Who cares? When I was a student, that was my first thought in nearly all my history courses. Now, as something of an accidental historian, I can relate to students who have not (yet) been bitten by a history bug. Students’ apathy is a challenge to overcome. In the earliest days of my teaching career that was daunting. Years later, I faced another daunting but more practical challenge: how can I future-proof a history course that will survive the COVID-19 pandemic? That was in spring 2020, when I was designing my first undergraduate history course during lockdown. It was an elective course on publication design history for students majoring in any discipline. The first offering was delivered remotely and asynchronously, though I later adapted the course for in-person instruction. Given the many stresses that the pandemic placed on students and educators, I aimed to remove barriers, embrace interdisciplinarity, and nurture enthusiasm while teaching research skills, critical thinking, and storytelling. One way I pursued these goals was by guiding students through the Curatorial Project or Essay assignment reproduced below.
This assignment resonates with a wide range of learners. I teach histories of art, design, and publishing at two Canadian universities to undergraduate and graduate students, both in person and online (synchronously and asynchronously). Students come from a range of disciplines: some focus on art, design, or publishing; others come from related disciplines such as English and communication; and still others come from fields further afield, such as economics and criminology. Despite these variables, the Curatorial Project or Essay engages students across modes of delivery. The word “curatorial” intrigues and empowers students. It productively emphasizes their selection and framing of content, particularly visual and material content, giving them greater agency. The assignment has students research history in interdisciplinary ways, select pieces of history to put in conversation with each other, and tell stories. Students choose either to write an essay, which is a familiar, linear way of constructing a historical narrative, or to create a project—in formats ranging from videos and performances to websites and zines to paintings and collages—which offers an unexpected, nonlinear approach to sharing historical research and critical thinking. The project option also affords students an opportunity to learn about the history of their format of choice, whether it be zines or collages.
I also actively encourage students to lean into their families’ intergenerational histories and their personal histories. For example, a student made a film about mid-twentieth-century activist magazines because their father had published one that he said landed him on a dictator’s hit list, and another student unravelled their grandparents’ immigration stories while researching children’s books from World War II. A student reckoned with their complicated relationship to formal education by analyzing textbooks they had as a child in China, and another student unpacked experiences of being bullied in Canadian elementary schools for reading Japanese manga. A student shed their familial shame of body hair by surveying prints that depicted it, and another student worked through trauma by researching tattoos. A dance student created a zine because they connected with the format’s feminist roots, and a journalism student created a scrapbook about translations of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank because it placed their childhood reading experience in a global context. A visual arts student sewed a jumpsuit in fabric upon which they printed a Constructivist-inspired design to reconcile the movement’s workwear aesthetic with twenty-first-century sustainable sewing patterns, and a ceramics student created a vase to explore whether ancient Greek pots can be seen as publications.
By locating students’ knowledge and experiences within a continuum, strengthening community bonds, and increasing self-awareness and self-belief, the assignment leads students to invest themselves in work that meets course objectives and remains personally meaningful beyond the classroom. Students also use research as a form of allyship. For example, a cishet student studied queer pulp fiction cover art, and a white settler student researched the inordinate amount of labor that systemic racism in the North American publishing industry puts on BIPOC women.
How can we achieve such diverse and powerful coursework? Asking students how they arrived in the classroom, what they are curious about, and what they imagine doing after graduation leads to topics that fit both the course and their lives beyond it. This assignment also fosters four Cs that are meaningful to me as an educator and resonate with students: curiosity, curation, creation, and community. The pandemic had us all reevaluate how we connect with each other; this assignment was born of those 2020—but ultimately timeless—needs for flexibility and care. Half a dozen years and hundreds of students later, I remain excited to adapt this Curatorial Project or Essay assignment semester after semester across courses on histories of art, design, literature and publishing. I am happy to share it with the SHARP community in the hope that it offers inspiration and perhaps even lightens workloads as we prepare next semester’s courses.
This scaffolded assignment includes two rounds of submission: the project or essay and, before that, a proposal so that students plan, pivot, and produce—skills that are important in a variety of fields and sectors across academia, the art world, creative industries, and nonprofit organizations. The downloadable student-facing assignment outline includes questions to guide students’ work, timelines, descriptions of strong submissions, and rubrics. Annotations for educators provide sample feedback and in-class activities.