In my Gender and Rhetoric course students can choose from among several optional assignments. One of them, something I borrowed from my Northwestern rhetorical history days, is called the Discovery Paper. Students are asked to "discover" a primary text related to the topics we've been discussing during the semester. They then write a 5-6 page paper that serves as an introduction to their discovery, telling us about the period, the historical context, and the rhetor. They are also asked to make links to ideas about gender and citizenship we've engaged in class.
Many of the students who choose this option end up using campus archives. This gives them firsthand experience doing archival research and gives them a little bit of insight into what that work entails. At Illinois we are lucky to have a marvelous thing called the Student Life and Culture Archive. It holds not only materials related to the history of student life at Illinois, but also national sorority and fraternity archives, oral history recordings, and lots more. It is a remarkable resource.
This week I have been grading the papers my students produced, and I am continually amazed by what they discover. This time around the texts included 1898 and 1905 brochures recruiting women students to Illinois, information for residence hall house mothers (circa 1940), a campus etiquette manual produced by the Illini Union in the 1950s, and a 1963 speech by the Illinois Dean of Women to the all-male Urbana Rotary Club (this last with the marvelous thesis, "The main problem in educating women is to educate men about women"). It's just about as much fun as a professorchick can have grading papers. And it's clear that doing this assignment helps students make connections that they might not otherwise make. Which, as I said to a student who made this exact observation to me a few days ago, is pretty much what education is supposed to be about, isn't it?
(image credit: "Corn Girls perform in the May fetes, circa 1915," from Student Life and Culture Archive)
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