Teaching Strategies: Teaching with Archival, Botanical, and Museum Collections
Sample Activities and Assignments
Articles and Additional Resources
Grants to Fund Teaching with and in the Collections
Campus Resources
Teaching with archival, botanical, and museum collections can help students to evaluate evidence in primary documents, develop skills in visual and contextual analysis, collect and examine raw data, extract and synthesize information from a large amount of undifferentiated material, and correlate different sources in order to make informed arguments.
The links in this section provide examples of course assignments and activities that make use of the university’s public goods collections to enhance student learning, include articles on the benefits for student learning and how to assess it, and offer a list of campus and external resources for instructors and students.
Sample Activities and Assignments
Archival
Document Worksheet (Musicology)
Questions to guide students’ note-taking on primary source documents.
BiblioBouts Game (School of
Information)
Computer game in which students learn about the library research process
by compiling a bibliography on a research topic and evaluating their
peers’ sources. Click here for
more on the development and evaluation of the project.
Capstone
Essay Assignment (Asian Languages and Cultures)
Final essay assignment that asks students to discuss two “objects” from
the university’s museum or archival collections in light of the
themes, key terms, and readings of the course.
Field
Trip Activities and Assignments (Anthropology and Archaeology)
Sample activities and assignments for a museum field trip as well as
a role playing activity for students to determine criteria to identify
the veracity of artifacts.
Library “Road
Rally” (History)
A scavenger hunt to encourage students’ library research skills.
Podcast
Assignment (Biology)
Instructions for assignment where students each create a podcast for
the Exhibit Museum of Natural History; students fact-check and review
one another’s creations, with the end products made available at
the museum for the public.
Reflecting
on Unpublished Diaries (English)
Two assignments: questions to inform a presentation on a diary from the
Clements library and guidelines for the final essay assignment on a diary.
Thinking
Critically about Museums (American Culture)
Three assignments that ask students to consider how museums condition
the way we understand the objects in them.
Examples of more extensive uses (Projects by past Public Goods Council grant awardees)
Articles and Additional Resources
Reading & Responding
to Exhibitions, Tang Museum, Faculty & Teaching (web page)
http://tang.skidmore.edu/index.php/pages/view/250/section:193
Instructors at Skidmore College report the ways in which they have used
the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery to engage students in disciplines
as varied as English, Chemistry, and Psychology.
Doris K. Malkmus, Teaching
Undergraduates with Primary Sources: Highlights of Survey
Reports the findings of a 2007-2008 online survey of 4,002 practicing
history faculty and instructors to determine how often and in what ways
they use primary sources to teach undergraduate history courses. Respondents
also reported on barriers and benefits to teaching with primary sources.
Tools
for Assessing Experiential Learning
Suggests basic tools for instructors teaching courses that involve experiential
learning (where students participate in programs, events, and projects outside
of the classroom).
Gillian Spraggs, Using
Archives in Higher Education History Teaching (2008)
Identifies benefits for students in engaging in archival work, offers
suggestions for planning visits to archives, and includes examples of
archival research projects in different undergraduate classes.
Grants to Fund Teaching with and in the Collections
Clements Library
One-Time
Class Visit Request form
Exhibit Museum of Natural
History
Information
for UM faculty
Resources
for Teaching at the Exhibit Museum
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology
Resources
for students and instructors at the Kelsey
Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum
Museum of
Art
Resources
for Teaching at the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Object
Study and Curatorial Study Center Resources
Special
Collections Library
Overview
of Special Collections and ways in which they work with students and
faculty