High School Lesson Plan

Overview: Scrapbooks provide insight into a specific person's record of memory and experience. Viewing scrapbooks can allow researchers (and students) access to another's perspective. Though similar to a reading experience with a fiction or creative fiction piece, the reading experience of a scrapbook can be even more intimate.

Learning Objectives:

1. Students will be able to discuss a first-person perspective and how this perspective relates to its historical moment
2. Students will demonstrate the ability to incorporate historical materials into a project.
3. Students will be able to demonstrate creative writing skills.
4. Students will be able to use Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook to demonstrate their understanding of first-person, nonfiction narratives.

Requires:

• Access to Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook, through the exhibit "Preserving the Play Hosue: the Scrapbook of Dorothy Paxton"
• Other resources the instructor finds appropriate

Time Required: One class period, plus any at-home research and work

1. Show students Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook, as well as any relevant pages on the exhibit.
2. Have students investigate in particular how these items came together out of Paxton's experience. 
3. Discuss how each item records moments and events in her lifer, and that these were particular items that she chose to preserve. Make sure students notice that though Paxton is mentioned in various places, the scrapbook does not center completely on her. Furthermore, there are no written comments or additions to the materials preserved in the scrapbook.
4. Assign students to write five pages comprising at least three separate journal entries from Dorothy Paxton's perspective. Have students narrate through her eyes three journal entries based on the materials int he scrapbook. Students should use the scrapbook as a primary resource, as well as any exhibit pages as secondary resources. Entries should focus on what the student (pretending to be Paxton) must do, is currently thinking about, and how they are engaging with contemporary issues as they are represented by the scrapbook.

Undergraduate Lesson Plan

Overview: Archival materials provide primary source documentation for researchers in History as well as other Humanities disciplines such as English Literature, Art History, and Theatre History. Some archival materials, such as scrapbooks, contain primarily visual resources.

It is important to know how to interpret visual resources; it can be a very different process than interpreting textual resources. Through visual resource research, students can engage with non-textual primary sources. This provides important opportuntities for learning how to form and support conclusions with only non-textual materials as well as with combinations of both non-textual and textual materials.

Learning Objectives:

1. Students will be able to state how scholars in various disciplines use visual resources.
2. Students will demonstrate the ability to "read" visual resources for historical information.
3. Students will be able to use historic visual resources to support an historical interpretation.
4. Students will be able to use Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook to demonstrate their understanding of visual resources research.

Activity One: Exploring visual resources 

Requires:

• Ellen Gruber Garvey's book chapter "Reuse, Recycle, Recirculate: Scrapbooks Remake Value," from Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, 
• Access to Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook, through the exhibit "Preserving the Play Hosue: the Scrapbook of Dorothy Paxton"
• Other readings on primary visual resources the instructor finds appropriate

1. Assign students to read appropriate materials beforehand and be prepared to discuss them in class.
2. Discuss readings in class, guiding the students to consider Garvey’s conclusions and what supports them. Ask them to consider how Garvey uses the visual resources to inform her conclusion regarding value-making through scrapbooking.

Activity Two: Reading visual resources 

Requires: 

• Access to Dorothy Paxton's scrapbook, through the exhibit "Preserving the Play Hosue: the Scrapbook of Dorothy Paxton"

Time required: 25-35 minutes.

1. Divide class into small groups of 3-5 students.
2. Instruct the class to spend 15-20 minutes exploring the digital scrapbook and exhibit. Ask them to consider what they think Paxton considered important. What did she include in the scrapbook? What might not have been included? Why? What was her relationship to the Play House? To the Gilpin Players?
3. Have the entire class discuss their findings. The students should be able to support their ideas with resources contained in the scrapbook.
4. Relate the discussion back to Gruber Garvey's conclusions regarding the construction of value through scrapbooking.

Activity Three: Building a case with visual resources. 

Requires: 

• Access to the Play House scrapbook collection at Kelvin Smith Library's Special Collections 

Time required: 1 week or more

1. Either assign individual students or small groups one scrapbook each from Special Collections.
2. Individual students should be able to prepare a 4-6 page paper arguing a thesis supported by materials in their scrapbook.
3. Small groups should be able to create a 4-6 page paper, and a 15 minute presentation detailing their findings to the class.