Students in Queer Oral Histories created sophisticated materials that introduced their research projects to K-8 students in an effort to diversify the curriculum and to teach young students about LGBTQ history in Hampton Roads.
For the last two years students in Queer Studies have documented local LGBTQ history. After conducting archival research, students created walking tours of Norfolk. Each tour is different, and these are the only student-created queer walking tours in our region. Community members join us on our tours, and last fall we had an entire class from Virginia Wesleyan accompany us. It is an exemplary example of undergraduate research. Some of the tour stops can be found at https://sites.wp.odu.edu/queerwalkingtour/. In the fall of 2018, students also worked with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to document HerShee Bar, Virginia’s oldest lesbian bar, before its closure.
It is important that undergraduates be given opportunities to conduct and present research, so I have encouraged students to present at Old Dominion University’s Undergraduate Research Symposium for many years and the Works in Progress Conference at Virginia Wesleyan College. I mentor students through the process of research revision and preparation for a conference presentation or poster session.
I value experiential learning, and work to provide students with opportunities to engage with their local community. I mentored several students through the process of addressing Norfolk City Council when many of them opposed the city’s plans to demolish a historic LGBTQ establishment in the city. Last spring I trained students to conduct oral history interviews to preserve local queer history, and that work will become part of a larger archive of queer oral history work that I am leading in the region. One of my students won a grant to produce Our Own Podcast, a podcast that documents LGBTQ history in Hampton Roads. I mentored her through the process of creating the podcast and applying for the grant, and I prepared her for our appearance on Hearsay With Cathy Lewis. My work with students has received quite a bit of local and statewide news coverage in the last two years, and I prepare students for talking to the media about their work and local issues that are important to them.
In the Fall of 2017 I organized students from ENGL 110C, a food writing course I was teaching, to paint ODU’s Spirit Rock for Hunger Awareness Month. Students worked with The Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia to secure paint donations and spent several hours during the lunch period painting the rock to raise awareness of food insecurity in our region.
I have revamped all of my syllabi to make them more user friendly for students. I approach the syllabus not as a book to be read cover to cover but as a reference guide that is read once quickly and then referred to frequently for specific information. Thus, students need to be able to easily and quickly find information. This rhetorical awareness is important to me because it (1) shows respect for the reader’s needs and limited time and (2) makes students much more likely to use a document that is very important to their success. I have been fine tuning my approach over the years and regularly share techniques with colleagues at ODU and other institutions both formally and informally. I have included one syllabus below as a sample of this work.
syllabus-Queer-Studies-Fall-2019-2