Hello, and welcome to the second section of The Archive As
Classroom. In this section, we’re all about the archives! The
archive is, after all, the noun of the DALN, its material reality as
well as its mission.
With approximately 7,500 submissions as I record this, the DALN
offers scholars an invaluable resource for studying literacy in its
various inflections. And as a tool for teaching, the archive is
immensely valuable as well: it’s a site where students can read,
watch, or listen to models of personal literacy narratives to
emulate; it’s a site where they can study the conventions that make
up the genres and subgenres in the archives; it’s a site they can
explore as yeoman researchers as they come to learn about the key
questions that characterize literacy studies; it’s a site to which
they themselves can contribute their own narratives, thus helping
the archive grow more valuable in the process.
We are in the middle of what some have called the “archival turn” in
rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies—we see the selections in
this chapter contributing to that ongoing conversation about the
value of the archive in fostering student learning and research. As
we consider the various ways that educators use the DALN in their
classrooms and beyond, we asked contributors of this section to
consider a couple high-level questions in their explorations and
investigations: One, how do you use the DALN to teach archival (and other) research methods? And two, what approaches to the archive engage students in critical examinations of qualitative research?
Below, you’ll find a collection of chapters that demonstrate the
power of the archive as a site for preserving the literacy stories
of people whose voices are historically marginalized or
underrepresented. Or as a means of theoretically reconceptualizing
the classroom itself as a kind of archive. The archive can be a site
that enables educators to enact transformative pedagogy. Finally,
the DALN’s capacity as a new breed of archive can radically
destabilize or queer conventional notions of archival practice.
Taken together, the pieces in this section challenge and change our
thinking about the relationships between literacy, identity, power,
as well as the practices associated with curating the material
artifacts that reflect and enact those relationships.
[Outro music]
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER
1 Cynthia Selfe & H. Lewis
Ulman, “Black Narratives Matter: Pairing
Service-Learning with Archival Research”
This chapter explores an oral history model for service
learning through The Literary Narratives of Black Columbus
course. In the course, students assist African-American
community members in Columbus, Ohio as they audio- or
video-record autobiographical accounts of their literacy
practices and values, and preserve these narratives in the
DALN. In the process, students learn how to interview
participants; record and edit texts; analyze qualitative
data; document and archive primary sources for public
access; design archival materials for wide accessibility
(e.g., transcribing and captioning audio and video);
report research findings and design projects that provide
reciprocal benefits to students and community
participants. These characteristics link the course with
the goals and practices at the heart of the DALN, allowing
us to provide students a range of learning opportunities,
while contributing to the community an invaluable
historical record of African-American literacies, told in
community members’ own voices. The chapter includes
insights and recommendations for further
community-oriented, DALN-based pedagogical projects.
Chapter
2Johanna Schmertz, “Archiving and
Re-Narrating Selves in an Online Writing Course”
Archives are primary sources for creating knowledge, not
just storing what is already known. The Digital Archive of
Literacy Narratives is ideally positioned for students to
create knowledge about literacy by serving as both a
repository for narratives of literate selves in community
and a tool for creating them. If a digital archive is a
“digital resource that collects and makes accessible
materials for the purposes of research,
knowledge-building, and memory-making” (Enoch &
VanHaitsma, 2015, p. 219), an online writing course may be
considered a kind of archive as well: it stores readings,
exercises, discussions and class writings while enabling
students to chart their own paths through it and
contribute to its shape. This piece applies principles of
narrative and archive theory to an upper-division online
writing course. Following Jerome Bruner’s precept that
“Any story one may tell about anything is better
understood by considering other possible ways in which it
can be told” (2004, p. 709), students in my class
navigated and curated the DALN in order to stage and then
restage their identities. They cultivated critical
thinking and new identity repertoires by retelling their
original narratives in ways that acknowledged their own
performances. By adding both sets of stories to the DALN
archive at the end of the semester, students in an online
writing course laid the foundation for ongoing
self-revisions as well as made those selves publicly
accessible for the construction of new narratives of
literacy.
Chapter
3Bill FitzGerald & Brynn Kairis,
“Year of Living DALNgerously: Breakthrough Encounters with
Archival Pedagogy”
This dialogic essay recounts a “year in the life” of an
instructor (Bill) and undergraduate student (Brynn) in
their mutual encounters with the DALN as a site for
teaching, learning, and scholarship. Initial exposure to
the DALN in an undergraduate course on “Community and
Literacy” marks a turning point for both as the
affordances of the DALN prompt significant growth and
shift of perspective. For Bill, teaching with the DALN
enabled him to own his desire to develop as a researcher;
for Brynn, learning to use the DALN as a resource
encouraged her to embrace a new identity of a scholar in
addition to that of a student. This year continued into a
second semester in which Bill taught a graduate course in
research methods in composition and literacy, and Brynn
found herself developing a publishable project through
archival research in the DALN. In a postscript, Bill and
Brynn reflect on the ways that this year of living
DALNgerously continues to impact their growth as scholars
(both), teachers (both), and writing program administrator
(Bill) and address the potential for the DALN to serve as
a site for transformation of not only individuals but the
field of English studies itself.
Chapter
4 Deborah Kuzawa, “A Tool of Queerness?
Queerness and the DALN”
What might queerness (as an epistemological and
ontological concept untethered from sexuality and gender)
and the DALN offer to the discipline of composition
studies? I contend that the Digital Archive of Literacy
Narratives is both a queer and queering archive for
classrooms and research. The underlying structures and
implicit values of the DALN are queer in that they
simultaneously push against and embrace dominant binary
values that shape archives, archival research, and
literacy. The DALN’s structure and values surf between the
values, structures, and conceptions of conventional
archives and Archives 2.0 (technologically-enhanced
archives), embracing a queer middle ground that values
movement and both/and. Instructors and students may use
the DALN to better understand conventional binary values
of archives (restriction/openness,
impersonalness/personalness,
expert-direction/self-direction) and how they manifest in
archival spaces, classrooms, and research. These binary
values normalize and privilege particular configurations
of archives and classrooms, including when, where, and how
archives and the personal appear (or don’t) in composition
classrooms and research. The DALN may be used to expand
understandings of what archives and literacy can be, what
archives and literacy look like, how archives and literacy
are used, and who/what are preserved in archives or who is
considered an expert. I argue the DALN may be used in
classrooms to meet practical and institutional goals for
composition courses as well as meet the personal,
philosophical, and intellectual goals of instructors,
students, and researchers.
