discussion of a current issue on campus. Topics ranged from the history of the mascot to the history of student activism on campus, but every member of the class was able to develop a detailed and persuasive contemporary argument. They learned to value Penn State’s past at the same time that they looked for ways to better the community in the present. Archival work invigorated their research and writing processes by encouraging them to explore unique connections between historical and contemporary issues and by creating a real opportunity for them to discover something new and unexpected about our university.

The project culminated in the creation of a website. Librarian Dawn Childress helped us to develop a site that features a digital archive and an interactive historical campus map. This public element allows their work to leave the walls of our classroom and continue to reach the Penn State community well past the end of the semester. The website helped students to see their individual projects as a part of larger conversation about our institution; I loved seeing the students develop and discuss connections between their topics. We held a public presentation of the website on our last day of class. I was impressed by the confidence and enthusiasm of each student as they shared their contributions, and I could not have been more proud to see their work come together so successfully. It is my hope that this project taught my students to rethink possibilities for research and writing, but that it also taught them something about what it means to actively engage with their community.