Colby Faculty Lead Teaching with Primary Sources Workshops

The now virtual Teaching with Primary Sources workshop series, co-organized by the Lunder Institute, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, continued its programming throughout the summer. In May and June, Rachel Beane (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Bowdoin College) led a two-part, interactive discussion on Zoom with the ten workshop participants, who are early career academics teaching American art history. Professor Beane offered an overview of the principles of assignment design, and the participants applied those to their teaching with archival primary sources.

In August, the workshop cohort met again on Zoom, this time with Colby Professors Stacey Sheriff (Director, Colby Writing Program) and Ghada Gherwash (Multilingual Writing Specialist) to talk about a variety of writing pedagogy strategies. The Lunder Institute will host its third and final workshop in the series in September, before turning over the remainder of the programming to its institutional partners. Led by Colby’s Kate McLaughlin (Associate Director of Student Access and Disability Services) with Professor Amber Hickey (Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies), the September workshop will reflect on issues of access and equity in teaching.

All three workshops, organized for the Lunder Institute’s Director of Research Tanya Sheehan, support the cohort’s final project, which is to develop an open-access and adaptable assignment for the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab that incorporates online digitized materials from the Archives of American Art. This work has become all the more valuable to the academic community as many institutions around the world have moved to remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic. We look forward to sharing the Learning Lab assignments with you in 2021!