Open Inclusive Pedagogy: Strategic Collaborations for Integrating Distinctive Collections into the Curriculum

This program describes preliminary outcomes of the USF Libraries’ Collections in the Curriculum Task Force, a cross-unit, cross-campus library committee charged with identifying “opportunities to discover, promote, and integrate their distinctive research collections into the teaching and research of the academic community.” While integrating primary resources into course curricula is not a new concept in librarianship, the task force’s internal audit of faculty-librarian collaborations, virtual classes, and digital objects created for course curricula uncovered the following—that instruction was unevenly distributed across disciplines and a strategic framework was needed to effectively collaborate between units and with campus and external partners, thus identifying new instruction opportunities related to strategically collected environmental and natural sciences collections of local, regional, and national recognition.

To accomplish the Task Force goals, the team began work to develop inclusive pedagogical methods and tools designed to integrate archival collections and related materials into course curricula. Panelists from multiple campus libraries and disparate library units will share preliminary outcomes of this initiative, including three case studies that used varied approaches to integrate distinctive humanities and scientific archives and digital objects into higher education curricula.

The moderator will introduce the panel and the efforts of the task force, as well as provide context for their work within a newly consolidated, multi-campus environment.
- Panelist 1 will address the perspective of an embedded liaison librarian, working in tandem with the Department of History to propose coursework that integrate library materials through high-impact practices. Specifically, their case study will reflect work on a Digital History course that was taught in the library to allow students to engage with the physical and digital objects in tandem.
- Panelist 2 will address the perspective of the Special Collections unit, which maintains high standards of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in virtual instruction sessions by ensuring that all scanned primary source material is screen readable. The planning of instruction sessions also considers how students with diverse learning styles can reengage with materials later through virtual additions to live classes and the inclusion of quality metadata.
- Panelist 3 will speak on their work in the creation of a multi-disciplinary Faculty Learning Community (FLC) funded by USF’s Center for Innovative Teaching & Learning. This FLC is focused on integrating Special Collections’ science-based archives into university classrooms, as well as K-16+ curricula. The collaborative focus on climate advocacy in the classroom offered new opportunities to expand its impact through an initiative to create open educational resources that that will be available through regional partners.

Attendees will take away practical approaches and best practices for establishing strategic, inclusive, sustainable collaborations among academic library units as well as with campus and external partners across academic communities.