IMSA Oral Histories: Information Sheet for Interviewees

Purpose: The IMSA Oral Histories project records conversations with alumni and former and current faculty and staff to explore the school’s history and what it meant to be a part of it. The oral histories can be found on Digital Commons, IMSA’s institutional repository

Oral history research at University College Cork: Past, present, and future

This is a report on a research project which set out to explore the feasibility of creating a sound archive in University College Cork. It identified the number and types of oral history projects that existed in 2016 in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences (CACSSS) in UCC and it established the state of readiness of those available for digitisation and preservation in a discoverable form. It sought to use the strategic research fund awarded to preserve two existing online oral history collections to create a valuable and trusted long-term online searchable secondary research resource. It was successful in preparing one of these for deposit with the Digital Repository or Ireland (the DRI); the HEA funded Irish Women at Work Oral History Project. The digital content for this project is now available via the Digital Repository of Ireland. This report documents the process involved in identifying and selecting a suitable common platform / portal and the standardised metadata required to keep current holdings safe online and to make them accessible and searchable to scholars and civil society groups. It also presents the results of a survey conducted with CACSSS staff and postgraduate students, which indicates that there is significant interest in the university community in safely preserving and making accessible data collected in the course of research projects and in accessing data when it is made available by other researchers, particularly online. As evident in this report, until such time as a UCC or alternative institutional sound archive is established in Ireland, the DRI provides a national trusted repository for oral history and related data collected by UCC researchers and students

ACRL Project Outcome Short Overview with Sara Goek

Presentation slidesSummary of the longer pre-conference workshop on Project Outcome. Project Outcome is a free toolkit that helps libraries measure four key learning outcomes – knowledge, confidence, application, and awareness – across seven library program and service areas. The survey topics cover: Instruction, Events/Programs, Research, Teaching Support, Digital & Special Collections, Space, and Library Technology. Project Outcome provides academic libraries of any size the means to easily measure outcomes in those areas and to use that data as the basis for continuous improvements and advocacy.Association of College and Research Librarie

Alumnus (anonymous)

This interview is with an alumnus who graduated in the late 1990s and prefers to remain anonymous. He grew up in in a Chicago suburb. While it had a good school system, during his freshman year his parents were considering moving and IMSA’s residential and academic nature appealed to him. He recalls the admissions process, from taking the SAT, to getting recommendation letters, doing an interview, and ending up on the wait list. On move in day for sophomore year, he remembers that his roommate arrived first and got the pick of the room furnishings. While they only lived together for one year at IMSA, they were later roommates in college as well. He had arrived with an old laptop that didn’t have an ethernet card, and he remembers being unable to access the internet on it and having to use the school computers instead. In terms of classes during sophomore year, he recalls the challenges of the Integrated Science curriculum, feeling out of his depth in Spanish class, and a math teacher who would give students the problem and answer and tell them to “figure it out.” All IMSA’s classes presented a new way of learning, working through problems collaboratively, rather than preparing material for tests. He did independently study for and take additional AP tests. Outside of classes, he spent a lot of time working in the Grainger workshop and participated in extracurriculars including Science Olympiad, math team, chess, and sports. After IMSA, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He started out undecided about his major and eventually picked East Asian Language and Culture. While he had taken a lot of biology and chemistry classes, he decided not to major in either subject and says this was the point he stopped going down a math and science path. After graduating from college, he got a Master’s in bilingual and bicultural education at Columbia University. He then traveled around, working in different places, including at the Ministry of Education in Taiwan and teaching in the Pacific Northwest. While teaching science at an inner-city school in Texas, he became disheartened by problems in the broader educational system and curriculum. That experience led him back to graduate school at the University of Connecticut to study educational technologies. However, it became clear that the limiting factor in improving education wasn’t technology or research so much as political will. He currently runs a non-profit that aims to facilitate collaborative educational research. Interviewer: Sara Goek. Duration: 58:4

Irish Vernacular Poetry and the American Revolution: Irish Find Their Voice in Tomas O Miochain

Historical studies of Ireland during the late-18th Century 'Age of Revolution' have traditionally focused on politics and ideology-the realm of society's elite-often ignoring the opinions and role of the largely Catholic, Irish-speaking population of the country. This has occurred due to both an inability to understand the rich vernacular sources, as well as the longstanding view of rural people as an undifferentiated mass, a view that went largely unchallenged-until recently. By examining the vernacular poetry of Tomas O Miochain, this paper reconsiders the role of the native Irish-speaking population in discourse of the American Revolution and, in turn, the Revolution's implications for Ireland. While only a single example of political voice in the Irish vernacular during this era, the works of O Miochain offer a window into a much more complex presentation of late-18th Century Ireland, demonstrating that people outside the English-speaking elite comprehended the political situation and brought to it their own experiences and understanding

Project Outcome for Academic Libraries: Data for Impact & Improvement (preconference workshop)

Presentation slidesIn this interactive workshop, attendees will learn how to use the Project Outcome for Academic Libraries surveys and resources. Project Outcome is a free toolkit that helps libraries measure four key learning outcomes – knowledge, confidence, application, and awareness – across seven library program and service areas. The survey topics cover: Instruction, Events/Programs, Research, Teaching Support, Digital & Special Collections, Space, and Library Technology. Project Outcome provides academic libraries of any size the means to easily measure outcomes in those areas and to use that data as the basis for continuous improvements and advocacy. Prior to the workshop we recommend that participants register for Project Outcome, review basic materials in the toolkit, and consider a goal for outcome measurement at their library. Learning Outcomes Participants will: Measure meaningful learning outcomes using Project Outcome for Academic Libraries. Use the Project Outcome for Academic Libraries toolkit to administer surveys, analyze results, and create reports. Understand how other libraries have used outcome data for action. Identify challenges and effective means of implementing outcome measurement to improve library services and advocacy. Develop an action plan for successfully implementing Project Outcome at your library.Association of College and Research Librarie

Farewell to Erin: oral histories of post-war Irish music & migration

Between 1945 and 1970 over 665,000 men and women left Ireland for destinations across the globe. This study focuses on the society they left and the two primary receiving countries, the United States and Great Britain, with particular reference to the cities of London, New York, Chicago, and Boston. Using transnational and comparative historical analysis, I examine the Irish communities in those locales and movements and connections between them. Traditional music acts as a case study of the role of cultural practices and the ways they shaped and reflected ethnic identities. The main sources utilized are forty-one original oral history interviews with musicians and singers who emigrated between 1945 and 1970. A selection of these appears in the accompanying digital archive, ‘Voices of Irish Music & Migration’. In addition, existing archival collections and published memoirs reveal diverse and evolving attitudes towards music in Ireland and across the diaspora. The unique significance of these sources is their insights into personal experiences and the meaning given to them in life stories. In the context of social and cultural history, they offer a window into the making of a generation. Chapter 1 addresses methodological approaches to oral history and the creation of a digital archive. The structure of the remaining chapters follows the migrants’ life course. Chapter 2 examines Irish society and culture in the period in which the interviewees grew up, a necessary consideration because it shaped their outlook and later experiences. The Irish in the United States and Great Britain in the post-war era are the subjects of Chapters 3 and 4. Both assess the nature of those varied communities and offer points of comparison on the themes of work, class, gender, social life, ethnicity, and culture. Together they support the argument that in America, post-war Irish migrants had to negotiate expectations, not only of the host society, but of earlier generations and their descendants in defining the ethnic group; while in Britain the post-war generation were able to define the group by virtue of their larger numbers, but they found themselves marginalized within British society. Chapter 5 examines migrants’ changing attitudes to Ireland and the question of return migration in a life story context. As a whole, this dissertation argues that while each individual has a unique story, examining music and its social contexts provides insights into their points of connection and varied experiences

Christian Nøkkentved

Dr. Christian Nøkkentved - known to generations of IMSA students as Dr. Nok - started as a member of the history faculty 1988. He had finished his Ph.D. in History in 1985 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He visited IMSA and decided to apply for a job, attracted by the small class sizes and teaching he saw there. He had to learn to adapt to teaching in a more hands-on way and felt freedom to experiment with ways to engage students. In particular, the history faculty did a lot of simulations, where students could take on roles to act out or debate historical events. Dr. Nok primarily taught World Studies, European History, and International Relations. The European History course was organized around key artifacts, starting with the opera La Traviata, to open up questions about the nature of history, art, and evidence. He enjoyed the ability to create and change the curriculum, with the guiding principle of developing students\u27 historical thinking skills, rather than just covering content. Because it is impossible to cover all of world history in a single class, he focused on the development of major structures or trends that we still live with today, trying to balance powerful Western influences with non-Western histories. He particularly enjoyed reading the research papers that students wrote for the class. In addition to his regular teaching, Dr. Nok participated in trips to Germany with the German classes as part of an exchange program that ran between 1998 and 2007. IMSA students visited Erfurt, Germany in the summers of the even-numbered years and German students came to IMSA in the odd years. Dr. Nok also did an independent study for students interested in learning Danish for many years. During intersession he ran a class called philosophical perambulations. He took students for hikes, in all weathers, and they had readings that prompted reflection on the landscapes. Among the more challenging aspects of work at IMSA was figuring out how to always have students engaged in active learning, and not all experiments worked. A lot of things changed over time too, from new technology to shifts in the student culture, especially towards students going home on weekends. Once all students had laptops, teaching methods also had to be adjusted. In facing these challenges, it was helpful to have supportive colleagues in the history department, all of whom worked together to figure out effective teaching methods. Dr. Nok retired from IMSA in 2013 and continues to volunteer in the archives. Interviewer: Sara Goek. Duration: 50:58.https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/oral_histories/1019/thumbnail.jp