Abstract
Introduction
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution maintains web-searchable transcripts of oral history interviews with prominent American artists. However, they possess a backlog of transcripts awaiting editing. In a 3-year-long service-learning project, art history students at an open-admissions state university processed these oral histories into web-publishable copy. This project reframes conceptions of what qualifies as service-learning in a digital era.
In a discussion about digital age community engagement, Butin (2014) defines experiential learning as “the type that happens outside of textbook covers and beyond the four walls of the classroom” (p. 7). Might students nonetheless connect meaningfully through service-learning all while remaining physically within the confines of the four-walled classroom? This article examines an archives-based, oral history, e-service-learning project that took place entirely within a “lecture” (not online or hybrid) course.
The normative framework for service-learning would position the project discussed in this article as a derivative deviation from standard practice (Butin, 2010). Students did not volunteer with purportedly needy or underserved populations, they did not perform tasks explicitly oriented toward social justice (Butin, 2006), and they never physically left their community boundaries. The project did not involve “individual students with high cultural capital” (Butin, 2010, p. 6), as most participants occupied at least one of the categories of non-traditional age, low income, learning or cognitively disabled, and/or parent of children. Almost all the students in the evening course worked at least one off-campus job, many full-time. Very few students in these courses were “full-time [student], single, non-indebted, and childless,” the population upon which service-learning is traditionally premised (Butin, 2006, p. 482).
Moreover, volunteer activities were not “for the sake of individuals with low cultural capital” (Butin, 2010, p. 6). The project partnered with an organization that maintains Internet accessibility to historical documents. This project nonetheless fostered “‘border-crossing’ across boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, (im)migrant status, language, and (dis)ability” (Butin, 2006, p. 482). Holocaust-refugee Jewish immigrants, the American South, and even New York City with its concentration of artists and their (anti-)social practices were all unfamiliar cultures represented in the interviews.
This university’s Art History and Studio Art majors are advised to fulfill the university’s Experiential Learning graduation requirement with travel study. However, financial, family, legal, health, and social obligations make travel more difficult for many students at this regional campus. This project therefore made experiential learning more accessible to these populations.
The assumption that service-learning needs face-to-face interaction limits opportunities in a digital age (Hinck, 2014). Governmental agencies and their online presences represent ideal partners for digital-age, service-learning projects (Hinck, 2014). Increasingly, common crowdsourcing projects for digitizing cultural heritage data provide prime opportunities for remote service (Ridge, 2014). Opening the geographic boundaries of service-learning is particularly important within the field of art history because of persistent questions about what falls within or outside the canon. Over the short history of this academic discipline, most canonical works of art and artists’ archives have concentrated in a few major urban centers. While art history pedagogy continues to debate the appropriate balance between local art resources and internationally renowned art (Chandra et al., 2016), the concept of an evolving canon continues to define our discipline. Opportunities to connect geographically remote students with archival materials directly pertaining to the canon, however the instructors and students might define it, expand dramatically with digitally enabled archival materials.
Review of Literature
This remote service-learning project falls under the rubric of e-service-learning (Waldner, McGorry, & Widener, 2012). In an online context, service-learning students may learn new ways of participating in civic discourse, practice digital skills, and increase agility within online communities (Hinck, 2014). E-service-learning can provide freedom from geographical limitations, particularly for institutions with few local community partners or without public transportation to service sites; the ability to expand programs to community partners worldwide; and time flexibility to fit students’ extramural responsibilities (Jacoby & Howard, 2014). Waldner (2015) suggests that e-service-learning might be even more effective for skill development than traditional service-learning.
“Extreme” e-service-learning, wherein both service and class take place online, produces statistically similar learning outcomes to face-to-face service-learning (McGorry, 2012). Nonetheless, entirely online experiences can include a lack of in-person interaction and reflection, both with community partners and with peers and faculty. Most models for e-service-learning are hybrid in form, which may mitigate such limitations (Jacoby & Howard, 2014).
Online service-learning in a face-to-face classroom can include in-person partnerships with a finished online outcome (Mosley, 2015; Pearce, 2009; Vetter, 2014). Diversely located students can facilitate site-specific data collection and analysis online (Pearce, 2009). Service learners can collaborate remotely with government agencies to produce web content and analyze municipal projects (Poindexter, Arnold, & Osterhout, 2008).
The service-learning project discussed in this study connected three distinct elements that appear separately in service-learning research: (a) previously recorded and transcribed oral histories for publication through (b) an institutional archive, edited through (c) library assisted research. First, a frequent example of using service-learning to engage history students is the collection of oral histories from local communities (McLellan, 1998; Nystrom, 2002). Oral history service-learning can help students understand the malleability of history (Belanger, 2012). Students report greater content understanding in service-learning projects that produce official transcriptions of audio content (Eastmond & Legler, 2010).
Second, service-learning has contributed new archival materials (Ching, 2018), completed digital archival projects (Long, 2011), and conducted research in archives for public presentation (Erekson, 2011; Vetter, 2014). Museums, which can provide a wealth of experiential education opportunities (Dorfsman & Horenczyk, 2018), also perform archival functions and can constitute meaningful community partners for art history courses (Cempellin, 2012; Shifrin, 2011). Studies in archival service-learning emphasize increased motivation for quality work due to the final product’s public accessibility. Producing “real world” technical documents for community partners leads to greater student engagement and sense of purpose, eliciting deeper learning (Soria & Weiner, 2013). Last, librarians can play a key role in connecting service-learning students to relevant resources and in helping them evaluate resources’ usefulness (Kott, 2016; Nutefall, 2009).
Method
Participants
Thirty-eight undergraduate students enrolled in an upper division contemporary art history course at an Ohio state-funded regional campus participated in this project over three spring semesters. The first semester, with 12 students, ran as a pilot. During the second and third semesters, Kent State University’s Institutional Review Board approved research on the project. Students chose either to sign a participation consent form or to opt out. Approximately 70% of participating students (n = 26, 16 females and 10 males) took the course to fulfill a major requirement.
Program Description
Students used digitized archival materials to edit oral history transcripts for web publication. Staff from the Archives of American Art conducted the interviews with prominent artists between 1965 and 1993, shortly after which professional services transcribed the audio using typewriters. The instructor processed the scanned transcripts’ PDFs through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Students made corrections while comparing the digitized text with the audio. In several cases, students found that significant portions of the audio did not appear in the transcripts.
The project occupied approximately 24% of total course contact hours, between Weeks 7 and 10 of a 15-week semester. The project included an initial video consultation with staff at the Archives, whom students could also email. Out of class work allowed students to bring problems that they encountered into class time. In class, groups working together on a single transcript collaborated to maintain consistency across the entire document. For example, when artist Kenneth Noland took frequent, long pauses in his speech, they resolved how, or if, to indicate such pauses in the text. Students brought in particularly troublesome audio excerpts, to which we collectively listened on the classroom speaker system. Much class time involved applying the Archives’ style guide to specific problems in the transcripts. Closing each class session, we collectively reflected on the day’s outcomes and planned next steps.
Student comments in the first semester’s pilot phase resulted in significant changes to the project. Students resisted a requirement to document their experiences throughout the project via Twitter, and subsequent semesters removed this form of reflection. Students asked for more exposure to the oral history format prior to the project; during the first 7 weeks of the course in subsequent semesters, participants reported on already published oral histories directly related to course content. This familiarized the format and usefulness of these documents before the service-learning project began. In one instance, a student became so frustrated with Robert Rauschenberg’s transcript currently online that she requested permission to edit it. It was not part of our original slate of transcripts to edit, but the archivist agreed to provide the extra materials.
During the second and third semesters of the program, a research-based reflection project complemented the service. Research can serve as an effective mode of reflection on service-learning (Barry, 2016), and students acquired deeper content-area knowledge and made connections with other parts of the course through these projects. Students picked one particularly interesting point made in their interview and connected it to other course elements and scholarly secondary sources. They created a web of connections between these elements through written commentary and, if they chose, visual graphics. Barry (2016) has suggested that a reflection question such as “How did our readings or discussions in class relate to your experience?” helps emphasize students’ critical thinking. This reflection project facilitated important conversations about the differences between primary and secondary sources, why oral history interviews operated as the former, and what distinguished scholarly from non-scholarly secondary sources. In particular, the use of scholarly secondary sources in service-learning reflection opens up opportunities for deeper critical thinking (Barry, 2016); the oral histories gave students a wealth of connections to make with art historical scholarship, rewarding their curiosity with evidence-based arguments.
Research also took place during the transcript-editing stage of the project. Content-area knowledge (or its acquisition through research) was necessary for the correct editing of transcripts’ proper nouns. The artists in these interviews frequently name drop, mention geographical places, or speak about books or works of art. Students compiled a list of all proper nouns and verified their spelling. For some students, this added a learning objective of understanding and applying the definition of a proper noun. For students already possessed of a high level of content knowledge, this task required basic memory recall, but for students with more limited backgrounds, the task required significantly higher levels of processing through research. In reflection on this part of the project, we considered the importance of spelling in an age of “CTRL+F.” Although the proper names’ identification was one of the more tedious aspects of the project, students consistently indicated that they appreciated why this was one of their responsibilities in serving future users of the transcripts.
Data Collection
At the conclusion of the project, the instructor conducted focus group interviews to analyze students’ perceptions of the project’s learning outcomes. The author conducted four focus groups with between two and 10 students each; three groups mixed genders and one consisted of women only. The author employed a guided interview framework, using the same open-ended, pre-determined, structured questions for each group. These led to unstructured follow-up questions within the flow of conversation. The facilitator monitored participation and invited less talkative members to contribute to the conversation if they wished (Olson & Brinkmann, 2011).
Focus groups can create less hierarchical spaces for data collection wherein power shifts from the interviewer toward the participants. This can elicit more complex and meaningful information about the topic discussed (Davis, 2016; Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2013). Focus groups also can synergize a preexisting group’s collective memories, thereby making previously invisible dynamics more visible (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2013). Within a service-learning context, Eyler and Giles (2002) find that using interviews, as compared with self-reported surveys or essays, produced more meaningful assessment of students’ understanding of complex ideas and critical thinking.
Data Analysis
Focus group audio recordings were transcribed and analyzed for emergent themes using an iterative approach (Tracy, 2013). Primary coding identified emergent themes using a grounded theoretical methodology (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Findings from this analysis and its subsequent reassessment were presented to peer faculty within allied art disciplines for feedback. After these steps, the themes were then considered within the context of existing scholarship on service-learning outcomes to generate secondary coding informed by a theoretical understanding of the field (Tracy, 2013).
Results
Four major themes emerged in the coding process: disciplinary understanding, transferrable skill development, critical decision making, and emotional knowledge. Each of these is discussed, with examples, in the context of existing literature on learning outcomes from service-learning.
Disciplinary Understanding
Students report and demonstrate deeper understanding and better application of course material from classes with integrated service-learning components (Eyler & Giles, 1999). Similar outcomes appeared in students’ responses studied here. Reports of greater understanding pertained to increased knowledge about art world contexts as well as artists’ working methods and life experiences, with several students emphasizing their increased understanding particularly of material that would not typically appear in (text)books.
Students also reported specific instances of gaining greater understanding of specific disciplinary concepts. For example, one student commented on her revelation about what constitutes an artistic style. She realized that, with a term like “expressionist,” she had to discern “whether it was a description or an actual movement” to determine proper capitalization. She intuitively discovered the importance of the distinction between this term’s two allied meanings, a threshold concept that perennially troubles students in this course. Another student related, I’ve learned . . . what an artist thinks of . . . their work is not nearly as important as what the people who are viewing the art think of it. They can more or less have the power to group you, box you into a group [that] you may not necessarily think you belong in.
With this insight, the student revealed a deep understanding of the function of (art) history as a discipline and its tenuous connection to any particular historical actor’s intentions or beliefs.
Transferrable Skill Development
Student comments that related to transferrable skills settled into three subthemes: listening, research, and editing. These three categories directly related to the primary tasks of the service-learning project: listening to the audio in comparison with the transcript, investigating troublesome portions of the transcript and words specific to the context, and correcting the transcript in conformance with guidelines set by the institutional partner. This corresponds to similar project-specific results of transferrable skill development within the existing literature (e.g., Stolley, Collins, Clark, Hotaling, & Takacs, 2017); in other words, students develop the skills they practice in their service.
Listening
Students frequently commented on their development of listening skills, including an ability to focus more intensely. When this topic came up in the focus groups, it consistently generated a synergy of responses from many participants who audibly and visually demonstrated their concurrence with its importance for their learning. Several students commented on developing greater capacities for patience working with slow-speaking subjects, some of whom were quite elderly at the time of their interviews.
Research
Students commented on a wide array of skills gained in art historical research. Many of the comments pertained to issues around sources. One noted, “It’s definitely the most intimate I’ve been with a primary document. . . . I feel [the project] created more of a framework for my understanding of how research in art history might function.” Another commented, I would feel more inclined to want to go look at the primary source than just reading a secondary source, knowing that these sort of things [i.e. details] can get left out and also just the wealth of information that can also be mixed in there that you might not have otherwise.
Students also commented on how the Archives’ oral histories would be useful as sources for future research, understanding the differences between primary and secondary sources, and how they had a better sense of how to navigate a library to find sources.
Students frequently indicated through verbal and nonverbal means such as tone and rapidity of speaking how much they enjoyed, at times begrudgingly, researching minute details using contextual clues within the interviews. For example, one of the students recalled of Rothenberg’s interview: At one point she mentioned going to a university, but she just said the first name of it. . . . So I had to look it up . . . And it was kind of hard because there were multiple ones. . . . Because it was based off of where she first moved to . . . So I am like, “It has to be somewhere in the same state. OK is it close?” I am looking at maps, names. . . [laughing]
Her partner on the transcript followed up, also laughing, “She spent like 20 minutes on this map!” Each of these transcripts had similarly intriguing research problems associated with it; for example, one student spent significant time researching the proper spelling of terms associated with kosher butchery, a topic which critic Harold Rosenberg discussed in his oral history. Similarly to what Eyler and Giles (1999) demonstrate, these students’ service-learning generated curiosity about authentic questions that engaged them in deeper learning.
Editing
Participants frequently mentioned how they found themselves debating finer points of grammar. The Archives’ style guide required students to review grammar fundamentals that may have previously been fuzzy. One student commented on how they “really had to study . . . the style guide to really figure out how to properly place things in the transcripts.” Another remarked on having debated, “Do I put a semicolon, do I put a comma, or do I put a period?” One pondered, “Where is the best place to end that sentence, so that it’s not just a continuous run on?”
At the Archives’ request, most students used Microsoft Word, which was freely available to students through their enrollment at the university, to complete the project. Several comments related to learning new tools in this software. They were particularly impressed with the utility of the “track changes” and “combine” functions as well as the find-and-replace tool. One commented on the value of the project, “You hardly ever go in and edit someone else’s stuff.” They believed that using these tools for editing others’ work were valuable skills to have acquired.
Critical Decision Making
Students experienced firsthand the complex choices that archivists must make in processing oral histories, and they reported increased ability in critical thinking skills because of having to make such decisions. This evidence concurs with findings by Eyler and Giles (1999) about the connections between service-learning and complex problem solving. For example, students had to define what constituted a verbal tick for the speakers in their interview, deciding if it was reasonable for them to leave out words that the speaker actually said. In one case, a student commented, “A lot of times, our interviewer would just be like, ‘Uh-huh,’ ‘Mm-hm, ‘Yeah,’ ‘Ok,’ and, to me, that’s not really worth putting in there. Because it doesn’t add anything to the text, it doesn’t add any information.” From their position, the constant affirmative interruptions that the interviewer would make into the speech of the interviewee were not historically significant.
In contrast, another student commented on the essential nature of nonverbal interruptions that his partner had initially left out of the transcript: She had stopped the tape at one point and said, “Look, I have got to go figure out what is going on,” because the phone was ringing, there was a lawn mower going off in the background, and she was just apologizing for it. So, you know, adding that added to the interview. It added to the character of it. It showed what was going on outside that was affecting the interview.
In a separate focus group, his partner related his own perspective on the same issue: [My partner] was wondering if whether or not a telephone ringing was worth keeping in . . . She said, “I got to take this. It might be my daughter.” So, it was her birthday, so it did mean something. . . . Altering stuff that wasn’t in the transcript but was in the tape—That didn’t really change the content of it but . . . kind of served the dialogue.
The comparison of these two perspectives demonstrates the critical thinking that this group applied to their transcription choices.
Students recognized that through the act of transcription, the oral history “loses a little bit of . . . the actual . . . richness of an interaction,” and they debated how best to preserve that interaction “for the sake of historical record.” They realized that in the process of creating these transcription documents, they were creating new versions of history: “We have already affected this transcript because it is our opinion as to what should be on the transcript. . . . So we are technically changing a history.”
Emotional Knowledge
Understanding of self
Service-learning can lead to greater understanding of self, particularly within a broader social context, as well as greater self-efficacy (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Yorio & Ye, 2012). The majority of students in these classes identified as studio artists, and the project provided them with practical models for how artists talk about themselves and their own work. One student noted that the project gave “an idea of how artists think and their opinions which are very interesting, because we are all very opinionated as artists.” About listening to Rothenberg speak about her own work, another commented, Being an artist myself, it helped me think about different ways of approaching work and also working in series, because she talked about the series that she would work on. . . . I think seeing that side of an artist, where they struggle too with people and also within their career, finding that path, was pretty interesting.
One student remarked that “going through [the project] made me feel like I was more capable” and “makes me feel more comfortable about participating in the professional realm,” with greater feelings of competency in new areas. Yet another student noted, “With being an art student myself . . . a lot of times you will go to a gallery talk and be like, ‘Oh, I can’t relate to this,’ but there is something you can relate to when you hear these things [in the interview].” For these students, the project helped them feel more confident in professional contexts.
Empathy
Service-learning can lead to the creation of emotional bonds that foster empathy as a means of understanding (Wilson, 2011). In the focus groups, students commented on feeling an intimate connection with their artists, after spending hours listening carefully to their voices. For example, two students dialogued:
[It’s] kind of like how a mom can understand a two-year-old. But when you’re trying to listen to them, you are like, “Um, what did they say?” And mom translates for you.
Uh huh. Like, “Oh, he wants milk,” and you are like, “You got all that from ‘oowadaloo’?”
This description of a cultivated ability to understand the artists’ mumbling elicited extended communal laughter in the focus group, but interestingly implicates a maternal character in the editors’ relationship with the artists interviewed. Another remarked on their discomfort with their own “creepy” relationship to the artist via the audio: Well, Rothenberg said at one point, “Oh, is someone going to edit this?” and . . . even though she has no idea who I am, it felt like I was intimately involved in this, like she was talking to me. It feels uncomfortable at the same time because they were also talking about some really intimate things.
Rothenberg’s interview elicited numerous empathetic comments, such as I like the fact that she . . . struggled in school. One of her professors absolutely hated her. She called her like a modernist monster or something like that. So just the fact that she is this famous artist, and she struggled, that is cool.
Rothenberg speaks about alcoholism and homelessness as a young mother. One student noted, “There is something you can relate to when you hear these things, like . . . Rothenberg’s struggles with raising a kid.” Another student remarked of Rothenberg’s time as a CalArts faculty member, When she was out in Cal she was living in the school. That just boggled my mind. They wouldn’t pay for her to get an apartment or something out there? No, she had to live in the school with her daughter. So it kind of made me connect and empathize with her.
Ultimately, this project helped students humanize these canonical artists. One noted, “They seem kind of apart, unattainable. Hearing their voices just kind of brings them down. Hearing them joke and laugh really makes them feel more like a real human being.” Another commented that the project helped them gain “a perspective into the minds of artists that were well-known. Not having that weird, holier-than-thou kind of concept. Being able to relate to them as an actual person instead of a symbol to be glorified.” A third noted, Tony Smith talked a lot about other artists: how they came together, how they talked about their ideas, and how they put up galleries together. So and so married who, and so and so liked this person, but then really didn’t like that person . . . The gossip. It makes it more real. It’s like, this is a person, and they had high school drama.
Students gained perspective by seeing through the interviewees’ eyes, moving beyond their own personal responses to occupy others’ positions. They made meaningful connections between their own experiences and the artists’ stories, developing empathetic knowledge with individuals of cultures, ages, and experiences different from their own.
Discussion
A limitation of this project was the weakness of students’ experience within a community partnership; by comparison with an on-site service-learning experience, with regular exposure to the practices and staff of a working archive, students gained much less in tangible social interaction with the institutional partner. Nonetheless, students achieved many outcomes similar to those reported in face-to-face experiences. Such outcomes occurred largely through meaningful engagement with rich texts, which is hardly exclusive to a service-learning context. Nonetheless, the activity of editing these transcriptions held meaning for the students both because of their personal connections to the voices and the authenticity of the task. One student remarked on their perceived responsibility to future readers, “The quality of the work . . . became very evident . . . You know if . . . they are just slupping it off or doing it half way, it’s going to come out later . . . It is really going to bite someone hard, especially if it is somebody doing . . . research.”
The resources to support the project through the Archives also posed a significant limitation. With only one permanent staff member fully devoted to the entire Oral History program during the duration of the service-learning project, staff were limited in their ability to process the students’ completed transcript documents. During the first, pilot year phase, three of the completed transcripts were published online after a final proofing by a short-term, funded Fellow at the Archives. Unfortunately, the funding for her position concluded before the second and third year of the project completed additional transcripts for final editing, and sufficient staff resources have thus far remained unavailable to finish the final proofing process leading to web publication. Finally, because the interviews occurred mid-semester, student responses might be biased as final grades for the course had not been assigned by the instructor/principal investigator.
In a critique of e-service-learning, Alexander (2014) notes, “in lived experience we confront disagreement, discomfort, and discord; discomfort is inherently confrontational in nature. . . In an online world, these moments of discomfort are more easily clicked, trashed, or deleted away” (p. 101). She argues that transformational, confrontational moments arise from the kind of presence and immediacy of in-person interaction. However, in this oral history editing project, the recorded audio fostered an immediacy, a being-present-with the interviewee. The editing process itself compelled students into a confrontation with the living presence of the artist. The listening and re-listening moved students to a point where they came to know the speaker on a far more intimate, sometimes discomforting, level than they expected.
Conclusion
This project demonstrates how meaningful service-learning that affects students profoundly on intellectual and emotional levels can be achieved without traditional accouterments of service-learning such as out-of-class time commitment and travel to service sites, both of which can prevent non-traditional student populations’ participation. Service-learning’s imbalances of privilege and awkward dynamics of benefit transference to underserved populations can be sidestepped when the recipient of service is a cultural institution like the Smithsonian and the students themselves represent a diverse population with non-traditional attributes.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Jennifer Snyder and Kelly Quinn at the Archives of American Art were both instrumental in initiating and supporting this project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Kent State’s University Teaching Council provided a Teaching Travel Conference Grant to present of this research at the 2017 SECAC conference. This research was supported in part by a Travel Grant from the Kent State University Teaching Council.
