Learning through Teaching: BGC Students Serve as Teaching Assistants for HBCU Summer Course on Research

In the summer of 2021, Bard Graduate Center partnered with the Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries to offer a one-week course focused on research through objects to undergraduate students and recent graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The course, which was held virtually, centered around presentations from and discussions with a variety of visiting professionals, including conservators, artists, scholars, curators, and archivists. mary adeogun (MA ’22) and Elizabeth Koehn (MA ’20, PhD candidate) worked as teaching assistants for the course. In October 2021, they reflected on the curriculum, the students, and their experiences as first-time TAs. A complete version of their discussion appears on the BGC website.

With thanks to the Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries, Bard Graduate Center, and each student who participated in the program: Amanei, Barriane, Jade, Janelle, Justin, Kaelin, Kadeer, Kaleizhanae, Meaghan, Shamica, Shon and Torri.

mary adeogun (MA ’22) and Elizabeth Koehn (PhD candidate). Still from Zoom video recording.

Elizabeth Koehn (EK): Hi Mary! In looking back over my notes from HBCU summer school program, it’s really awe-inspiring to see how the students took the central topic of the course—which was the concept of research—and spun it off into so many interesting dimensions of their own. … They went above and beyond simply connecting the content of the workshops to their chosen objects. They were proactively taking the day’s themes and applying them to a wide variety of larger topics and issues relating to their own interests and work.

It was a good decision to kick the course off with the BGC publication, What Is Research? (the published transcripts of three conversations that Dean Peter N. Miller moderated in 2020 among scientists, artists, and humanists, all MacArthur Fellows) because it really set the tone for how diverse the scope of research, as we were looking at it, was going to be.

mary adeogun (ma): Having as loose a topic as research really allowed people to kind of run in whatever direction interested them. And we saw that in the program, where some students responded to specific topics more than others. Do you remember the session we had with botanists, curators, and researchers from the New York Botanical Garden? There was a moment where one student was completely in the zone. Based on his line of questioning, the conversation took multiple directions: from the different plants they preserve in the herbarium, to plants as a healing and spiritual tool, with psychedelics being used to treat PTSD and depression. There was a similar response from a few students who are artists to the Artists Doing Research talk, which included Tomashi Jackson, Richard Tuttle, and Vanessa German. They talked about their work—what it’s responding to in this world and how research informs it.

EK: That was such a special session—Vanessa opened her part of the talk by going through the list of participants and giving voice to every single person’s name. That really set a tone for everyone. I think you could see that they felt that sense of reciprocation with the speakers. All of the speakers throughout the program are experts in their fields, doing such amazing things, and they were so generous and willing to engage with the students. They took their questions seriously. There was a lot of respect going both ways, and I think that contributed to making it a successful program.

ma: For sure. And that also sometimes meant questioning the information being presented.

For example, in the investigative journalism session with Nicholas Lemann from Columbia’s journalism school. There were a lot of questions from students, especially around the more undefined boundaries of journalism. Some of the students were wondering, can anyone just say anything?

EK: That’s a good point about the journalism session, because I remember that was one area where we, as TAs, actually felt it was important to push back on some of the student responses— I remember students in our evening session expressing a lot of skepticism about notions of journalistic truth. I think a lot of that stemmed from the recent political discourse around what constitutes “fake news,” but I also think they applied some of the critical points raised by historian Marisa Fuentes, in her session from earlier that day—where she discussed absences in the archival record—to their understanding of journalistic objectivity. Students really responded to the ideas that she raised about narrative construction, how it is contingent on the information that is preserved, and how you always need to be aware of the facts and perspectives that are left out of the record. So even if that emphasis on criticality that she raised took a direction in our group discussion about journalism that we felt we needed to correct a bit, it was still interesting to watch how the students were synthesizing and drawing points of connection between the various topics and approaches raised by the different speakers throughout the week.

ma: Fuentes made it very clear that she does not make things up. I love that she stressed not running away with the idea of creativity in the archives as we imagine things that weren’t documented. It’s a rigorous exercise of understanding the possibilities given the bounds of the archive, and then connecting the dots. But also, when you don’t have enough information, letting the silence linger, while still acknowledging that something was there. That’s powerful. The topic and the scholarly attention paid to archival silences is so pervasive and important in academia, especially in relation to communities, groups, and histories that don’t fit cleanly into a Euro-American academic version of archive.

There are many possibilities within and outside of that. That’s why I really enjoyed Mpho Matsipa’s talk on our final day about research as a way to destabilize EuroAmerican claims to knowledge about African cities and public spaces. For example, the project

African Mobilities being a scholarly portal where theorists and creative practitioners across the continent can come together, access their histories, and imagine their futures on their own terms.

EK: That’s such a good point. It brings to mind our visit from Tammi Lawson, from the Art and Artifact Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Some students said, “I didn’t think that would be in an archive.” That visit was such an important way to alert people to the fact that various types of archives exist, and that if they haven’t in the past, people are working to remedy or reorient our notion of what should be preserved.

ma: The expanded understanding of archives, and the bodies of knowledge that are within archives, was explored by so many of the speakers. Memory is a really powerful archive, and that concept resonated with me, because it made me think of oríkì, which is a Yorùbá concept of a being or family’s story, their epic, that is passed from generation to generation, often orally. In Yorùbá Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, scholar and art historian Rowland Abiodun notes that oríkì is not passive, but active. Pronouncing an oríkì invokes or summons the subject into action. And though I refer to oríkì that’s spoken, it can also be invoked through art, spaces, dance, and so on. An oríkì can be recorded on an audio device or in writing, but it doesn’t necessarily have a history of being passed down in that way. To me, it’s one of the most precise archives because to speak it correctly and pass it down to the next person, you’ve got to have that thing down pat. It always struck me that among this community it’s considered archival, but among other communities, it’s not.

I think over the course of the week, it was striking to see the connections in what we each recognize as “archive” and how a lot of these lecturers in their practices have either defined that on their own terms, or found ways to address the gaps in whatever definition of archive they’re working with.

EK: That point you raise about different forms of knowledge and specifically archival knowledge, and how information can be passed down through families and oral histories rather than being recorded in official documents, I think that was reflected also in many of the objects that the students chose to research. I’m thinking of a few students who chose to research family heirlooms, such as a grandmother’s jewelry box, Guyanese gold bracelets

passed down to firstborn daughters, or a pillow made by a mother for her baby.

So many of them were objects that were deeply embedded in their familial histories and relationships. And I think that point you raise about the validity of these different forms or sources of knowledge is so important in this regard. It emboldened a lot of the students in the final conclusions that they were making about their objects: “Yes, this is a story worth telling, even if it wasn’t written down in a newspaper. This is my family’s story and it’s expressed, not through text, but through this object that I now have in front of me and I’m looking at and I’m holding and I’m asking questions about.” For me, watching the students expand their notion of research, whether that meant broadening their understanding of the kind of sources worthy of being consulted, or how to look critically at those sources, or reassessing the types of subject worthy of research, was the most fulfilling part of being a TA.

ma: I hear that.

EK: I also want to shout out how amazing these students were, because this was an extremely rigorous curriculum. They were in class from 9 am until noon, hearing speakers but also engaging in good, rich discussions. Then there was a lunch break, and a second session with speakers and discussion in the afternoon. Then they met for an hour on their own to rehash the day (no professors or TAs allowed), before taking a dinner break, and then they met with us for an hour in the evening to go over questions and reflections on the day’s presentations. And of course they also were doing the reading and prep work for the following day’s seminars. They were unbelievably active and engaged throughout an extremely intense week.

ma: This was my first experience as a TA, too, and I learned so much from the students, including through the constructive feedback they gave us when the program had wrapped up. I’m curious. Did you do any preparation? How were you thinking about being a TA?

EK: I was mostly just trying to get over my sheer terror at being in a position of authority, which I’m not used to. And it was really important to me, as a teacher, to be honest about my intellectual background, and the things that I know but more importantly the things I don’t know. For me, that’s a really radical, feminist act, of acknowledging what your limitations are, and not feigning authority for the sake of preserving that teaching role. In that regard, it was really helpful

for me to be in an environment like this, where students were so willing to engage one-on-one. It validated for me that that is a legitimate way to approach teaching: not as an authoritarian, but as someone who really can go in learning from other people, as much as they can learn from you. Obviously, I wanted to make sure people were getting what they needed and point them to resources that I knew of that they could use. But working with these students affirmed for me that teaching should be more of a dialogue than a unidirectional vector. What about you? How did you prepare?

ma: I’m also not very experienced when it comes to teaching, but as a student, I find that when I am able to participate in a learning experience that feels more dialogical, I gain so much.

And so, to answer your question, “How did I approach it?”, I started out very nervous and scared. I think I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I did not want to send anybody in the wrong direction. But to your earlier point, that incorrectly assumes that students don’t already have their own processing power to filter through what’s BS and what’s real. When I started working with the students, it calmed me down a bit. At the end of the week, I’d learned so much—from the lecturers and administrators, from the students, and from the experience of being a TA.

mary adeogun (MA ’22) studies textiles, garments and dress culture. For the past four years she has focused on Yorùbá dress culture and textile practices from her family heritage, relying on conversations with stylish aunties about their lace and aṣọ òkè, interviews with àdìrẹ collectors and scholars, and brief apprenticeships or workshops with practicing textile artists. Other interests include fiber and dyeing science, how clothes are displayed, American dress culture, and everyday dress habits. She is grateful to the many loved ones and teachers in her life that make this learning possible. Elizabeth Koehn is a PhD candidate at Bard Graduate Center who is currently researching pneumatic furniture designs of the 1960s and 70s in relation to the concept of utopia. She completed her MA at BGC in 2020 with her qualifying paper, Designing Destruction: Archizoom Associati’s Superonda Sofa as Radical Critique, in which she examined the formal and material qualities of Archizoom’s 1966/67 seating design in the context of the group’s theoretical projects, essays, and archival materials questioning the relationship between design and consumerism. In 2019, Koehn interned in the design, architecture, and digital curatorial department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she worked directly with the museum’s Rapid Response Collecting Curator on new acquisitions. Prior to her studies at BGC, she held positions working with artists at the New York-based galleries Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and David Zwirner after earning her BA in history and art history from Oberlin College in 2009.