Chapter 9 Student Activities

The History of your College/University

This activity can be organized as an individual assignment or in small groups of three or four students. Ask students to identify some brief source about the history or your college or university. This source may be a booklet, a webpage, a film clip, or, for older colleges, on some bronze plaque. It may even be the script spoken by student guides on campus tours. Have students delve into the history of your campus from more comprehensive sources. Have them consider what parts of the story are left out, like the Santee Sioux (the roving Indians) in eastern South Dakota, or something exaggerated to emphasize some trait perceived as virtuous or positive. The questions we pose—such as, Who are the “roving Indians” whose contributions to your campus go unnoticed? Whose successes are presented as individual accomplishments that ignore the hard work of other unsung heroes?—are the kinds of questions on which your students can work. The bigger question is who controls the story of your campus’s past?

The Historic Symbols of Your Campus

Ask students to look around your campus and identify what they think of as the historic relics of your institution and its rich history. Nearly all schools have revered objects that may or may not be used in any campus ritual. After identifying their object, have each student find the symbolic messages that link this object with some important aspect of the campus’s history. Ask students to consider how this object embodies virtuous traits attributed to your campus and institution. Have them think about and discuss in class how these symbols make points about the school and its students (then and now). What aspects of contemporary campus life are completely ignored by these symbols? What aspects are present today but likely took on different forms in the past? Are there symbolic aspects of a student’s object that no longer can be interpreted as virtuous, even though it may have been a virtue when the object was first created? Many older schools will have mixed messages coming from different revered symbols. In class, ask students who have identified different objects if their symbols and overall symbolisms run in the same directions or if they seem to tell different stories. Consider whether the symbols are related or emerged from different eras where different virtues were celebrated or admired.

Your Roommate’s Object

Ask students to interview their roommate or some other close friend about an object that is important to them from their room. If yours is a commuter campus, you can have students interview other students in the class and have students bring smart phone photos of their object and the context in which it sits. It is important for the roommate to choose the object so we can learn about the roommate’s through something he or she values. Have students consider the several dimensions through which we can understand this object. How does it relate to the roommate’s past, his or her social status and economic situation, his or her sense of aesthetics, and how it embodies his or her aspirations? Have students consider, for example, how the object embodies aspects that make them special or different as an individual or about the things they hold in high regard. How does the symbolism reveal the aspirations or values of the roommate? In class discussion, you might ask students what it would mean if one of their parents chose a similar object, or what would it mean if the same object was placed in a position of honor in one of their professor’s offices.

Understanding the Goal of State Historic Markers

Most states have a state-wide program of historic markers. What is the purpose of these markers? They identify a few historic sites with typically cursory explanations of some historical event that often seems disconnected from anything meaningful today. Ask students to research these state programs and see if a handful of randomly chosen markers are actually as disconnected from the history leading up to the present as may seem the case. How do the events of the past support the symbolic meanings we give these same communities today? What difference does it make today if there was once a thriving textile industry in your town or a neighboring town? Can you see the roots of modern industry in your community as a symbolic way of linking your community with the goals and aims of the past?

Art in the Museum

This works well with universities and colleges that have a museum on their campus or have an art museum or natural history or historical museum nearby. Send students off to a local museum, either on campus or off campus. Have them pick a particular gallery or recommend they choose one of six or seven galleries. Ask them to look at the art, historical objects, or whatever exhibits are present. Suggest that they look at the way objects are presented to museum goers by the curator and the order the curator has placed them in the gallery. What message has the curator tried to convey simply by the context? Now, think of the same objects displayed much more randomly. Consider, for example, six pieces that have been plucked out of the exhibit and placed in an empty gallery. What do these same objects say if seen in this order? Reorganize them once more for your imaginary museum and ask, what meanings are brought out by this arrangement that are absent in the original exhibit (real) or the other (imagined)?