Legacies: Research and Curation Meet Care and Creativity in the Classroom
In the fall of 2021 I developed a two-part learning engagement for Arts and Enduring Meaning, a class taught by Ijeoma Njaka for the Learning, Design, and Technology program at Georgetown. The project was inspired by my experience working with interpretive strategies in the museum field and is bolstered by my interests in trauma-informed pedagogy, high-impact practices, and arts integration. In April 2024 Njaka invited me to guest lecture for UNXD2107 (Bearing Witness: The Legacy of Jan Karski Today) to share this engagement/workshop with current undergraduate students. I am always blown away by the care, thoughtfulness, and creativity demonstrated by students, and this class was no different. The outcomes exceeded all my expectations, including the production of some stunning artwork within the timeframe of one class.
Workshop objectives:
Demonstrate the ability to research, analyze, curate, and synthesize
Create a visual representation of research and analysis
Reflect on the connection between historic and personal legacies
The workshop is broken into two (almost three) components. The first activity is built on existing research components within a course, especially archival research that may include artifacts such as photography, ephemera, and art. When conducting research, students are asked to sift, reflect, reorganize, and find themes, then curate a collection of objects or materials based on their thematic analysis. I offer the following guiding questions: How do we care for historic or socially significant legacies? How do we connect these legacies to contemporary issues in our communities? They are also asked to reflect on what they learned, what they found interesting within their research, and what potential audiences may enjoy learning about the topic - in the case of this workshop the focus was on Georgetown professor and WWII hero, Jan Karski.
During the workshop students create a paper or digital collage based on their research and curated collection. The request to represent their research through an aesthetic encounter breaks with the traditional tendency to translate research into papers. Instead, I offer another mode of communication that challenges students to create as an opportunity to engage in higher-order thinking (see Bloom’s Taxonomy). I focused on this component during my workshop with the Karski class and have linked all the slides below, including the second, optional component, which takes a constructivist approach through a facilitated mindfulness exercise (not linked). The second component’s guiding questions are: How do we care for ourselves and each other? Where do we find the inspiration to take action? How do we remember and honor the people who inspire us personally? Both components highlight care as a major facet of learning in the classroom experience - both academically and personally.
Click here to view my slides and let me know if you would consider doing an activity like this - and a look at the collages created during this workshop below.
