It was in seeing themselves that they could better see others - perhaps, and especially, others who weren’t exactly like them.
The Personal Archive Assignment is an adaptable, re-mixable assignment ready for you, your students, and your community members.
The Personal Archive Assignment (PAA) asks students to assemble a personal archive that documents and communicates their experience/s during 2020 and beyond: living through the COVID-19 pandemic, the most recent #BLM uprisings, the 2020 elections, and more.
Along with helping those completing the PAA record and critically engage with their lived reality, it also helps those completing it explore and understand:
The Archive
Symbolic Annihilation
Critical Analysis
Radical Empathy
Bring the PAA to your classroom or community space!
The Creators
Dr. Krista Grensavitch and Abigail Nye are long-standing collaborators at the intersection of archives, history, and women’s & gender studies
Krista & Abbi created the Personal Archive Assignment (PAA) within the framework of engaged pedagogy, in which the emphasis is on well-being, self-actualization, and empowerment of students. This framework is particularly important during an extended period in which students find themselves unmoored due to the pandemic and other traumatic events.
In creating and sharing the PAA, our goal is to attend to student well-being: utilizing the space of the classroom to help students learn to navigate, reflect upon, and mark the time spent living through a world characterized by upheaval.
Dr. Krista Grensavitch, PhD
National History Day
Abigail Nye, MLIS
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“Each person, including myself, has something important to contribute, even if textbooks won't necessarily reflect that. History is current, and it's not supposed to be precious, or elitist.”
Student, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee