Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Original Version
2025
Department
University Library - Technical Services
Abstract
Considerations of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility can inform and enhance all aspects of archival work, even and especially our most challenging. When tasked with creating a new course for the University of Rhode Island’s General Education Program, I focused on how to engage students from various disciplinary backgrounds with archives on a deeper level. The result is Bias: Interrogating the Archive (LTI 350G), which debuted in fall 2021. While based on my ongoing work on bias and silences in the documentary record, the course highlights the wider real-world implications of bias. A successful example of incremental growth, LTI 350G is built upon the more modest educational opportunities I have created for students around the topic in the past.
While LTI 350G may be too niche to serve as a model for many other archival professionals, the format of the semester-length course provided a number of opportunities to integrate inclusion in a meaningful way. My hope is that this attention to accessibility and inclusion may inspire similar consideration in other areas of the archival endeavor. More practically, I offer the experiential learning activities designed for the course. All can be adapted for use in more typical class or group visits to archives. They are discussed at the end of the chapter with particular attention paid to the activity most directly concerned with teaching students to recognize bias in records.
Citation/Publisher Attribution
Morse, K. Walton. “Grand Challenge in the Archives: Exploring Bias through Experiential Learning.” In From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation edited by Kim Hoffman and Rachel Makarowski. 325-367. Chicago: ACRL, 2025.
Creative Commons License
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