Monday, November 12, 2018

MAC Fall Symposium 2018

I had the privilege of being invited to help lead this year's Midwest Archives Fall Symposium. What an amazing day! The theme was "From the Stacks to the Classroom" and we had such a wonderful day together exploring exciting topics, sharing ideas, and growing together! Many thanks to my co-presenters, Rachel Seale (Iowa State University Special Collections) and Anna Trammell (Pacific Lutheran University). I left feeling as though I had 34+ new friends to nerd out with about instruction!

We began the day with one of my favorite activities (that I borrowed from the Info Lit workshops I lead with Becky Canovan of University of Dubuque): Solution or Sympathy! Y'all, archivists and librarians are such kindred spirits and the questions or situations that were submitted and shared with the group were phenomenal! Here's how Solution or Sympathy works. Participants:
  • Write down instruction/archives-related questions or concerns;
  • Share the questions anonymously to see if the group has experienced something similar;
  • Offer up possible solutions, or sympathize, and let the person who submitted the question know that at least they're not alone.
What I love about this activity is that it works in almost any context with almost any profession! Everyone has problems and everyone wants to know either 1) what have others done to address/resolve this problem, or 2) who is here and can at least commiserate about this. Because, sometimes it's nice to just know you're not the only one.

We could have done Solution or Sympathy all day (seriously) but transitioned to an active learning/collaborative learning session primarily led by Rachel Seale. I LOVED the narrative building exercise she introduced to the group. To use this in your own classroom, divide your artifacts/documents into 4-6 groups. Similarly, divide students into the same amount of groups and ask them to read and evaluate the documents, preparing to share out with the rest of the class information about their resource. Because you have cultivated the collection, eventually through the sharing-out process, students will start to see a story emerge from the resources. By the end, the whole class should be able to pull together the whole story - either through a whole-class discussion, or by a volunteer student who can tie it all together. You can also discuss what's still missing from the story, or try to predict what happened next. Lots of great inquiry can be built from this example! Rachel also led another activity where groups taught each other about various Collaborative Learning Techniques. She recommended the resource Using Primary Sources: Hands-On Instructional Exercises edited by Bahde, Smedberg, and Taormina.


Rachel & I collaborated to lead a session on Growing Your Instruction Program. We set up table-topics where participants could self-select which conversation they wanted to participate in. We prepared some conversation-starter prompts, but essentially the participants ran each table independently. All we asked was that a recorder be assigned to each topic so those who are interested in more than one topic could still learn after the fact, despite not being able to be in two places at once, because the notes were shared out with participants after the conference. We did allow for participants to rotate tables partway through the activity, though most stayed at their original topic. The overarching topics were:

  • Building relationships with faculty
  • Building relationships with students
  • Building relationships with colleagues (librarians, archives, staff)
  • Advocating for resources
  • Marketing your archives

Anna Trammell led a session on Designing Special Collections Instruction Sessions Using a Social Justice Framework, and also shared out a session focusing on Utilizing Instructional Technologies in the Classroom. A few of the highlights from those sessions are found in my tweets, below.

I led a session on Assessing Your Instruction Program and presented 60 assessment ideas or tools in what was slotted for 60 minutes. I warned the audience that I'd likely be talking like the Micro Machines commercial guy or an auctioneer, and I did.
I also promised that if there was extra time, we'd go back and do some more Solution or Sympathy questions. Well, I was totally Micro Machines-y and wound up covering the 60 ideas in 30 minutes! So we dug back into the Solution or Sympathy, which also seemed to be a hit. It worked out well!

We closed out the day with an Instructional Design Workshop where groups used provided scenarios to develop a lesson plan that incorporated some of the elements covered throughout the day. Groups had ~1 hour to work on their plan and then reported out to the group:

  • A brief description of the scenario
  • Explanation of how they addressed communication barriers, incompatible expectations, and how they worked with the requestor to find out more about their needs to develop a plan. 
  • Identified their learning outcomes
  • Described or demonstrated how they incorporated active learning techniques
  • Described what items they used (from collections)
  • They also had the option to share out instructional technologies or social justice framework elements if they chose to include them
  • How they assessed the activity/lesson
What rich conversations were generated throughout the entire day! I loved learning from participants and helping facilitate activities! Below are my tweets from the day -- with tidbits and takeaways from the various sessions! Thanks again to participants for being so wonderful, and to MAC for inviting me to help plan and facilitate the day!










































Posted by Cara at 11:02 AM
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