Thread by @hralperta

So I just read student evaluations for The History of the Book in the Americas and Beyond #JCBBookHistory and I'm so pleased that the students felt like they benefitted from the course. But it's bittersweet because I don't know when (if?) I'll get to work with undergrads again!

I wanted to share some things I learned about teaching book history in special collections. I should say this was a really unusual class: a small and very thoughtful group of students, embedded in a rare books library, and co-instructed by the library director and curator.

Lesson 1: fewer (and slower) is better

Guest speakers Aaron Hyman and Dana Leibsohn gave the students 90 minutes to work with two books: Thomas Harriot's 'Briefe and True Report' (Frankfurt, 1590) and a facsimile of the Codex Boturini (1/3)

Students split in two groups and spent ~30 minutes looking very slowly at each book. We were there to help, but mostly they just asked questions and tried to find the answers. They learned more about the nature of the colonial book in that hour than in two weeks of conversations.

The student-driven comparison of just two texts felt so much more effective and engaging than the massive show & tells I was taught to conduct. Students did similar activities at home with digital facsimiles, with equally good results.

Lesson 2: Part of teaching with rare books is teaching library & information literacy.

Most undergraduate students do not know: how to request a rare book, how to visit a reading room, how to use a finding aid, how catalogues get made, how collections are formed. (1/3)

We were super lucky to have research librarian Kim Nusco teach the students about library expectations AND book dealer David Szewczyk to talk about the legal & extra-legal ways that collections got formed. We also did a scavenger hunt in the online & paper card catalogues,

getting hands-on experience with the ways that historical approaches to information are embedded in information infrastructure, and how that can continue to impact research methods. Here's the workshop:

docs.google.com/document/d/1Dc…

Lesson 3: Lots of book history is feminist and anti-colonial...

... but it's super easy to forget that. I benefited so much from the crowdsourced 'diversify your book history syllabus' reading list:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

I also invested some time working with students on how to read and take notes on academic essays, which I hope they found helpful. We experimented with different kinds of note taking, including content mapping and reverse reading. Worksheets:

halperta.com/2019-bookhisto…

Lesson 4: Do an exhibition

In place of a final paper, students collectively designed an exhibition using JCB books. The exhibition ended up looking great but I'm even more proud of the work they did thinking together about complicated book history topics 1/2

Like many of us, students struggle to see the intellectual work of public history. The exhibition let them grapple with meaning, audience, materiality, and ethics outside of the scholarly essay, and I think they enjoyed it! Here's the assignment:

halperta.com/2019-bookhisto…

The entire course has been documented online. If you're teaching book history or thinking of using rare books in your other courses, feel free to borrow from the syllabus and assignments, and I'd be happy to chat about what I learned! 🌞🌻🤓📚

halperta.com/2019-bookhisto…

Finally, so many thanks to my co-instructors and all of our guests last semester, who taught me so much about teaching and about book history 🌼

Addendum: most of the things about not being tt are terrible but it's great not worrying about the fact that work like this has little to no value for t&p