Libraries and Learning
Thursday in the Park With Students
October 6, 2015
It’s always inspiring to learn about new research from scholars who share their discoveries with excitement and passion at the best conferences. I had this experience last week. What was unusual was that the researchers were students just a few weeks into their first college semester. And the venue was a great urban park.
As part of a visit to the University of San Francisco, I joined a class being taught by David Silver, who I’ve known for years but had never actually met. He’s teaching a first year seminar about the Golden Gate Park, which is conveniently close to the campus, a great field site and living textbook.
On the day I joined the class we met at the site of the 1894 Midwinter Fair. This was a Californian version of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (though, so far as I know, without any serial killers – though there was a man-eating lion that actually killed a man during the event). There are traces of this event in the landscape of the park. Students had picked something at the fair that aligned with their interests and came to class that day ready with a three-minute presentation on what they’d found out about their chosen subject: the hospital for people injured at the fair that also showed off new surgical techniques, disputes with the local Japanese-American community about how Japan was depicted in an exhibit, the entrepreneur who gathered up people from West African countries to populate an imitation “African village,” the way the press covered the man-eating lion (in a word, luridly), and so forth. It was a great variety of topics, illustrated with photographs and accounts from the time found in digital collections online and in books from the library.
Giving the first public speech of your college career can be nerve-wracking, particularly when it’s in a public place where wandering tourists stop by to listen in, but these students quickly relaxed into a collaborative pooling of what they’d uncovered and the questions that emerged. Students began to ask if they could go next, because their research fit so well with what the last presenter had uncovered. Questions were kicked around, connections were made, and an impromptu plan to spend a Saturday at a nearby archives that held historical documents about the fair was quickly negotiated and unanimously approved. It was utterly fascinating and super-impressive, and left me thinking about what makes research so much fun for students just getting started – or (as is unfortunately much more common) so very onerous.
Why was this experience so great? Were they just unusually brilliant students? They clearly were pretty special – but I think there are some valuable lessons to take away from this class for students of all abilities.
- They were clear about what research is for. David Silver made developing curiosity the focus of their first class meetings. Students had practiced it. They knew how to wonder