Example Ongoing Research Archive

For WRD 110, 111, and 112 Classes. Currently for Spring 2019 WRD 112 Sections 13 and 15.

[uispeccoll]

#VoicesFromTheStacks

Special Collections is starting a new series that will be highlighting the voices of marginalized individuals and communities from our collections that often go unheard, underrepresented, and/or misunderstood. We have chosen to start this series during Black History Month as one way to observe the multitudinous contributions of African American people to Iowa and the United States. However, a single month is not enough, and we will be continuing this series throughout the year and into the future. We hope that by doing so, we can actively engage and learn more about these rich, complex histories in our stacks.

–Special Collections

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Valentine’s Day is near, and love is certainly in the air. Some of my favorite photographs exhibiting love are from the James B. Morris, Jr. photo album. Morris attended the University of Iowa from 1937 to 1941 and went on to practice law at the University. His parents were also active civil rights leaders and role models in the community. His mother, Georgine, founded the Iowa State Conference of the NAACP in 1939. James B. Morris Sr. served as a charter member and president of the organization, as well as the editor and publisher for the oldest black newspaper, The Bystander, from 1922 to 1972.

The album includes photographs largely documenting James B Morris, Jr.’s social activities and student life at The University of Iowa, as well as his WWII military service.  Morris Jr’s captions are also by far the most witty and creative I’ve seen. For example, one endearing caption of a woman in front of a car states, “Here’s lies my heart. The finest thing that you could ever want.” I’m not sure, however, if he’s talking about the woman or the car in this case. Either way, it’s clear that Morris enjoyed taking photographs of his life and capturing the people he loved and cared for most.

Morris Family Papers

RG02.0009.033 (University Archives)

Check out the digitized Morris Family collections from afar!

Morris Family NAACP photo album, 1981

James B. Morris Jr. photo album, 1937-1941

-Micaela

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Look at this archival research! I wonder if the Margaret King Library’s Special Collections can return similar finds.

[its-daniellebauer-blog]

Blog Post Five

(Picture: “LEXGIVE” sign reading: Change the way you give to help panhandlers. Includes website title: Lexgive.com)

This is an example of an organization that is encouraging people to “change the way they give”.

This popular Lexington sign is an artifact that spreads awareness and advertises their organization, “Lexgive”, which is dedicated to providing employment to homeless people and panhandlers. This artifact presents an argument that homelessness is an issue worth solving and the people inflicted by it are worth helping. Also, these signs are particularly effective because of the simplicity and location of the message. In the past couple of years, the amount of people standing on street corners asking cars driving by for money has increased significantly.

The message “change the way you give” is chiefly important because of its simplicity and straightforwardness. As the primary target audience of these signs are people in cars driving by that may be tempted to give cash to panhandlers, the phrase is short enough to read at a glance and the implication that dissuades drivers from giving money directly to the homeless is clear without having to directly state that as such. By placing the signs on these corners, their location discourages panhandlers from loitering there. These panhandlers can also be considered a secondary audience, as the sites of the signs are places frequently attended by people that are financially insecure to ask for money. It can be assumed that the intention of this is to discourage panhandlers from standing there because people that have read the sign would be more likely to visit the website given and donate rather than hand cash or change out of their vehicle’s window.

Link to a video: http://www.wave3.com/2018/10/09/homeless-residents-take-wave-news-inside-camp/

Another artifact that shows how homelessness is affecting communities and is worth helping is the video, “Homeless Residents take Wave 3 News Inside Camp”. Wave 3 News is a news station that is televised only in Kentucky (Louisville). This news clip shows the conditions that the vast majority of homeless people have to endure at some point. Inhabitants of this camp located under an overpass show the reporter their living conditions, with the reporter noting that “what little these people have, they are fighting to keep” (timestamp 0:52). The camp itself is built from a random collection of couches, other furniture, trash, clothing, and mattresses. One homeless man that was interviewed shares that after losing his job and his family, he found himself landed on the streets with nowhere else to go but the camp. The stakeholders in the video are the destitute occupants of the camp, as their livelihoods are put at stake through their poverty.

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Dogs of UK, found by searching “dog” and specifying item type “image” and collection “University of Kentucky general photographic prints” at Explore UK

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1. Amy May and dog (1916), 2. William D. Funkhouser (1945), 3. Cardome Academy in Georgetown (1946)

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Two young Native American boys holding chickens

Creator: Stewart, Cora Wilson, 1875-1958.

Cora Wilson Stewart Photographic Collection, | collection guide | more from this collection

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An unidentified student in her bedroom in the Dillard House with a dog and two cats. This photo is third on page 201 of the 1969 "Kentuckian"

Date: [1968]

University of Kentucky general photographic prints, , | collection guide | more from this collection

[ukfinearts]

Black and 25 in America by Jeremy Gillett

UK Alumni posted a great Q and A with actor, playwright, and UK alum, Jeremy Gillett whose one-man play, Black and 25 in America hits the stage this Friday and Saturday at 7:30 in the College of Fine Arts Guignol Theatre.

Keep reading

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Every Appalachian Love Week we invite folks to tell their #AppalachianLoveStory, and we ask you to be a part of ours. This story we are asking you to be a part of is about the kind of love that is necessary for us to STAY in Appalachia because it requires us to resist and unlearn everything that has been telling us that we do not “belong” here. It is the kind of love that makes room for young people to transform, to shed the behaviors, beliefs, and narratives that hold us back so that we can feel light enough to share the load of work left to do.

A relevant project for today from the Stay Project, an organization focused on a geographical place (Appalachia) and the individuals in that place whose stories are not often represented (think of Adichie’s “Danger of a Single Story”). If you have any stories that could help bring variety to our stories of Appalachia, feel free to submit them to the Stay Project!

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UK Libraries Exhibit Explores Kentucky’s Legislative, Judicial History of Racial Integration

UK Special Collections Research Center presents “From Separate to Unequal: School Integration in Lexington and Louisville,” a free public exhibit through March 22, in the Margaret I. King Library Building.

The University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) has opened “From Separate to Unequal: School Integration in Lexington and Louisville.” This free public exhibit will run until March 22, in the SCRC lobby, located in the Margaret I. King Library Building.

The new exhibit features photographs, pamphlets, video, speeches and news clippings that track the fight for racial equality in Lexington and Louisville, home to the two largest public school systems in the state of Kentucky.

This exhibit is the next to be showcased in the lobby of King Library, the same place that houses the Special Collections Library!

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Kentucky Geological Survey to Host Open House at Rock and Sample Facility

Academic, industry and government researchers are encouraged to learn more about KGS' core collection at an open house Friday, Feb. 15.

It never occurred to me that, of course, geologists would need libraries of rock cores and samples in order to do research that spans both time and place. Research on the effects of fracking, for instance, must rely heavily on the successful collection and storage of these samples, and yet the sheer size of a facility like this is astounding.

From the article:

KGS has scheduled an open house at the facility from 1-4 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15, to showcase changes to current and prospective users and solicit suggestions for future improvements. A new name for the facility will also be announced during the open house.

...

Please RSVP by Monday, Feb. 11. More information is available at https://www.uky.edu/KGS/news/core-library-openhouse-2019.php

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Let’s Not Get This Bread

I love eating food. A lot. Every chance I get. I grew up in a big city in California where the food scene was extremely diverse and the closest to authentic food can be in a different country than …

While I’m posting about food, I thought I’d reblog something from one of our fellow WRD 112 students about accessibility to safe food while managing food allergens and restrictions on college campuses.

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Cork Board Corner! (though some of these are more strictly “flyer pile” or “taped to wall” posters) This one is food and sustainability themed.

1. Farm-to-Fork: free food every Wednesday?! This takes place either before or after our class, depending on which section you’re in.

2. UK Greenthumb, what I assume is a sustainability club or organization on campus. Weekly meetings sound like anyone can drop in!

3. Food @ Lunch. A flyer for a past sequence of conferences. I like these flyers on old talks because they help me find scholars who are talking about a topic and what topics they’re talking about!

4. Danish Cuisine and the Digital study abroad option through the WRD department! A food-based study abroad adventure doesn’t sound half bad.

5. The Victory for Hemp flyers I passed around! I also included (6) a pin I was given by the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition (KSEC). So many organizations around campus, Lexington, and Kentucky!

[biodiverseed]

The demand for an ever-replenishing supply of cheap “fast fashion” has been a race to the bottom, in which factories outsource to the lowest bidders, resulting in human rights violations for the workers and unregulated pollution of the environment. In fact, fashion is the second-highest polluting industry behind oil.

“Who made your clothes? A ‘Slow Fashion’ revolution rises”

by Colleen Kane in Fortune

(via biodiverseed)

Tangentially related: I remember when Where am I Wearing? by Kelsey Timmerman was a popular choice for universities’ freshman-shared-text initiatives. After a quick Google, it looks like this was the book for the University of Kentucky’s 2013 Common Reading Experience. The author came to campus and did a talk that year!

[iseesigils]

Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners

When cities lack the paths pedestrians need, people vote with their feet

the logic of “desire paths” – described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways”. The New Yorker offers other names: “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)”. JM Barrie described them as “Paths that have Made Themselves”.

Reddit has desire path threads, tens of thousands of people strong, delighting in the more mysterious or illogical-seeming of them. They can form anywhere from apparently forgotten corners of cities to the grounds of national governments, as has happened around the National Congress of Brazil; some are so well established that they are visible on Google Maps.

[ongoingresearcharchive]

It’s great to have a term (or terms!) for this phenomena I see everywhere. I wonder how urban planners respond to pedestrian-made “desire paths” and how a place like the University of Kentucky do or don’t re-plan paved pathways in response to the will of the people.

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Human trafficking soars at Kentucky Derby; here's how to help victims

As the Run for the Roses gets closer, officials are issuing an important reminder: major sporting events like the Kentucky Derby become huge magnets for human trafficking.

I mentioned the increase in human trafficking in Lexington around Keeneland, so I thought I’d provide a few sources and a bit of context for those claims here.

Above is a link to an online news article from 2018 on the increase in human trafficking around the time of the Kentucky Derby, how to spot potential human trafficking victims, and what to do to help:

Anyone who notices a potential problem should first call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline at 1-888-373-7888."The center will stay on the phone with you to help you get local resources, such as law enforcement, to intervene," Neal explained.

I also found a much longer and more formal, but more informative, document: an annual report from 2017 on the Kentucky Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force: https://ag.ky.gov/publications/AG%20Publications/HT_2017-Annual-Report.pdf

These two artifacts are specific to Kentucky, but I also found an article that is generally about Human Trafficking Awareness Day (January 11) which mentions some Midwestern towns specifically, Louisville and Lexington included. Here is a brief excerpt:

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, note that human trafficking activity spike around events such as the Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500, and the twice-yearly Keeneland race schedules.

Finally, here is a heat map for human trafficking in the US. 

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Example Blog Post 2: Savini & “Learning Styles”

I wanted to provide another sample blog post for this week, and I thought I’d do so by talking about something that is causing me to rethink the way that I teach: the recent counter-evidence to teaching via “learning styles.”

As early as my training to work as a writing center tutor, and in fact as far back as my own days in high school, I have been taught that different learners have different “learning styles” and that teaching to these styles can help students access content. For example, say we have three students who are assigned a book to read. A visual learner might do fine reading this text online, an aural learner might do best listening to an audiobook recording, and a tactile learner might prefer a physical copy of the book to dogear and write in. This was also expanded to make general claims about students’ subject preferences. Tactile-kinesthetic learners, for instance, were arguably more inclined to hands-on classes like pottery, shop, or phys. ed.

However, recently some of my fellow instructors here at UK mentioned that this separation of individuals into different learning types isn’t really helpful. “Learning styles” were more myth than fact. I realized that, apart from some pedagogy materials I’d been given years ago, I had never done any research to verify these learning or teaching methods. Not only was I concerned that I may have done harm by misguiding students (I have, in the past, asked students to reflect on what learning styles work best for them), I was also faced with at least one (of a possible many) teaching methods that I had taken for granted—a scotosis in my own pedagogy.

In developing research questions to address this issue, I wondered what made “teaching styles” a bogus concept, how it had come to be popularized, if its teaching was actively harmful or simply mistaken, and if there were alternative ways to reflect on and understand the learning methods of students and self. I also wanted to know where my peers found out that “teaching styles” is bunk—a question easily asked and answered. 

Here is an article from the Guardian and another from the Atlantic on this issue.

Here is an excerpt from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching’s website on the question, “Why are [learning styles] so popular?”

First, people like to identify themselves and others by “type.” Such categories help order the social environment and offer quick ways of understanding each other.  Also, this approach appeals to the idea that learners should be recognized as “unique individuals”—or, more precisely, that differences among students should be acknowledged—rather than treated as a number in a crowd or a faceless class of students (p. 107). Carried further, teaching to different learning styles suggests that “all people have the potential to learn effectively and easily if only instruction is tailored to their individual learning styles” (p. 107).

It’s clear to see here why I, too, considered learning styles valuable: I support a flexible classroom that is attentive to students’ needs and responds to them in order to help facilitate effective communication and comprehension of lessons. My ability to achieve this flexible classroom is part of what is at stake in this conversation on learning styles, but I feel that knowing better how these styles are meant to work versus how they fail to work (or at least are failed to be proven) is a more responsible way to practice pedagogy than using these styles uncritically.

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Cork Board Corner! I see events and resources around campus and Lexington frequently which I think may be of interest to my students. I thought I’d go ahead and make some posts here as a way to share these finds. Those of you who are interested in creative writing, the latter two posters should be helpful!