by Bridget Retzloff and Zachary Lewis
Students are often asked to share details about their lives. Whether it’s for summer bridge program activities, orientations, workshops, or the first day of class, students are expected to draw connections between their own experiences and the topic at hand. Two librarians at a private midsize university designed and implemented a guided looking activity for a scholarship cohort’s summer bridge program, which tasked students with using a personal object to demonstrate a meaningful connection with a social justice issue. By using archival materials to exercise creativity and curiosity about the past, students prepared to do the same with primary sources from their own personal histories. The authors demonstrate how guided looking activities and primary sources can be used in library instruction to meet objectives 3B, 4C, 4D, and 4F from the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy. Additionally, the authors share insights on how this project impacted their teaching philosophies and offer recommendations for streamlining and assessing similar projects.
Access: Connecting Past and Present: Using Archival Materials in a Storytelling Exercise