When I first started teaching at the University of Dayton in 2018, one of my first stops was the library to get a tour of the archives. I had first started teaching with archives while at the University of Georgia and knew that I wanted to recreate that experience at UD. Using archives in the classroom is experiential learning at its core. When using archives in the classroom, students are asked to engage with an object from another time and place and confront the humanity of those that made and used it. The pedagogical gift of archives is that they inspire curiosity to know more but also ask us to grapple with what we cannot know. To understand the object, students can’t just turn to the instructor or any other authority but must use their own minds and senses to understand the best they can.
At UD, I was able to immediately integrate materials from University Archives into my classes but the Marian Library had unique challenges when teaching undergraduate students, particularly the first- and second-year students that I like to bring to the archives. Much of the collection is not in English but French or Latin. It’s not uncommon for the texts to use cursive, which more and more students are unable to read. Moreover, the religious nature of the materials meant the materials had to be more carefully chosen to share with students because of their varied knowledge on Mary and Christian history. I decided to save the Marian Library for a later semester. The Marian Fellowship finally gave me the time I needed to explore the extent of the collection and consider what to teach from it.
The time and space the fellowship awarded was instrumental in thinking through how to integrate these materials into the classroom. I sifted through artwork and holy cards and prayer books and rosaries and maps and prints and more holy cards. By the end of the summer, I had planned projects to include in my new Humanities Seminar classes — courses designed for our first-year students to teach them about humanistic thinking — and made a laundry list of other archives as suggestions to colleagues. This past week I was able to share these projects with my colleagues in a presentation held in the new Special Collection Classroom.
For a humanities course for entering first-year students, I developed a class to investigate how the definition of an ideal body and what it should be capable of doing has changed over time. Students examined a range of items from the Marian Library (and a few from the U.S. Catholic Special Collection) depicting the Sacred Heart, Stigmata, the Eucharist, the Pietà and a collection of relics and rosaries. I asked students to read these objects devotionally, artistically and historically. Michele Jennings, our special collections instruction librarian, helped students learn how to approach and examine these artifacts. Students then had to work through what was known and unknown about the objects to better understand how the body was viewed through time. Students created a mock digital exhibit of a sample of the objects, an assignment that allowed them to consider how they could present these objects to an audience of high schoolers.
For the second course in the humanities series for first year students, my students undertook a smaller project. They read letters that John Stokes wrote to his children. While much of the John Stokes collection features his work establishing the Mary Gardens movement, these letters gave a glimpse into his personal relationship with his children. These letters advanced thought on our class theme of hospitality and also worked as a model for students as they wrote their own letters to loved ones. Stokes’ words and inspiration showed up directly in many of the letters with many writing to their parents or even sharing his words in their letters as examples of kindness and hospitality.
One of the things that made teaching this class possible was the Special Collections Classroom in Roesch Library. I had previously brought classes to the Marian Library Reading Room but extended use of objects was not ideal there. Generally, students ended up standing and hovering over objects on a table. In the new classroom, students were able to sit closely and really examine objects. The class was able to meet repeatedly, whereas before return visits were more difficult to plan. Importantly, our archival material was easier to keep safe. Unlike the regular teaching classroom, the doors lock and materials can be left out between my two classes. Moreover, the classroom has designated space for students to store their gear, including things like food and drinks that can harm an object.
As the class continued, this space itself took on the aura of the gift. Stripped of their gear, students had to interact with their surroundings. Placed in tables, students had to work together. With the objects at the center of the study, I was rarely at the front of the classroom but truly with my students. The Marian Fellowship gave me the gift of time and space to teach these projects and hopefully many more. I look forward to seeing what I and my colleagues can continue to build pedagogically from the collections in the library.
— Teresa Saxton is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Dayton and the recipient of the 2025 Resident Scholar Fellowship.
