Students share poignant, powerful artifacts

As my courses at the University of Central Florida moved online, I realized many of my 75 students were going through the most challenging event of their young lives.

The syllabus and long-term lesson plans for my U.S. History 1877 to Present classes were all but abandoned as I struggled to become the professor they needed in crisis. Many were looking to me, as the historian, to help them find understanding and context.

As a part of that effort I asked my students to consider a historical artifact that could represent their experience during this pandemic to a historian 100 years in the future. I wanted my students to contextualize and think critically while understanding the way artifacts can relate personal historical narratives.

I was not prepared for how personal, poignant, and staggeringly powerful their responses would be. I found it difficult to read and grade more than a small batch at a time through misty eyes. All of them conveyed students’ lives arrested and dislocated from a campus that had been a place of curiosity and independence. Their answers represented lives in disruption – unfinished, and yet resilient.

Some students suggested incomplete notebooks, with the blank pages representing the notes they would not be taking from my lectures. Others thought of blank testing forms that would no longer be used for final exams. More than one student shared an image of empty college apartments; hurriedly packed without roommates to say goodbye to or the usual sounds of college life echoing in the hallways. An abrupt exit to both the physical place and the abstract ideas of young independence it represented.

A number of foreign students suggested unused plane tickets as their artifact. With foreign travel all but shut down, their lives have been pushed towards uncertainty as they are unable to find the security of family and home. Other students, now living with families again for the first time in years, suggested items such as bedroom doors – representative of the remaining barrier of their academic and personal lives.

More than a few of my students are healthcare workers, essential workers, or have family who are. Their artifacts represented powerful imagery laced with anxieties and fear of the pandemic invading homes. A parent’s hospital ID badge, the notes a student’s mother who is a nurse leaves before starting a 12-hour shift, and the glass one family member lives behind in an effort not to get the rest of the family sick all reminded me that the burden of this pandemic is not equally shared.

In an effort to make the assignment challenging, students understood their artifact needed to be tangible, not digital, and not something obvious like a mask or test kit.

I have done my best to get my students to the end of the semester, they will be turning their final exams in to me early next week. I am immensely proud of their efforts, but my teaching, the lessons, have all felt inadequate. I can’t help but leave this semester knowing there were a host of a-ha! moments and big connections that won’t be made.

My teaching philosophy has always been the analogy of “planting seeds.” I know that some will propagate in front of me as the semester moves along, while others won’t sprout for years.

I’ve been asked what artifact I would select for this hypothetical museum exhibit. It would be my last ungiven lecture. Something I usually scribble down on a scrap of paper that is uniquely tailored to each class I teach. A last lecture that tries to make sense of nearly 150 years of American history while also leaving students encouraged with a sense of purpose as they move on into their further studies at the university and beyond.

While those lectures will go unspoken, I still have faith in the seeds.

Their answers represented lives in disruption – unfinished, and yet resilient.