Notes on cross-course collaboration between public history & graphic design for the Fannie Barrier Williams Historical Timelines.
In the fall of 2023, students in history faculty member Dr. Michael J. Kramer’s Public History seminar collaborated with students in Mitch Christensen’s Typology 2 Graphic Design course to develop graphical timelines about Fannie Barrier Williams’ story and context. We learned a lot, often by making mistakes. Such is the nature of collaborating across courses and fields, particularly for the first time.
Mistakes are also inevitable when making classroom work also serve as public work. We mixed up spreadsheet files, made some factual errors, and there is some poorly phrased language. Corrections include: Susan B. Anthony died in 1906 not 1907; in addition to Fannie Barrier Williams, Hester C. Jeffrey was another African American woman who eulogized Anthony (did the two know each other?—yet another good research question!); the 1929 Wall Street Stock Market Crash took place in October not September; the issue of state’s rights may have been claimed as an issue by Confederates attempting to secede from the Union, but it is slavery that caused the US Civil War most definitely not state’s rights; the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 was forced upon Native Americans, not “accepted” by most except by force. We needed to build in a more robust fact-checking process.
We also had to find better ways to balance individual with collective work in the context of courses in which some students thrive and others struggle: how might we give better credit for work done yet complete the projects across groups of students? While instructors explained that classroom work would be displayed publicly, we might have made it even more clear to students what the final product of the experiment would become. It is always a puzzle with cooperative coursework, and the complexities get trickier when working across two classes and departments.
Despite all our mistakes, the results you see in the exhibition are very promising. We hope that as an educator, Fannie Barrier Williams would be proud. The posters are bursting with creative graphical ideas. They are filled with information about the understudied figure of Fannie Barrier Williams, for whom there are no extensive archival sources and a lot of missing or murky information. Nonetheless, these posters should be considered experiments, not final projects, a glimpse of student work in progress, not some final summation or professional museum exhibition or even close to a full historical accounting of the significance of Fannie Barrier Williams in her historical context.
— Dr. Michael J. Kramer, Public History seminar, Department of History, Fall 2023
