Fifteen undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a new course next semester will have the Syracuse community as their classroom and the community members as their classmates.

The class, AAS 400/AAS 600: Black Syracuse: Organizing and Interpreting ‘Hidden’ Research Collections, will include archiving materials concerning blacks in the Syracuse area. Syracuse University students will also take oral histories of the community members.

An oral history is an interviewing technique that historians use to gather people’s first-hand accounts when there are no written records.

‘Oral histories show that people have a history, even if they don’t have records,’ said Joan Bryant, an associate professor of African American Studies.

Bryant will be teaching the course next semester. The class will meet Wednesdays from 3:45 to 6:45 p.m.

‘The students will get a greater appreciation for historical research and all facets of it,’ Bryant said of the purpose the class. ‘It also heightens a sense of awareness in the community.’

Bryant added that the class is about the link between the methods of organizing materials and how historians interpret them.

The first half of the course will take place in the classroom with the students gaining a basic knowledge of how to archive. Ken Lavender, an archivist and a professor at the School of Information Studies, will aid in instructing.

The second half of the class – starting most likely around March – will take place in the Syracuse community at various organizations, such as churches and grassroot associations.

Bryant has several organizations in the community lined up to work alongside the students. Two organizations that have expressed interest in the class are the Onondaga Historical Association and the Dunbar Association.

Gregg Tripoli, executive director of the OHA, said he became involved with the project because of his organization’s current involvement with the South Side Initiative program at SU.

Sharon Jack Williams, executive director for the Dunbar Association, a multi-service family center, attributes her association’s involvement to Bryant approaching her about the class. Williams said the association has a similar program that began in 2003, but is currently not operating due to lack of funding.

‘We have the start of a project that needs to be completed,’ Williams said. ‘It also gives students hands-on experience with conservation and preserving archival information. One hand washes the other.’

Bryant said she had the idea in mind to create the class two years ago when SU administrators interviewed her to become a professor. She said she’s drawn inspiration from both the Dunbar Association and a similar program called ‘Mapping the Stacks’ that her friend runs at the University of Chicago.

‘I had a sense that in African-American history, there’s a problem in finding materials because they’re not archived,’ she said. ‘Another part is to raise community awareness about African-American resources and to draw resources out.’

Bryant said she wants to make the resources available to students, researchers and the community.

She said that while she’s looking forward to the fieldwork portion of the class, she’s more excited to see what students learn from it and how it turns out because it’s an ‘experiment.’

‘I hope it heightens the idea that the community can be an intellectual resource,’ Bryant said. ‘This is not a project where anyone will help the people of Syracuse. Hopefully it will be a mutually intellectual exchange.’

Tripoli, the OHA’s director, expressed different expectations for the course.

‘We hope to have a more comprehensive idea of what the collection of African-American history at the OHA consists of and a quicker, easier method of accessing that information for our own staff and for all of the people who use our facility to do research.’

Bryant and others working on the project applied to Imagining America for the Enitiative Grant Program last spring and received the funding to cover the cost of transportation, recording equipment and other materials to make the class a reality.

Though the course is listed as a 400-level class, Bryant said they registered it that way so more students could enroll.

‘It’s a 400 level course, so it’s open to anyone who’s interested,’ Bryant said. ‘We won’t turn anyone away unless we’re over capacity, but it may not make sense for freshmen to take unless they have a strong background in historical studies.’

krkoerti@syr.edu

Published on November 19, 2008 at 12:00 pm