Ancestry Postcards

April 22, 2020
post card reading "greetings from Spokane, Washington"

With instruction moving online and her students departing Harvard for destinations spread all across the globe, Coolidge Professor of History Maya Jasanoff was looking for a way to keep her students connected to Harvard and to each other by incorporating their experiences into GENED 1014: Ancestry. Recalling a successful in-class activity from earlier in the term focused on the ancestry of Harvard houses, Jasanoff decided to create a new assignment that would let students explore, analyze, and share the ways in which ancestry has marked their current locations. A long time collaborator with the Bok Center—it was Bok that helped to develop and facilitate the activity on Harvard’s houses—Jasanoff returned to consult with us on her new assignment. (It’s one thing to design a new assignment; it’s another to develop a new assignment that will work for 185 students scattered all around the world.)

Channeling students’ passion for curating and sharing the visual record of their lives, Jasanoff is asking her students to create and share three digital “postcards” that highlight anything from the genealogy of the namesake of a local site to the story of a family heirloom. The assignment emphasizes a theme already present in the course: how ancestry shapes the environment and communities we inhabit, and how genealogical research is a powerful tool for illuminating the history and culture of a place.

After helping Jasanoff clarify the assignment’s concept, our team next tackled the logistics of its execution. The natural platform for collecting and displaying Jasanoff’s students’ work would be Instagram, but using Instagram presents a host of issues when used in such a large class  (including, not least of all, the imperative to shield students’ coursework from public view). In response, we created an Instagram-like gallery using a database application called Airtable. Students submit their work (both their images and the brief texts they write to accompany them) through an online form embedded securely within their course Canvas site, and Airtable instantaneously reformats their submission into an entry that resembles the familiar genre of the Instagram post.

If you wish to redesign an assignment or other aspects of your course in response to Harvard’s shift to remote instruction, or to explore additional technologies that can enhance the way you and your students share and respond to key course concepts, please schedule a Zoom consultation with our team.

Photo: Pub. by John W. Graham & Co., Spokane, Washington. "Tichnor Quality Views," Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass. / Public domain