Eira Tansey

Teaching Archives and Climate Change

Last week I taught “Archives and Climate Change” for California Rare Book School. I was very excited to teach the course, and it wildly exceeded all of my expectations for the week. I was profoundly lucky to have an incredible group of thirteen students who came to the course from various professional and personal experiences. The success of the week is very much to their credit, thanks to their enthusiasm for active participation, eagerness to share with each other, and openness to learning from each other. I’ll share in a later post what a transformative experience it was for me, especially at this point in my career, but I want to spend this post reflecting on the actual teaching logistics of the course.

This was my first time teaching anything for more than a couple hours, and I knew it would be additionally challenging given the online format. I am glad that the course was offered online, since I felt this would widen the possible pool of students and allow people to participate who may not be able to take the time or expense to leave home for a week. And of course, given my own concern about the emissions levels of professional development, teaching a course online was an obvious choice.

CalRBS asked me to finish the syllabus a month before the course began, and I was glad to start prepping it much earlier than that, since it helped me organize my thinking around the main subject areas of the course early on. It was super important to me that participants had a solid foundation of the science and policy of climate change. It was equally important that they learn about climate emotions and climate grief: based on my own personal experience, you cannot do climate work for the long haul unless you recognize and care for your own emotions. I front-loaded the course with these two areas (spread across two days), so that by the time we moved into talking about the impact of climate change on cultural heritage generally and archives specifically, everyone had both the foundational science and emotional tools to fully engage with the content.

Developing the syllabus was helpful for organizing the basic thematic structure of the class, but I still had to figure out how to organize each particular day. Given that folks have spent 2.5 years on Zoom, and given that I had 20 contact hours for the course, I did not want a course that felt like it dragged. There were a few topics I knew I wanted to cover that would be primarily lecture-based. However, I know that I personally do not learn best from lectures, and neither do many others. I reached out to some of my instructional librarian colleagues at UC for advice, and spent a lot of time reading about classroom assessment techniques and active learning. I also drew on activities I’ve used in various social justice settings, especially those focused on facilitating discussions and building relationships within small groups. Several years ago I attended a climate grief workshop at a Quaker conference that was based on the work of Joanna Macy, and her co-authored book Active Hope was an enormously helpful resource for the week.

Some things I did in the service of setting expectations up front:

  • I deliberately chose not to record class sessions (except for one super technical afternoon of demonstrating ArcGIS online). I posted PowerPoint decks and course materials (Google Jamboards, Zoom chat logs) at the end of each day in our course folder. I strongly believe recording things by default without a strong pedagogical reason for doing so is a form of surveillance, and that unrecorded spaces allow people to share more freely and with greater candor (especially important given the course’s emphasis on group discussions and sharing).
  • To that end, I also created a pretty stringent privacy policy for the course, which you can read about in the syllabus.
  • I asked people to generally turn their cameras on for any group discussions. I assumed that if a camera was turned off, someone had stepped away or needed some offline time to gather themselves.
  • I held office hours before/after each day, and regularly invited all students to attend for any concerns they had.
  • I left the Zoom room open during the 90-minute lunch period for anyone who wanted to chat with each other. I usually took this time to make some adjustments to the afternoon portion of the course. Most of these lunch periods were fairly quiet, but towards the end of the week some people would come back from lunch a few minutes early to chat with each other.

What I lack in pedagogical training, I (hope) I make up for in abundant enthusiasm and doing my best to read the room so I can tweak things on the fly based on what it seems like people are resonating with. As a result, I built in a lot of activities and group discussions to keep the energy levels going, and allow the students to bond with and learn from each other. Sometimes this took the form of sending students off into “pair and share” discussions, other times it was in small group (3-4 people) breakout rooms. One of the interesting things about CalRBS is that students apply for the course(s) they want to take with their CV and an application statement. The instructors make the admissions decisions, so I knew there would be students coming in with a wide variety of knowledge and experience I simply don’t have. It was important to me to make an environment rich for learning from everyone, rather than an outdated model in which the instructor is assumed to contain all the knowledge. At a certain point in the week, I thought “I feel more like a facilitator helping the students learn as much from each other as they learn from me, the instructor.” This was a really good feeling!

Maybe my first sign that the course would go well was that I was mildly surprised the first day (which was the most lecture heavy) there was so much chatting going on in the Zoom chat box – to the point where there was a request to download and save the chat to our course’s folder with all the other course materials since there were so many resources/links being shared by students. I happily did so that day (and the rest of the week) after putting it to a vote to make sure everyone was okay with it. When my husband (who facilitates a lot of online groups through his volunteer work) asked about the first day and I mentioned how active the chat was, he said “Oh that’s a very good sign!”

The syllabus is embedded below, but since it doesn’t really convey the depth of what each particular day looked like, this is a very brief sample of some of the activities we did:

  • Every morning we did a round robin of reactions to the day’s readings. This took about 30-40 minutes, but it was well worth the time. It often signaled to me what might be worth adjusting or cultivating more attention to in the afternoon part of the course. The students often built on what someone else said, or helped draw out new connections.
  • I really like Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Action Venn Diagram exercise. On Day 2, we watched the video on her website. Each student then had 10 minutes to fill out their Venn Diagram. Then I sent pairs of students into their own breakout room where they had 20 minutes to interview each other about their Venn Diagram (I sent out an alert message at 10 minutes reminding them to switch turns).
  • We used breakout rooms and Google Jamboards pretty regularly throughout the week. On Day 4, we had a “choose your own adventure” breakout room/Jamboard activity. Before lunch, students nominated which topics they wanted to discuss with each other (our focus was on what archival practices could be made more environmentally sustainable). In the afternoon, they selected whichever breakout room they wanted and each room created its own Jamboard. Afterwards, we came back to discuss and review the Jamboards in the group.
  • On Day 5, I expanded the final portion based on student feedback to be something akin to a show and tell/talent show/barn raising as a way to close out the week. Each student had 8 minutes, and could share their ArcGIS StoryMap, their climate venn diagram, or any other project they had been working on/were contemplating in the future.

Here’s the syllabus. Feel free to contact me with any questions! I hope to teach the course again in the future.


Categorised as: archivists


Comments are closed.