Teaching With Rhet/Comp Archives

Though I'm at least a week behind, I've actually been thinking a lot about ways to teach with archives. Let me first confess that my area is rhetoric and composition, with special emphasis in professional writing, developmental writing, writing centers, and--believe it or not--computers and writing. The archives that most interest me are not literature archives, but archives in my professional field(s). I have the following suggestiosn for graduate and advanced undergraduate classes in this area who are using archives. Add to An Archive: A cool lesson for undergraduate/graduate students interested in rhetoric and composition would be to skim such professional archives as International Association of Writing Centers, Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Centers Research Project, Writing Program Administrators, and others looking for important information. Then students could think of questions the information generates and could email the originator of the materials for answers to the questions. Finally, the interviews could be collected in a new archive or added to the ones that exist. Class Interview: Keeping with the idea of using archives to locate and interview professionals in the field, another assignment could allow students in an introductory writing center theory class, professional writing class, computers and writing class, teaching composition class, teaching developmental class, teaching English as a Second Language, etc. to do the following: (a) search the archives, identify interesting scholars or scholars associated with "big ideas" (b) collaborate on a set of questions they would like the scholars to answer about the field (scholarship, breaking into the profession, the future of the profession, smart moves to make, dumb moves to avoid, etc.) (c) email a scholar (and have a backup or two) and conduct the interview online (each student would do this individually) (d) share the interview transcripts as a contribution to an archive or do something else, such as write a paper, collaborate on conference presentations, etc. The ideas above vary; both, however, give students a cool introduction to the field, an opportunity to connect with a professional, an opportunity to collaborate/share with others, an opportunity to contribute to the profession, and an opportunity to write something that will be read by multiple audiences.