On this page, we have assembled some pedagogical materials for undergraduate and graduate instructors, librarians, and archivists. Whether you are an educator who wants to teach with the Harriman Recollected project in your class, or an archival practitioner interested in applying aspects of this project to your own work, we hope there is something for you here.
Lesson plan: George Nelson and the History of the U.S. Residential School System
Designed for: Instructors of high school and undergraduate classes in the humanities and social sciences
Learning Objectives:
Students will apply close-reading techniques to an excerpt from Nelson’s diary describing a visit to a residential school in Alaska, then contextualize the excerpt through web-based research.
Students will be introduced to some of the key colonial assumptions that drove the residential school system and some of the most significant impacts of the residential schools on Indigenous youth and communities.
Students will engage in comparative thinking by drawing connections between a residential school described by Nelson and a residential school that operated closer to their home region.
Download the activity package for the activity on George Nelson and the history of U.S. residential schools.
Workshop: Reparative description
Designed for: Instructors of upper-year undergraduate or graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, especially library or museum studies; OR archive, library, or museum practitioners who might undertake the exercise in a workshop setting
Learning Objectives:
Participants will gain familiarity with recent scholarship by Indigenous archivists and scholars of archival studies that establish the principles of “reparative” or “anti-colonial” methodologies for working with artifacts, with an emphasis on description methods.
Participants will engage critically with an example of archival description taken from the archival description for PSU’s Harriman Collection Expedition.
For those completing part 2: Participants will experiment with editing the description of an artifact produced by an Indigenous maker and/or seized from an Indigenous territory that exists within the catalog of their own university or institution.
Download the activity package for the reparative description activity.
Teaching at Penn State?
Bring your class to see the collection!
On-site instruction opportunities are available for Penn State instructors who would like to bring their class to engage with the Harriman Alaska Expedition collection in person.
For those interested, please fill out the Special Collections Instruction Request Form in advance of your desired visit.
Do note the deadline that Special Collections sets each term for instruction requests.
Harriman Recollected project co-creator, Grace King, speaking to a first-year Art History class about the collection in winter 2024.