Ethnographic Collections in the Classroom: Teaching Research and Composition through Community-Centered Archives

Instructors of Language Arts, History, and Social Studies in the United States are tasked with helping their pupils compare perspectives across time and space. They must teach students how to locate and contextualize varied source materials--and help them develop research, writing, and citing strategies in the process. Standards of learning across the country also require students to analyze claims and practice writing for specific audiences, and to explain and analyze important social issues in the present and recent past, including civil rights, gender politics, technological and institutional change, and human migrations. Allowing students to explore, interpret, and create ethnographic materials is one way to achieve all these objectives. Large ethnographic archives, including materials provided online by the Library of Congress, offer enormous and often easily accessible riches to K-16 faculty and students. This essay explores what is to be gained from working with ethnographic collections that are relatively "bottom-up" in their orientation and structure. Accessing local collections mutually benefits teachers, students, and local archives.