Drs. Jessica Taylor, Jason Higgins, and Aaron Purcell

Team Award: Drs. Jessica Taylor, Jason Higgins, and Aaron Purcell

Dr. Jessica Taylor is a public and oral historian and assistant professor at Virginia Tech. She also teaches Native History and early U.S. History courses, and is the author of the book, Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (UVA Press, 2022). Taylor works with community groups and nonprofits on oral history and public history projects, connecting her students with regional leaders and activists. Her own work has focused on how people in the Southeast perceive landscape change, due to climate change, colonization, and other global factors, and what they do about it.

Dr. Jason A. Higgins is a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities, jointly affiliated with the Center for Humanities, Virginia Tech Publishing, and the History Department. He is the author of Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (UMass Press, forthcoming, Fall 2023) and the co-editor of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (UMass Press, 2022). He specializes in bringing the digital and technical resources of the library into classrooms and communities beyond. He is the director of a NEH Summer Institute for K-12 educators entitled, “Crossing Divides: Connecting Veterans, Teachers, and Students through Oral History.” Higgins has led several oral history workshops with community partners and has created open-access training modules designed to teach students to complete oral history projects.

Dr, Aaron D. Purcell is a professor and director of special collections and university archives (SCUA) in University Libraries. Creating greater access to original material, integrating primary source education into the curriculum, and highlighting the experiences of historically neglected groups are common themes across his work. With grants from the NHPRC and CLIR, he has led projects that provide greater research access to collections from lesser known voices such as international women architects, textile workers in Virginia, and environmental activists. Purcell serves as an affiliated faculty in the history department and has taught graduate level courses on archival theory and practice. He is the author or editor of eleven books on archival and historical topics, including Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia (Univ of Tenn Press, 2021) and The Digital Archives Handbook: A Guide to Creation, Management, and Preservation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).

Their Diggs Scholar teaching enhancement project uses the oral history collections held at VT and in our region in the production of student-informed, online exhibits accessible to undergraduate students that instructors across campus can use in their classes. It foregrounds oral histories resulting from authentic community collaborations in Appalachia, making graduate and undergraduate students of multiple disciplines aware of organizations enhancing equity and truth-telling in the region.  Oral history is an exceptional tool that provides research experience and a novel way of experiencing history for students. An all-audio primary source reader is a new model engaging alternative learning styles and the trend towards born-digital educational materials, a model they were excited to explore with archivists who have a wealth of these materials on-hand already. Graduate students interested in education worked to select content, align it with SOLs, and create learning activities that they could one day use in the classroom.  Oral history projects benefit students by creating a pipeline between the classroom and community in the common causes of equity and social justice. Taylor was able to strengthen relationships with Virginia Indian alumni through an exhibit in an interdisciplinary (history-political science) graduate course called, “The Politics of Memory,” in which students built an online exhibit about the Monacan Indian Nation’s fight to save their historic capital from environmentally-destructive development. It has since been shared by the American Historical Association and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, leading to a small co-authored publication in U.S. historians’ main trade magazine, Perspectives, about the collaborative and pedagogical design process. Oral history also benefits instructors, encouraging them to stretch their pedagogical skills. propose is an interdisciplinary resource base in community oral history applicable across disciplines and colleges. The team’s proposed program will produce student-informed, online exhibits accessible to undergraduate students that instructors across campus can use in their classes.