Description: In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations.
Review Quotes:
"More than a methodological handbook, the volume presents a provocative challenge to the way scholars conceptualize archives, knowledge production, and pedagogy."--Yasmine Benabdallah, Synoptique
"A timely, important resource that contributes to the burgeoning field of archival research, theory, and pedagogy that is transforming writing studies today. Teaching through the Archives fills an important gap by exploring how archival research can contribute to undergraduate and graduate education; how archivists, instructors, and community organizations can establish mutually beneficial relationships; and how archival work can support social change, activism, and community engagement."--Gesa E. Kirsch, coauthor, Feminist Rhetorical Practices
"These rich case studies show how archival work can underpin teaching that rhetoric shapes and is shaped by culture, which, like writing itself, is a process. They feature furthermore how work with archives can therefore be personally transformative when we better see our lives also as a process and our membership in a collection of lives across time."--Liz Rohan, coeditor of Beyond the Archives "Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden present a superb team of scholars demonstrating how the rich and varied archive of composition studies can become a resource for many different college classrooms, from first-year writing to graduate courses on the history of the profession. In doing so they have begun to transform the archive from a static repository to an active center of the discipline's institutional heritage."--John C. Brereton, author of The Origin of Composition Studies: A Documentary History