Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that restores a sense of their distinguished and unique contributions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, few people in the United States had access to significant school education or to the materials of instruction. By century’s end, education was a mass—though not universal—experience, and literacy textbooks were ubiquitous artifacts, used both in home and in school by a growing number of learners from diverse backgrounds. Many of the books have been forgotten, their contributions slighted or dismissed, or they are remembered through a haze of nostalgia as tokens of an idyllic form of schooling. Archives of Instruction suggests strategies for re-reading the texts and details the watersheds in the genre, providing a new perspective on the material conditions of schooling, book publication, and emerging practices of literacy instruction. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary works related to literacy instruction at all levels of education in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that restores a sense of their distinguished and unique contributions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, few people in the United States had access to significant school education or to the materials of instruction. By century’s end, education was a mass—though not universal—experience, and literacy textbooks were ubiquitous artifacts, used both in home and in school by a growing number of learners from diverse backgrounds. Many of the books have been forgotten, their contributions slighted or dismissed, or they are remembered through a haze of nostalgia as tokens of an idyllic form of schooling. Archives of Instruction suggests strategies for re-reading the texts and details the watersheds in the genre, providing a new perspective on the material conditions of schooling, book publication, and emerging practices of literacy instruction. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary works related to literacy instruction at all levels of education in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations. Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book’s three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.

Educational Programs: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections explores how archivists and special collections librarians in organizations of different sizes and types have approached the challenges in creating effective educational programs to prepare the next generation of researchers and advocates for archives. The case studies featured are: Tablet and Codex, Side by Side: Pairing Rare Books and E-Books in the Special Collections Classroom Fells, Fans and Fame: Acquiring a Collection of Personal Papers with the Goal of Engaging Primary School Children Student Curators in the Archives: Class-Curated Exhibits in Academic Special Collections A Win for All: Cultural Organizations Working With Colleges of Education The Archive as Theory and Reality: Engaging with Students in Cultural and Critical Studies Make Way for Learning: Using Literary Papers to Engage Elementary School Students Archivists Teaching Teachers: The Archives Education Institute and K-12 Outreach Animating Archives: Embedding Archival Materials (and Archivists) into Digital History Projects “A Certain Kind of Seduction”: Integrating Archival Research into a First-Year Writing Curriculum Not Just for Students: An Archives Workshop for Faculty Web Archiving as Gateway: Teaching K-12 Students about Archival Concepts Evocative Objects: Inspiring Art Students with Archives Documenting and Sharing Instruction Practices: The story of TeachArchives.org These case studies show a range of audiences and strategies, but all were selected because they demonstrate ideas that could be transferred into many other settings. They can serve as models, sources of inspiration, or starting points for new discussions. This volume will be useful to those working in archives and special collections as well as other cultural heritage organizations, and provides ideas ranging from those that require long-term planning and coordination to ones that could be more quickly implemented. The chapters also provide students and educators in archives, library, and public history graduate programs a resource for understanding the varieties of issues related to creating and implementing educational programs and how they can be addressed.

In the age of ubiquitous access to information, library special collections and archives have received renewed attention through digitization projects designed to share collections with the world at large. Yet these materials also offer opportunities for student learning through direct engagement with rare or unique items. While special collections and archives have largely been used by advanced researchers and scholars, an increasing number of undergraduate courses are taking advantage of these materials as guides in the instructional process.