April 2, 2025 • 32 mins
Primary sources can often feel irrelevant and difficult to navigate for students. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss how student-created photographs can provide a personalized learning experience and foster a deeper connection to history and the university archives. Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Prior to this, she served as Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and was also a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. See is also the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Jessamyn also regularly serves as keynote speaker and workshop facilitator.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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(00:00):
Primary sources can often feel irrelevant and difficult to navigate for students.
In this episode, we look at how using photographs provides a personalized learning
experience and fosters a deeper connection to history and the university archives.
(00:22):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:53):
Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and
Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Prior to this,
she served as Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and was also a
Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky
Pedagogy (01:12):
a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be
Effective Teachers and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty
and Increasing Student Learning. See is also the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of
Methods. Jessamyn also regularly serves as keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. Welcome back,
(01:32):
Jessamyn. It's great to see you again..Thank you. It's great to be here.
Today's teas are:... Jessamyn, are you drinking any tea?
I'm not drinking tea, but I am drinking some water out of my mug that, written on the side,
it tells me you're doing great, so I'm drinking positivity.
(01:54):
Love it. We could all use more positivity.
How about you, John?Based on your recommendation quite
a while ago, I am drinking Brodie’s Scottish afternoon tea today.
Oh, I'm so jealous. You know why I am jealous, John, because I have a cup of
it sitting on my desk because I accidentally grabbed my bottle of water instead. Oops.
(02:15):
Whoops.So what are you drinking, Rebecca?
I’m drinking this bottle of water that I brought because I forgot my tea on my desk.
We do have some teas here. So, I'll have to have some later. I have
failed as a host. I'm sorry.It's your turn.
So, we've invited you here to talk about the Picturing Plattsburgh project that you conducted
(02:36):
in your history course at SUNY Plattsburgh during the spring 2024 semester. We saw you had posted
about this on LinkedIn, I believe it was. Can you tell us a little bit about this project?
Sure, this was for the intro history class, the U.S. history survey at Plattsburgh. It's
1877 to the present, and for people who teach these history survey classes, there's a lot of
(03:03):
challenges in trying to cover a huge amount of just sort of content and material, helping to
try to make it relevant to students, and also just things like materials, like textbooks and
preconceptions that students bring in about what studying history means, most of them incorrect.
(03:25):
So those were all kinds of challenges that were in my mind. I also was fortunate that semester it was
going to be a small group, which was not usually the case for surveys. So I started thinking about
what could I do in the way of assessing student learning while also encouraging relevance and
(03:46):
meaning for the content? And I was interested, and very interested in the unessay projects and
helping students demonstrate their learning and skills in a variety of ways. So all those factors
led me to think about what kind of final project we could work on, what sort of research project.
(04:07):
I came up with the Picturing Plattsburgh first thinking about when I was writing the little
blurb for the catalog, thinking about how in any kind of textbook or any kind of lecture or any
kind of material where students are looking up information about the past, they always look at
(04:28):
the photographs first. Or really, everybody does that, not just students. People do that. They're
interesting. So they look at the photos first. And I had also started thinking about, what does it
mean to teach history in our current historical moment when accessing even facts about the past
(04:49):
can pose a real challenge, again, for students, but for everybody. And AI had just started to
really make its way into higher education discourse, and I was thinking about, well,
what about photographs that are generated by AI? How can I help students develop some of the skills
they're going to need out in the world to access reliable photographic evidence of events that have
(05:15):
happened. So that was all my sort of background thinking that led me to the project.
You started talking a little bit about why you chose photos as a focus. Can you talk
about how you use it as a primary source material in this class.
Sure, I really wanted to give these students the opportunity to do the thing really that
(05:36):
so many historians love, which is examine primary sources, look at the leftovers from the past and
try to make sense and meaning out of the past. Photographs are not necessarily simple primary
sources. There's a lot of complexity to them, but it's the kind of complexity that we in 2025 might
be more equipped to grapple with (06:01):
whe complexities of analyzing a snapshot moment in time visually
requires different critical thinking skills than combing through a 19th-century document.
And so I thought photographs would be a way to help students do this without overwhelming them
(06:22):
with the kind of abilities that you would have to bring to try to understand… they say the past
is a foreign country… like trying to navigate the foreign country of the past. I also thought there
could be a real opportunity here for students to look at photographs of where they were right
this minute, SUNY Plattsburgh. I had thought about ways to help students feel more connected
(06:48):
to the university, that they belong there, and that the resources in the library where
the Center for Teaching Excellence, where I was working, where it was situated, these resources,
they are there for the students. The students’ tuition helps pay for them. And I wanted them to
know and understand that the Special Collections in our Feinberg library are there for you to use.
(07:14):
The resources are there for you to mine. So I decided I wanted to have students first go to
the special collections. We would arrange ahead of time a visit to the special collections. The
Special Collections librarian, an archivist, would collect photographs from the many,
(07:35):
many collections of SUNY Plattsburgh life, things that had happened on campus, events,
student life, speakers, meetings, things that had happened there on the campus. Debra Kimok was the
librarian. She would prepare those ahead of time. I'd bring the students, and I gave them a sheet
with some questions, and then they got to choose and look through some of these photographs. There
(07:59):
were some of some early sporting events, really there were photographs covering the whole history
of SUNY Plattsburgh. We spent a few classes there, and then their assignment was to take
some photographs of SUNY Plattsburgh right now, their experience of SUNY Plattsburgh, trying to
help them see the continuity and the differences between their own day-to-day experiences and
(08:23):
what they had seen looking at photographs in the past. We decided together, as a class,
that everybody did three photos, and we decided as a class which ones to select for permanent digital
exhibit about their perspectives and experiences as students in 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh.
(08:47):
That sounds really fun, Jessamyn. It was very, very fun.
I did a project in our Special Collections using photographs too. And it was a really
great experience for students, because most of them had never been to Special Collections before.
I remember them getting excited about seeing like, “Oh, this is what snow looked like at this
time,” versus like the fact that we had, in that year, no snow, barely at all. It was really fun
(09:10):
to see them light up and understand the space that they were in a really different way.
That's absolutely right. I would say one of the things that it did really successfully
was de-mystify what special collections are, what their function is. We went a couple times,
and the first time we went, the students were pretty tentative. They came in slowly. They
(09:31):
were really hesitant, but the second visit, they walked right in, they started looking through the
photos. They asked the librarian for some more here and there. So it seemed to really empower
them to do something that we in a U.S. History class would be uniquely qualified to help them,
(09:52):
do not just U.S. history, but anybody interested in accessing these materials
and really help them feel like they belonged there in the space doing that kind of work.
One of the things you mentioned in the write up of this is just how memorable historic photos are.
I was thinking when I read that back to when I was studying history sometime in the last century
(10:14):
and remembering things like the newspaper that Truman held up saying Dewey wins or similar, types
of things. That lasts much longer than specific recollection of a lot of the content of the text
that we read at the time. What makes these photos so memorable to students or to any of us?
Well, I'm not an expert in the kind of visual knowledge and visual study of the past via
(10:43):
images. That's not necessarily my expertise and focus. I come at it from a little bit of
a different angle. My sense was less trying to understand why certain photos become so
etched in our memory. When I started, I thought that would be one of the things I was going to
be looking at and having students discuss. But it quickly became more obvious to me that I wanted
(11:06):
them to really explore the idea of the importance of documenting ordinary life, ordinary day-to-day
life, and the way that photographs provide insight into that, that many other sources cannot. So I
absolutely agree there's ways that photographs capture major events, historical turning points,
(11:32):
but they also, for those of us who really want to try to understand, what was it like to be alive
at a certain time, looking at photographs is one way that we can try to get our heads around
what was it like to walk down the street? What were people wearing? What was it like to walk
into a house? And for the students, I really wanted them to think about what was it like
(11:56):
to go to a basketball game at different points in time. What would have been like to live in
a dorm and to translate that then into what they were doing, what they were able to do,
because now everybody has a camera with them all the time, and I'm old enough to remember
that was not always the case, but now it is. So having them rethink some of the implications or
(12:23):
possibilities of their own day-to-day life and the way it could be recorded in a photograph.
And I mentioned that photo of Truman, but I was also thinking of photos from the Great Depression,
food lines, and people in poverty. It creates a much deeper sense of
connection than just reading about it, I think.I think historical empathy is definitely a skill
(12:48):
we would love for undergraduate students to be able to develop. And yes, definitely photos are
one way to do that. It also had a lot of power, I thought, because as we were doing this project,
we were also in the open source textbook that we were using, we also were focusing our discussions
(13:09):
around the photographs and students. I found when we went to Special Collections,
when we looked at the photos in the textbook, they were looking for photos that resonated for them
in some way with their own experiences, their own identities or backgrounds, experiences, families,
(13:29):
interests. So yes, historical empathy, anything to help them feel more connected to the material
we were looking at and using. Definitely sounds like a really
empowering project, both as kind of creators, investigators, etc.
Yeah, I think it was. I'll add that it was interesting in the Special Collections and
(13:56):
in what the students chose to take photographs of that the classroom did not appear very often,
and it was interesting how something that really has a disproportionate impact on what
students do and how they feel and if they're successful at the college and university,
that there are so few photographs taken of it, really at any point in time.
(14:21):
Maybe that's because they were so busy focusing on their educational activities in the classroom…
…maybe so……that they didn't want to distract themselves
with photographs. That would be nice to think.Yeah, well, there were issues. We had to be
cautious. We did not want any photograph of anyone who did not want their photograph to
appear in a possible online exhibit. So that was another reason. Students wouldn't just be
(14:45):
snapping photos of their work in their classes, but they did include some photographs of like
group projects outside of class, work they did outside of class, meeting up with people
in the computer lab, and stuff like that. So can you talk a little bit about what some
of the learning outcomes for the project were? You've hinted at some of them.
Yeah, sure. So the class had standard learning outcomes for our general education requirements,
(15:13):
and I connected work we were doing to those as well, but in addition, I had four learning
outcomes specific to that section and our work together: use photographs, so by the end of
our class, you will be able to use photographs as primary sources to increase your own understanding
(15:33):
of life and events in the United States from 1877 to today; identify what information you
need about a photograph and its historical context when you are using photos as primary sources;
explain how photographs as primary sources document diverse American Identities,
including how some groups experienced bias and discrimination, and work to create change from
(15:56):
1877 to today; and then finally, apply what you've learned about photographs
as primary sources to document life on campus at SUNY Plattsburgh, particularly the diverse
identities of our students, faculty, and staff.So, could you talk about some of the projects that
students did and how they realized those learning objectives?
Well, the reading and reflection they did on each section in the textbook,
(16:21):
they were choosing photographs from those sections and reflecting on them to make
progress and student learning outcomes, one, two, and three. So they had a reflection journal.
They talked and reflected on how the photographs documented diverse experiences, what they needed
to know about the source of a photograph… in this open access textbook, you could trace it back to
(16:46):
where did the editor access this photograph. How do we know that it is what it says it is? And also
looking at the way photographs from the American past document a wide range and diversity of
experiences and including people working to enact a social change. The final one was the one that
(17:08):
they took photographs, discussed why they would be a good addition to our online exhibit. So we had
a shared Google slides that everybody put at least three photographs that they had taken, and then we
talked about them as a class and chose which ones we wanted to include for the final exhibit.
So how did students respond to this project?So I did a poster on this project for the American
(17:35):
Historical Association annual meeting. And in addition to looking at their assignments,
I did a post-project survey, and they were aware I might use their answers in this poster. There
was some strong success. And then there was a couple things that it did not work as well
as I wanted it to work. So I'll start with that one. The way that the project didn't succeed as
(17:58):
much as I wanted it to was the historical aspect of it. I asked students if, after the project,
were they going to be more aware of how historians use photos to understand the past, and it was 10
students who completed the survey, and only three of them said it definitely would do that. However,
(18:19):
there were some things and what I think is worth thinking across disciplines, and the takeaways
for people in all kinds of classes doing all kinds of projects. The thing that they really responded
most positively to was it was their term. I didn't say it, it was their term that I saw repeatedly.
(18:41):
They called it the hands-on aspect of the project. And I think what they were getting at there was
that they felt like they were doing things even beyond just the fact we got out of the classroom
to watch a special collections, and even beyond the fact that they were taking photos themselves,
(19:01):
the overall project gave them a sense of doing something together and working towards this goal,
this shared goal, and they responded very, very, very positively to that. And really,
I think that's a strong takeaway thinking about our course design and how we assess student
learning and the ways a lot of us are really striving to help students build connections
(19:23):
with each other while helping them build these academic skills. And so that idea of an active
learning approach, a student-centered approach, they clearly responded to that. They also,
in the post-program survey and in other kinds of discussions I had with them, they felt very
(19:43):
positive or were interested in looking at photographs of their college campus from the
past. They found that interesting. They definitely understand what Special Collections is now. It's
not this weird term they've never heard of. And the other thing that it did really well was, I do
think almost just in the process of doing it, even if some of them couldn't quite articulate this,
(20:10):
but their work showed that they understood that thing that I was saying I was really hoping they
would get, which is that photographs of ordinary life are significant and important. And the other
thing that worked really well, we talked about why they could trust that the photographs that
(20:31):
were in the textbook were reliable, that they were what they said they were by tracing them back to
often Library of Congress. And every time they did that, I would remind them we can trust that this
photograph is what it says it is, because the actual real one that you hold in your hand that
(20:53):
was taken is at the Library of Congress, like our Special Collections and the people who work there,
it is their job to make sure it is what it says it is, and their job depends on it.
If they misrepresent it, if they try to falsify something, they'll get fired. And then we backed
(21:13):
it up by then going to Special Collections. So students did actually experience, which so few,
not just students, like so few people now, to have the experience of putting your hand on the thing
instead of seeing it on the screen. So all those things together, I feel confident that many of the
students left with a better understanding of what questions do we need to ask about a photograph to
(21:40):
verify that it is what it says it is.And this strikes me as being a type of
authentic learning experience which is not vulnerable to AI. And you mentioned
AI at the beginning as one of the factors in putting this together. Could you talk just a
little bit about that aspect of the project?Yeah, I think the concept that I was thinking
about, or I would say maybe the principle,the teaching practice, the principle that I was
(22:05):
operating from, is that I always want to convey to students that their ideas matter. It's my
strength as an instructor. Dynamic lecturing is not my strength. Being a super lovey dovey is not
my strength. But what I'm really, really good at doing and students get right away from me,
(22:25):
is that I'm very fascinated in their thinking, and I really value their ideas, and I want to
empower them to be able to share their ideas and explain their ideas and write about their ideas
in my class and beyond. So the starting point was that, to the student, your experience of
(22:48):
being a student at SUNY Plattsburgh is important. It's valuable. I value it. I want other people to
value it. We're going to put it in a archive. We're going to put it in a digital collection
that's going to be there and available for anyone who goes to the SUNY Plattsburgh library digital
collections forever. So all that is to say that it wasn't taking an approach of, well, I know that AI
(23:16):
is unlikely to generate a photograph of a student at the convenience store at SUNY Plattsburgh or a
student's my cat sitting in the dorm window, but more that students wouldn't need or want
to offload that work, because it matters to them. It was their experience. It was important to them.
(23:37):
I mean, it's not just students. Everybody looks for a shortcut. Our brains look for a shortcut,
especially when we think it's not worth our time. Nobody goes out of their way to spend more time
doing things they think are unimportant. Our brains are too smart for that. They say “No,
no, what's the least amount of work I can do to get this done?” So I think it makes total
(23:59):
sense to ask students to do work that could help them achieve the learning outcomes,
but gives them some choice and some way to make it meaningful for them. That was the other thing
they said in the survey. They clearly said that they appreciated having some choice, so they got
to choose what to take photos of, and then we worked together to choose the final ones.
(24:24):
That autonomy piece seems incredibly important, as does this idea of being a part of something
bigger, because we're working on like a collective collection and putting things
together so they were depending on one another to be successful as well.
Yeah, I know that, and some other things I did in class really emphasized that your colleagues
need you to attend and participate. And I did hear from several students who said something
(24:49):
along the lines of it had never occurred to me that my being in class would help another
student. I think a lot about academic agency and the idea that as a student,
I am an active participant in my education, my success is not dependent on other people,
(25:10):
like mainly the professor. I have agency and power to do well. It's hard to build those skills as a
student, especially a newer student. It was an interesting class. There was one senior, and then
there was a couple second-semester first-year students. And it was the kind of project where
(25:30):
I could see some difference, as in a couple years of working on building that academic agency.
And one nice aspect of it is in, I believe it was the words of David Wiley,
it's not one of those disposable assignments where students submit something and they never
see it again after the end of the semester. It has a life that lasts beyond that,
(25:52):
which gives it much more intrinsic value. I think so. Of course, I'm a big archive nerd,
so I was, like, really hyped up on the fact it was going to be there forever. I don't know
that that necessarily registered with all the students. I have a feeling it might be one of
those things that students do it and then it may take a while to kind of percolate and figure out,
(26:16):
“Ph, it's still there. Oh, look at that.’ I certainly hope it's around… I believe it
should be there for a long time. And if they were to have their children thinking about college or
going to college, and this is something that they could show their families, “This is a photograph
I took of my dorm, of some friends of mine, of track practice,” it would be very cool.
(26:38):
It’s fun to think about for sure. So one of the things that it sounds like it was important to
this project is some of the aesthetic components, or the skill of taking photographs and things that
are maybe outside of the historical discipline that you're in and might take advantage of other
skill sets that folks have, but others might feel like they have a deficit in that space.
How did you negotiate that with students? I am lucky, either just by luck of the draw or
(27:04):
the way I conveyed it, they were not worried about that, which was great. They were not worried about
that. And maybe it kind of goes to the fact that they were really getting that intended
point that just ordinary photographs of ordinary life can tell us so much. Because I will say,
and I do write about this in the introduction to the exhibit, these are not highly artistic
(27:26):
or professionally crafted photos, even not especially revealing journalistic photographs.
They're really casual and ordinary, even to the point students usually refer to them as pictures.
They're pictures they took. They were taken almost all… there was one person who took some
photos with a camera, otherwise it was with their smartphones. None of them, except this semester,
(27:50):
was the semester of the total solar eclipse. So with the exception of the total solar eclipse,
none of the photos document any exceptionally rare or groundbreaking events. But when you look
at them as a whole, they really reveal day-to-day details about life for undergraduate students at
Plattsburgh in 2024 (28:09):
the way they socialized, the way they studied, the way they got food,
the way they did laundry. And for me, looking at them as a professor, as a parent myself,
they do reflect what I see as the hopes and the challenges, the bonds and the aims
(28:31):
and desires of our students to do well and succeed and make progress in their life.
Reminds me a lot of some storytelling projects that I've heard of, even with kids,
and things where you put cameras in the hands of kids to document their daily life to see
what it's like through their eyes, it has a feeling similar to that. And in that respect,
I can understand how the aesthetic piece, like drops back as not being important.
(28:53):
Yeah, they wrote descriptions of the photos, captions, and sort of summary
from the photographer's standpoint, of what's going on in the photograph, thinking about that
historical context piece again. It sounds like a wonderful project,
and for students who grew up using Instagram as their primary social media, it seems like a very
natural environment for them to be working in. Yeah, they did not worry about taking photographs
(29:18):
with their phone, that's for sure.This discussion reminds me a little bit
of a podcast we did with Martin Springborg and Cassandra Volpe Hori, who created a book
called What Teaching Looks Like. It was, and we can include a link to the podcast we did with
them as a link in our show notes. In their book, they captured pictures of day-to-day
teaching interactions at many different institutions for much the same reason:
(29:42):
to use imagery to represent the interactions that were occurring at that point in time in
those specific places. One othe rthing we should ask about is that, when we last talked to you on
the podcast, you were at SUNY Plattsburgh, now you're at Syracuse. Could you talk a
little bit about your new position there?Sure, and I'm so glad to have the opportunity
(30:04):
to talk about Picturing Plattsburgh one more time, because this was the last class I taught
at Plattsburgh after 19 years there, so it was a very bittersweet experience for me,
doing the project and working with the students there for the last time. I so, so enjoyed working
with SUNY Plattsburgh students, and like I say in the acknowledgement to my new book,
(30:27):
sorry for all the mistakes I made, and thank you for sharing your ideas with me, SUNY Plattsburgh
students. I started the new role here at Syracuse University in August of 2024. I am the Director of
their Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence. We’re a small but mighty center and doing a lot of
(30:49):
collaborations with a lot of new people. You've actually had two of my colleagues on the Tea
for Teaching podcast to talk about our Students Consulting on Teaching Program, which is one of
our signature programs here at the CTLE.So we always wrap up by asking,
what's next, Jessamyn?Well, I'm so glad you asked,
because I'm hoping to come back pretty soon when my new book comes out. It's called Snafu Edu:
(31:16):
Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. It's going to be
published in the University of Oklahoma press series, Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in
Higher Ed, and I hope it will be available for pre-order very soon, March/April 2025.
We're looking forward to that. We heard some of the earlier discussions about
(31:37):
that on other podcasts, and we're really glad to see it coming out. And I think
we can learn a lot from those experiences. Well, it's always a pleasure. Jessamyn, thanks for
joining us. Thank you so much for having me,…and we hope to be talking to you very soon
about Snafu Edu.I'll be there.
(32:00):
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Primary sources can often feel irrelevant and difficult to navigate for students.
In this episode, we look at how using photographs provides a personalized learning
experience and fosters a deeper connection to history and the university archives.
(00:22):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:53):
Our guest today is Jessamyn Neuhaus. Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and
Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Prior to this,
she served as Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and was also a
Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky
Pedagogy (01:12):
a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be
Effective Teachers and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty
and Increasing Student Learning. See is also the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of
Methods. Jessamyn also regularly serves as keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. Welcome back,
(01:32):
Jessamyn. It's great to see you again..Thank you. It's great to be here.
Today's teas are:... Jessamyn, are you drinking any tea?
I'm not drinking tea, but I am drinking some water out of my mug that, written on the side,
it tells me you're doing great, so I'm drinking positivity.
(01:54):
Love it. We could all use more positivity.
How about you, John?Based on your recommendation quite
a while ago, I am drinking Brodie’s Scottish afternoon tea today.
Oh, I'm so jealous. You know why I am jealous, John, because I have a cup of
it sitting on my desk because I accidentally grabbed my bottle of water instead. Oops.
(02:15):
Whoops.So what are you drinking, Rebecca?
I’m drinking this bottle of water that I brought because I forgot my tea on my desk.
We do have some teas here. So, I'll have to have some later. I have
failed as a host. I'm sorry.It's your turn.
So, we've invited you here to talk about the Picturing Plattsburgh project that you conducted
(02:36):
in your history course at SUNY Plattsburgh during the spring 2024 semester. We saw you had posted
about this on LinkedIn, I believe it was. Can you tell us a little bit about this project?
Sure, this was for the intro history class, the U.S. history survey at Plattsburgh. It's
1877 to the present, and for people who teach these history survey classes, there's a lot of
(03:03):
challenges in trying to cover a huge amount of just sort of content and material, helping to
try to make it relevant to students, and also just things like materials, like textbooks and
preconceptions that students bring in about what studying history means, most of them incorrect.
(03:25):
So those were all kinds of challenges that were in my mind. I also was fortunate that semester it was
going to be a small group, which was not usually the case for surveys. So I started thinking about
what could I do in the way of assessing student learning while also encouraging relevance and
(03:46):
meaning for the content? And I was interested, and very interested in the unessay projects and
helping students demonstrate their learning and skills in a variety of ways. So all those factors
led me to think about what kind of final project we could work on, what sort of research project.
(04:07):
I came up with the Picturing Plattsburgh first thinking about when I was writing the little
blurb for the catalog, thinking about how in any kind of textbook or any kind of lecture or any
kind of material where students are looking up information about the past, they always look at
(04:28):
the photographs first. Or really, everybody does that, not just students. People do that. They're
interesting. So they look at the photos first. And I had also started thinking about, what does it
mean to teach history in our current historical moment when accessing even facts about the past
(04:49):
can pose a real challenge, again, for students, but for everybody. And AI had just started to
really make its way into higher education discourse, and I was thinking about, well,
what about photographs that are generated by AI? How can I help students develop some of the skills
they're going to need out in the world to access reliable photographic evidence of events that have
(05:15):
happened. So that was all my sort of background thinking that led me to the project.
You started talking a little bit about why you chose photos as a focus. Can you talk
about how you use it as a primary source material in this class.
Sure, I really wanted to give these students the opportunity to do the thing really that
(05:36):
so many historians love, which is examine primary sources, look at the leftovers from the past and
try to make sense and meaning out of the past. Photographs are not necessarily simple primary
sources. There's a lot of complexity to them, but it's the kind of complexity that we in 2025 might
be more equipped to grapple with (06:01):
whe complexities of analyzing a snapshot moment in time visually
requires different critical thinking skills than combing through a 19th-century document.
And so I thought photographs would be a way to help students do this without overwhelming them
(06:22):
with the kind of abilities that you would have to bring to try to understand… they say the past
is a foreign country… like trying to navigate the foreign country of the past. I also thought there
could be a real opportunity here for students to look at photographs of where they were right
this minute, SUNY Plattsburgh. I had thought about ways to help students feel more connected
(06:48):
to the university, that they belong there, and that the resources in the library where
the Center for Teaching Excellence, where I was working, where it was situated, these resources,
they are there for the students. The students’ tuition helps pay for them. And I wanted them to
know and understand that the Special Collections in our Feinberg library are there for you to use.
(07:14):
The resources are there for you to mine. So I decided I wanted to have students first go to
the special collections. We would arrange ahead of time a visit to the special collections. The
Special Collections librarian, an archivist, would collect photographs from the many,
(07:35):
many collections of SUNY Plattsburgh life, things that had happened on campus, events,
student life, speakers, meetings, things that had happened there on the campus. Debra Kimok was the
librarian. She would prepare those ahead of time. I'd bring the students, and I gave them a sheet
with some questions, and then they got to choose and look through some of these photographs. There
(07:59):
were some of some early sporting events, really there were photographs covering the whole history
of SUNY Plattsburgh. We spent a few classes there, and then their assignment was to take
some photographs of SUNY Plattsburgh right now, their experience of SUNY Plattsburgh, trying to
help them see the continuity and the differences between their own day-to-day experiences and
(08:23):
what they had seen looking at photographs in the past. We decided together, as a class,
that everybody did three photos, and we decided as a class which ones to select for permanent digital
exhibit about their perspectives and experiences as students in 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh.
(08:47):
That sounds really fun, Jessamyn. It was very, very fun.
I did a project in our Special Collections using photographs too. And it was a really
great experience for students, because most of them had never been to Special Collections before.
I remember them getting excited about seeing like, “Oh, this is what snow looked like at this
time,” versus like the fact that we had, in that year, no snow, barely at all. It was really fun
(09:10):
to see them light up and understand the space that they were in a really different way.
That's absolutely right. I would say one of the things that it did really successfully
was de-mystify what special collections are, what their function is. We went a couple times,
and the first time we went, the students were pretty tentative. They came in slowly. They
(09:31):
were really hesitant, but the second visit, they walked right in, they started looking through the
photos. They asked the librarian for some more here and there. So it seemed to really empower
them to do something that we in a U.S. History class would be uniquely qualified to help them,
(09:52):
do not just U.S. history, but anybody interested in accessing these materials
and really help them feel like they belonged there in the space doing that kind of work.
One of the things you mentioned in the write up of this is just how memorable historic photos are.
I was thinking when I read that back to when I was studying history sometime in the last century
(10:14):
and remembering things like the newspaper that Truman held up saying Dewey wins or similar, types
of things. That lasts much longer than specific recollection of a lot of the content of the text
that we read at the time. What makes these photos so memorable to students or to any of us?
Well, I'm not an expert in the kind of visual knowledge and visual study of the past via
(10:43):
images. That's not necessarily my expertise and focus. I come at it from a little bit of
a different angle. My sense was less trying to understand why certain photos become so
etched in our memory. When I started, I thought that would be one of the things I was going to
be looking at and having students discuss. But it quickly became more obvious to me that I wanted
(11:06):
them to really explore the idea of the importance of documenting ordinary life, ordinary day-to-day
life, and the way that photographs provide insight into that, that many other sources cannot. So I
absolutely agree there's ways that photographs capture major events, historical turning points,
(11:32):
but they also, for those of us who really want to try to understand, what was it like to be alive
at a certain time, looking at photographs is one way that we can try to get our heads around
what was it like to walk down the street? What were people wearing? What was it like to walk
into a house? And for the students, I really wanted them to think about what was it like
(11:56):
to go to a basketball game at different points in time. What would have been like to live in
a dorm and to translate that then into what they were doing, what they were able to do,
because now everybody has a camera with them all the time, and I'm old enough to remember
that was not always the case, but now it is. So having them rethink some of the implications or
(12:23):
possibilities of their own day-to-day life and the way it could be recorded in a photograph.
And I mentioned that photo of Truman, but I was also thinking of photos from the Great Depression,
food lines, and people in poverty. It creates a much deeper sense of
connection than just reading about it, I think.I think historical empathy is definitely a skill
(12:48):
we would love for undergraduate students to be able to develop. And yes, definitely photos are
one way to do that. It also had a lot of power, I thought, because as we were doing this project,
we were also in the open source textbook that we were using, we also were focusing our discussions
(13:09):
around the photographs and students. I found when we went to Special Collections,
when we looked at the photos in the textbook, they were looking for photos that resonated for them
in some way with their own experiences, their own identities or backgrounds, experiences, families,
(13:29):
interests. So yes, historical empathy, anything to help them feel more connected to the material
we were looking at and using. Definitely sounds like a really
empowering project, both as kind of creators, investigators, etc.
Yeah, I think it was. I'll add that it was interesting in the Special Collections and
(13:56):
in what the students chose to take photographs of that the classroom did not appear very often,
and it was interesting how something that really has a disproportionate impact on what
students do and how they feel and if they're successful at the college and university,
that there are so few photographs taken of it, really at any point in time.
(14:21):
Maybe that's because they were so busy focusing on their educational activities in the classroom…
…maybe so……that they didn't want to distract themselves
with photographs. That would be nice to think.Yeah, well, there were issues. We had to be
cautious. We did not want any photograph of anyone who did not want their photograph to
appear in a possible online exhibit. So that was another reason. Students wouldn't just be
(14:45):
snapping photos of their work in their classes, but they did include some photographs of like
group projects outside of class, work they did outside of class, meeting up with people
in the computer lab, and stuff like that. So can you talk a little bit about what some
of the learning outcomes for the project were? You've hinted at some of them.
Yeah, sure. So the class had standard learning outcomes for our general education requirements,
(15:13):
and I connected work we were doing to those as well, but in addition, I had four learning
outcomes specific to that section and our work together: use photographs, so by the end of
our class, you will be able to use photographs as primary sources to increase your own understanding
(15:33):
of life and events in the United States from 1877 to today; identify what information you
need about a photograph and its historical context when you are using photos as primary sources;
explain how photographs as primary sources document diverse American Identities,
including how some groups experienced bias and discrimination, and work to create change from
(15:56):
1877 to today; and then finally, apply what you've learned about photographs
as primary sources to document life on campus at SUNY Plattsburgh, particularly the diverse
identities of our students, faculty, and staff.So, could you talk about some of the projects that
students did and how they realized those learning objectives?
Well, the reading and reflection they did on each section in the textbook,
(16:21):
they were choosing photographs from those sections and reflecting on them to make
progress and student learning outcomes, one, two, and three. So they had a reflection journal.
They talked and reflected on how the photographs documented diverse experiences, what they needed
to know about the source of a photograph… in this open access textbook, you could trace it back to
(16:46):
where did the editor access this photograph. How do we know that it is what it says it is? And also
looking at the way photographs from the American past document a wide range and diversity of
experiences and including people working to enact a social change. The final one was the one that
(17:08):
they took photographs, discussed why they would be a good addition to our online exhibit. So we had
a shared Google slides that everybody put at least three photographs that they had taken, and then we
talked about them as a class and chose which ones we wanted to include for the final exhibit.
So how did students respond to this project?So I did a poster on this project for the American
(17:35):
Historical Association annual meeting. And in addition to looking at their assignments,
I did a post-project survey, and they were aware I might use their answers in this poster. There
was some strong success. And then there was a couple things that it did not work as well
as I wanted it to work. So I'll start with that one. The way that the project didn't succeed as
(17:58):
much as I wanted it to was the historical aspect of it. I asked students if, after the project,
were they going to be more aware of how historians use photos to understand the past, and it was 10
students who completed the survey, and only three of them said it definitely would do that. However,
(18:19):
there were some things and what I think is worth thinking across disciplines, and the takeaways
for people in all kinds of classes doing all kinds of projects. The thing that they really responded
most positively to was it was their term. I didn't say it, it was their term that I saw repeatedly.
(18:41):
They called it the hands-on aspect of the project. And I think what they were getting at there was
that they felt like they were doing things even beyond just the fact we got out of the classroom
to watch a special collections, and even beyond the fact that they were taking photos themselves,
(19:01):
the overall project gave them a sense of doing something together and working towards this goal,
this shared goal, and they responded very, very, very positively to that. And really,
I think that's a strong takeaway thinking about our course design and how we assess student
learning and the ways a lot of us are really striving to help students build connections
(19:23):
with each other while helping them build these academic skills. And so that idea of an active
learning approach, a student-centered approach, they clearly responded to that. They also,
in the post-program survey and in other kinds of discussions I had with them, they felt very
(19:43):
positive or were interested in looking at photographs of their college campus from the
past. They found that interesting. They definitely understand what Special Collections is now. It's
not this weird term they've never heard of. And the other thing that it did really well was, I do
think almost just in the process of doing it, even if some of them couldn't quite articulate this,
(20:10):
but their work showed that they understood that thing that I was saying I was really hoping they
would get, which is that photographs of ordinary life are significant and important. And the other
thing that worked really well, we talked about why they could trust that the photographs that
(20:31):
were in the textbook were reliable, that they were what they said they were by tracing them back to
often Library of Congress. And every time they did that, I would remind them we can trust that this
photograph is what it says it is, because the actual real one that you hold in your hand that
(20:53):
was taken is at the Library of Congress, like our Special Collections and the people who work there,
it is their job to make sure it is what it says it is, and their job depends on it.
If they misrepresent it, if they try to falsify something, they'll get fired. And then we backed
(21:13):
it up by then going to Special Collections. So students did actually experience, which so few,
not just students, like so few people now, to have the experience of putting your hand on the thing
instead of seeing it on the screen. So all those things together, I feel confident that many of the
students left with a better understanding of what questions do we need to ask about a photograph to
(21:40):
verify that it is what it says it is.And this strikes me as being a type of
authentic learning experience which is not vulnerable to AI. And you mentioned
AI at the beginning as one of the factors in putting this together. Could you talk just a
little bit about that aspect of the project?Yeah, I think the concept that I was thinking
about, or I would say maybe the principle,the teaching practice, the principle that I was
(22:05):
operating from, is that I always want to convey to students that their ideas matter. It's my
strength as an instructor. Dynamic lecturing is not my strength. Being a super lovey dovey is not
my strength. But what I'm really, really good at doing and students get right away from me,
(22:25):
is that I'm very fascinated in their thinking, and I really value their ideas, and I want to
empower them to be able to share their ideas and explain their ideas and write about their ideas
in my class and beyond. So the starting point was that, to the student, your experience of
(22:48):
being a student at SUNY Plattsburgh is important. It's valuable. I value it. I want other people to
value it. We're going to put it in a archive. We're going to put it in a digital collection
that's going to be there and available for anyone who goes to the SUNY Plattsburgh library digital
collections forever. So all that is to say that it wasn't taking an approach of, well, I know that AI
(23:16):
is unlikely to generate a photograph of a student at the convenience store at SUNY Plattsburgh or a
student's my cat sitting in the dorm window, but more that students wouldn't need or want
to offload that work, because it matters to them. It was their experience. It was important to them.
(23:37):
I mean, it's not just students. Everybody looks for a shortcut. Our brains look for a shortcut,
especially when we think it's not worth our time. Nobody goes out of their way to spend more time
doing things they think are unimportant. Our brains are too smart for that. They say “No,
no, what's the least amount of work I can do to get this done?” So I think it makes total
(23:59):
sense to ask students to do work that could help them achieve the learning outcomes,
but gives them some choice and some way to make it meaningful for them. That was the other thing
they said in the survey. They clearly said that they appreciated having some choice, so they got
to choose what to take photos of, and then we worked together to choose the final ones.
(24:24):
That autonomy piece seems incredibly important, as does this idea of being a part of something
bigger, because we're working on like a collective collection and putting things
together so they were depending on one another to be successful as well.
Yeah, I know that, and some other things I did in class really emphasized that your colleagues
need you to attend and participate. And I did hear from several students who said something
(24:49):
along the lines of it had never occurred to me that my being in class would help another
student. I think a lot about academic agency and the idea that as a student,
I am an active participant in my education, my success is not dependent on other people,
(25:10):
like mainly the professor. I have agency and power to do well. It's hard to build those skills as a
student, especially a newer student. It was an interesting class. There was one senior, and then
there was a couple second-semester first-year students. And it was the kind of project where
(25:30):
I could see some difference, as in a couple years of working on building that academic agency.
And one nice aspect of it is in, I believe it was the words of David Wiley,
it's not one of those disposable assignments where students submit something and they never
see it again after the end of the semester. It has a life that lasts beyond that,
(25:52):
which gives it much more intrinsic value. I think so. Of course, I'm a big archive nerd,
so I was, like, really hyped up on the fact it was going to be there forever. I don't know
that that necessarily registered with all the students. I have a feeling it might be one of
those things that students do it and then it may take a while to kind of percolate and figure out,
(26:16):
“Ph, it's still there. Oh, look at that.’ I certainly hope it's around… I believe it
should be there for a long time. And if they were to have their children thinking about college or
going to college, and this is something that they could show their families, “This is a photograph
I took of my dorm, of some friends of mine, of track practice,” it would be very cool.
(26:38):
It’s fun to think about for sure. So one of the things that it sounds like it was important to
this project is some of the aesthetic components, or the skill of taking photographs and things that
are maybe outside of the historical discipline that you're in and might take advantage of other
skill sets that folks have, but others might feel like they have a deficit in that space.
How did you negotiate that with students? I am lucky, either just by luck of the draw or
(27:04):
the way I conveyed it, they were not worried about that, which was great. They were not worried about
that. And maybe it kind of goes to the fact that they were really getting that intended
point that just ordinary photographs of ordinary life can tell us so much. Because I will say,
and I do write about this in the introduction to the exhibit, these are not highly artistic
(27:26):
or professionally crafted photos, even not especially revealing journalistic photographs.
They're really casual and ordinary, even to the point students usually refer to them as pictures.
They're pictures they took. They were taken almost all… there was one person who took some
photos with a camera, otherwise it was with their smartphones. None of them, except this semester,
(27:50):
was the semester of the total solar eclipse. So with the exception of the total solar eclipse,
none of the photos document any exceptionally rare or groundbreaking events. But when you look
at them as a whole, they really reveal day-to-day details about life for undergraduate students at
Plattsburgh in 2024 (28:09):
the way they socialized, the way they studied, the way they got food,
the way they did laundry. And for me, looking at them as a professor, as a parent myself,
they do reflect what I see as the hopes and the challenges, the bonds and the aims
(28:31):
and desires of our students to do well and succeed and make progress in their life.
Reminds me a lot of some storytelling projects that I've heard of, even with kids,
and things where you put cameras in the hands of kids to document their daily life to see
what it's like through their eyes, it has a feeling similar to that. And in that respect,
I can understand how the aesthetic piece, like drops back as not being important.
(28:53):
Yeah, they wrote descriptions of the photos, captions, and sort of summary
from the photographer's standpoint, of what's going on in the photograph, thinking about that
historical context piece again. It sounds like a wonderful project,
and for students who grew up using Instagram as their primary social media, it seems like a very
natural environment for them to be working in. Yeah, they did not worry about taking photographs
(29:18):
with their phone, that's for sure.This discussion reminds me a little bit
of a podcast we did with Martin Springborg and Cassandra Volpe Hori, who created a book
called What Teaching Looks Like. It was, and we can include a link to the podcast we did with
them as a link in our show notes. In their book, they captured pictures of day-to-day
teaching interactions at many different institutions for much the same reason:
(29:42):
to use imagery to represent the interactions that were occurring at that point in time in
those specific places. One othe rthing we should ask about is that, when we last talked to you on
the podcast, you were at SUNY Plattsburgh, now you're at Syracuse. Could you talk a
little bit about your new position there?Sure, and I'm so glad to have the opportunity
(30:04):
to talk about Picturing Plattsburgh one more time, because this was the last class I taught
at Plattsburgh after 19 years there, so it was a very bittersweet experience for me,
doing the project and working with the students there for the last time. I so, so enjoyed working
with SUNY Plattsburgh students, and like I say in the acknowledgement to my new book,
(30:27):
sorry for all the mistakes I made, and thank you for sharing your ideas with me, SUNY Plattsburgh
students. I started the new role here at Syracuse University in August of 2024. I am the Director of
their Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence. We’re a small but mighty center and doing a lot of
(30:49):
collaborations with a lot of new people. You've actually had two of my colleagues on the Tea
for Teaching podcast to talk about our Students Consulting on Teaching Program, which is one of
our signature programs here at the CTLE.So we always wrap up by asking,
what's next, Jessamyn?Well, I'm so glad you asked,
because I'm hoping to come back pretty soon when my new book comes out. It's called Snafu Edu:
(31:16):
Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. It's going to be
published in the University of Oklahoma press series, Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in
Higher Ed, and I hope it will be available for pre-order very soon, March/April 2025.
We're looking forward to that. We heard some of the earlier discussions about
(31:37):
that on other podcasts, and we're really glad to see it coming out. And I think
we can learn a lot from those experiences. Well, it's always a pleasure. Jessamyn, thanks for
joining us. Thank you so much for having me,…and we hope to be talking to you very soon
about Snafu Edu.I'll be there.
(32:00):
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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