“Collective Invention”: Learning Through Women’s Activism and Material Culture
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation
Conference Strand
Critical Literacy
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
K-12
Location
Ogeechee Theater
Relevance
Our project describes a partnership among professors of differing ranks, one that highlights a collaboration between archivists and teachers. This study of material culture relies upon digitization of artifacts and ephemera in order to provide virtual study of online archives.
Proposal
Archival/Library Specialists challenge humanities scholar-teachers to collaborate across disciplines, adopting one another’s method/ologies and praxis (Caswell; Cifor; Bahde, Smesdberg, and Taormina, etc). Our presentation answers this call. From our long-time experiences teaching with archives and collecting and collating special collection materials, we share a curriculum design that introduces teachers and their students to the value of archival investigation, beginning with local stories, events, ephemera, and collections. Inspired by the 2020 Radcliffe/Schlessinger #SuffrageSyllabus and Georgia State’s Women’s Collections, this digital archival course applies women’s activism and material culture as a lens through which teachers and students may engage in primary investigation.
Our pedagogical design, while grounded in a specific set of digitally accessible primary and secondary materials, is both transferable to in-person archival work and accessible for widespread adoption, inviting collaboration across institutions, ranks, disciplines, and community groups. The narrative/syllabus also provides a model for teachers, library specialists, and community activists to replicate, inviting instructors to design original archival courses grounded in local collections, issues, and community ground-up archival materials. With an article detailing this curriculum forthcoming, our presentation also introduces our next step: an invitation to interdisciplinary teams of teachers, community members, and archivists to collaborate in a collection that extends this work, reimagines it for other disciplines and purposes, and illuminates connections.
Short Description
From long-time experiences teaching with archives and collecting and collating special collection materials, two scholar-teachers and a library archivist share a curriculum design that introduces teachers and their students to the value of digital study of material culture, beginning with local stories, events, ephemera, and collections.
Keywords
material culture, digital archives, interdisciplinary collaborations, pedagogical designs
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Gaillet, Lynee L.; Rose, Jessica A.; and Gerard, Morna, "“Collective Invention”: Learning Through Women’s Activism and Material Culture" (2026). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 35.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2026/2026/35
“Collective Invention”: Learning Through Women’s Activism and Material Culture
Ogeechee Theater
Archival/Library Specialists challenge humanities scholar-teachers to collaborate across disciplines, adopting one another’s method/ologies and praxis (Caswell; Cifor; Bahde, Smesdberg, and Taormina, etc). Our presentation answers this call. From our long-time experiences teaching with archives and collecting and collating special collection materials, we share a curriculum design that introduces teachers and their students to the value of archival investigation, beginning with local stories, events, ephemera, and collections. Inspired by the 2020 Radcliffe/Schlessinger #SuffrageSyllabus and Georgia State’s Women’s Collections, this digital archival course applies women’s activism and material culture as a lens through which teachers and students may engage in primary investigation.
Our pedagogical design, while grounded in a specific set of digitally accessible primary and secondary materials, is both transferable to in-person archival work and accessible for widespread adoption, inviting collaboration across institutions, ranks, disciplines, and community groups. The narrative/syllabus also provides a model for teachers, library specialists, and community activists to replicate, inviting instructors to design original archival courses grounded in local collections, issues, and community ground-up archival materials. With an article detailing this curriculum forthcoming, our presentation also introduces our next step: an invitation to interdisciplinary teams of teachers, community members, and archivists to collaborate in a collection that extends this work, reimagines it for other disciplines and purposes, and illuminates connections.
