Lesson Plan: A Dogs Life (Freshmen Writing Seminar)
So, not only did a I have the immense pleasure of teaching virtually last Tuesday, but on Wednesday, I led two, 1.5 hour sessions of a Freshman Writing Seminar, “It’s a Dogs Life” taught by Li Qi Peh. Over the course of the semester, these students are asking the question “what makes a dog a dog, and why have they enjoyed such a privileged place in human culture and society?” (um, hello, have you seen my parent’s dog Bear? one look in his gorgeous face and you’ll have your answer but I guess maybe there’s more to it than that for some people).
For this visit to Special Collections, I was once again aiming to design a participatory session that demystified Special Collections and cultivated critical thinking skills during primary source research centered around objects that speak to the relationship between humans and animals over time.
Using the skills and lesson models that I learned in a truly fantastic RBMS conference workshop, “Putting Guidelines into Practice: Using Backwards Design to Develop Outcomes and Activities from the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy” lead by Jessica Holden, Sara Horowitz, Marieke Van der Steenhove and Christine Cheng, I set up a “think pair share” activity, but added my own twist at the end. In addition to my standard learning goals, I also wanted to have the students practice considering perspective and point of view in collection building. To do so, each of the objects in the room had a “mate” I had assigned to them based on a theme or concept. At the end of the lesson, the students were asked to guess what was the “mate” of the object that they had been working closely with. This model was apparently a little too ambitious, and we didn’t have time to really get into the “mate” part of the lesson plan in either session, but I’m hoping to continue to hone this idea in future classes.
Our object list included (“mates” in parenthesis):
Audubon : original paintings of birds of America in the New York Historical Society / text by Robert Cushman Murphy (8880.134.66) (“animals as specimen”, mated with shotgun)
Audubon's double barreled shotgun (8007052 A-Alcove 8, shelf 3) (“animals as specimen”, mated with Birds of America)
Otter pelt (Z-000021) (“animals and art”, mated with Yellowstone drawings)
The monkey: piano solo / by Mae-Aileen Erb (Sheet music 853) (“animals as entertainment", intended to be mated with Animal Acts (Photographs), dates not examined / Miscellaneous Circus Collection (TC118, Box 1, Folder 4) which was in unavailable)
Il Moretto del Pittoni : narrazione encomiastica serio-faceta della dignissime perogative che in lui si trovavano (21972 Euro 18) (“animals as friends”, mated with Bonaparte’s monkey)
Bonaparte's monkey (GA 2005.00490) (“animas as friends”, mated with Il Moretto del Pittoni)
De humana physiognomonia Ioannis Baptistae Portæ Neapolitani libri IV by Giambattista della Porta (BF840 .xP6) (“animals as kin” - meant to be mated with Vice in its proper shape, or, The wonderful and melancholy transformation of several naughty masters and misses into those contemptible animals which they most resemble in disposition (Hamilton 128s), which was unavailable)
[A series of animal drawings from Yellowstone Park] (Graphic Arts/Thorington Alpine Views) (“animals and art”, mated with Otter pelt)
and the overall lesson plan:
Introduce self, department, discuss special collections and archival work etc (15 minutes)
Each student chooses an object, completes side one of the worksheet (10 minutes)
What is this?
How do you know?
Who was this document / object created by?
How do you know?
Who was this document / object created for?
How do you know?
When is this document / object from?
How do you know?
Why does this document / object exist?
Everyone moves on to side two of the worksheet and gets a catalog entry (10 minutes)
What questions does this document / object answer?
What questions do you have about this document / object? Or what do you wish you knew about this document / object?
What next steps would you take to answer those questions?
What surprised you about this document / object?
Do you think this document / object is important? Valuable? Significant? And to whom?
Students present on their objects (15-20 minutes)
Surprise, everything in the room has a mate, take the next five minutes to walk around the room and try and take a guess at what your object’s mate is (5 minutes)
I want to know why you think they’re mated - give me at least two to three concrete clues
“Mate” presentations (10 minutes)
Questions and / or browse time (5 minutes - end)
A few key takeaways from these sessions:
In both classes, I ended up giving a very brief overview on the history of printing. The students were picking up on things like wood cuts and lithographs; they were asking questions about hand written books versus printed books and were surprised that one of our books (from 1750) was both very old but also printed. This was not a conversation I was prepared to have, but luckily, I was ready to have it thanks to years of book history pedagogy (it it also always surprising to me how few students know about Gutenberg’s printing press or the Gutenberg bible since it was such a fundamental part of my education starting in undergrad).
The gun, the sheet music and the otter pelt were particularly difficult for the students to interpret. Unlike with books, they weren’t as familiar with the context clues that can help them answer the “who, what, when, where, why” of each object.
I told them the only thing the were allowed to Google in the first part of the exercise (side 1 of the worksheet) were any Roman numerals because a) I’m not a monster and b) those things suck and despite years of reading Nancy Drew mysteries where each chapter is denoted by Roman numeral instead of Arabic numbers, I still cannot tell you what anything other than “I” stands for.
This lesson plan is ambitious for 1.5 hours - if I want to accomplish all of it, I need to consider better time management.
I had a lot of fun leading these sessions and I hope our students did too. I know for a fact that at least one is going to write a paper on Audubon and conservation after this lesson and honestly, I don’t think it gets any better than that.
