Institutional Context

Part of the Texas A&M University system, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi is a comprehensive regional university and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As of fall 2018, it had approximately 12,000 students, several hundred of whom were humanities majors, including 156 history majors and minors. The university as a whole predominantly serves the South Texas region, with about 40% of students coming from surrounding counties and 54% of students coming from other Texas counties. South Texas is a predominantly Hispanic region that has suffered from historical education inequalities.³ Therefore, many of our students come from underserved populations; in fall 2018, 48% of students were Hispanic, 33% received Pell Grants, and 20% were first-generation college students. Compared to the rest of the student population, history majors were slightly more diverse. Forty-two percent of history majors received Pell Grants, and 18% were first-generation college students.⁴ This class was representative of the larger history major population. Although these inequities cannot be entirely solved at the classroom level, understanding the academic and nonacademic challenges for underserved students remains central to supporting and encouraging student success.⁵ In this case study, we show that metaliteracy and transliteracy projects are doable at these types of institutions, despite challenges posed by the lack of available resources.

Literature Review

This literature review argues that a more holistic treatment is needed to inform pedagogical development and that little has been written about digital projects that use these literacies at HSIs. The two concepts of metaliteracy and transliteracy, taken together, reflect the larger transformation of information literacy in the last twenty years.⁶ The sheer volume of information produced in the digital age, which is “the approximate equivalent of 8.18 million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress,”⁷ as well as the growing participatory culture of Web 2.0 helped give rise to these new pedagogical frameworks. Metaliteracy provided the foundation for revisions to the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). The guidelines emphasize metaliteracy as “an overarching set of abilities in which students are consumers and creators of information who can participate successfully in collaborative spaces.”⁸ By comparison, transliteracy focuses not necessarily on students as creators but on their ability to assess and produce across a variety of media: “Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”⁹ We maintain that projects like the one described in this article provide an opportunity for students to practice and develop mastery in all of these skills.

Despite the growth of literature on transliteracy and guidelines for metaliteracy, relatively few studies exist on how to design and implement such projects.¹⁰ Digital history, digital humanities, and archival studies often encompass both concepts, but pedagogy and case studies from these fields often come from research institutions, prestigious private colleges, and larger, well-established public history programs. Much less has been written on regional public universities with underserved populations. Our experience illustrates that serving these students creates some unique challenges.

Digital projects such as the present case study bridge information literacy, primary source literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy, and general technological literacy.¹¹ Yet, these literacy conversations remain somewhat fragmented, despite calls from within the archives, library, and history professions for transliteracy. To complicate matters further, the compartmentalization of academia in the twentieth century, including the history and library science disciplines, broadened the gap between different types of literacies.¹² Once linked to academic history departments, archival training shifted to library science at the same time that public history programs began to grow in the 1970s.¹³ More recently, public history programs and other digital humanities curricula have fostered a more holistic approach to information literacy training. In New York University's archives and public history program, Peter J. Wosh, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Esther Katz observed the role of digital technology in transforming archival and public history fields as well as bringing them back together.¹⁴

Goals and Course Design

At Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, HIST 3370: Introduction to Public History is an upper division course populated almost entirely by junior and senior history majors. For this specific class, the professor's goals were to provide students with a project-based learning environment that would develop their public history skills (research, communication, collaboration) in a digital environment that would provide an additional layer of career skills. While we know that high-impact practices (HIPs) such as student research can be important for retention, since juniors and seniors comprised the class, the goals and design focused on postgraduation and building their professional portfolios.⁴² The following learning objectives guided course and assignment design:

• Gain a better understanding of the nature of historical scholarship on a public level, and practice skills needed for creating that scholarship.

• Learn more about the variety of issues faced by historians working in the public sector.

• Demonstrate information retrieval skills required for historical research.

• Improve written and oral communication skills aimed at public audiences.

• Become familiar with the Chicago Manual of Style.

• Acquire a better grounding in US history, and sharpen the ability to critically analyze a range of historical interpretations and arguments.

With learning objectives in mind, the professor designed a large, semester-long project during which students would build the Omeka site for the ongoing South Texas Stories oral history project. This involved developing metadata for existing oral histories and uploading them to the site as well as researching and writing their own digital exhibits for the site. Specific activities are addressed more fully in the next section. The South Texas Stories codirectors hoped to expand the project in future semesters, envisioning a cocreated archive of oral histories, for which students in various courses would conduct oral histories and/or curate digital exhibits. The assignment represented the pilot for bringing students into the project.

The professor met separately with the archivist and two librarians to plan project activities prior to the semester and subsequently throughout the semester as needed. The team did not map out individual literacies to specific tasks or parts of the project during our planning. Rather, these connections became clear to us as we worked through the project and inspired us to write this article and plan future projects more deliberately.

Experiences and Project Activities

To build the South Texas Stories digital archives, students in HIST 3370: Introduction to Public History readied digital files and accompanying materials as well as curated two digital exhibits.

In class, students learned oral history best practices and the basics of audio editing. Most of the students had taken a class with the professor the previous semester in which they conducted an oral history project, so the digital exhibit was meant to build on their earlier work and teach them new skills for public history. With this knowledge, they generated access copies of the audio files for use on the site by mixing tracks from the master files, cutting the ends of tracks or raising the volume of the voices as needed, and deriving the appropriate file format. They worked in groups to transcribe two of the oral histories. Finally, using interviewers' notes, they wrote descriptive metadata for each oral history.

From there, students were ready to start researching and creating the digital exhibits. They created two digital exhibits on the Omeka platform: “The Mexican American Fight for Freedom” and “Environmental Narratives of the Coastal Bend.”⁴³ These exhibits provided context for previously recorded oral history interviews conducted by the South Texas Stories project codirectors. Students curated a digital exhibit about each theme that provided context to the oral histories by conducting research, writing short histories on subtopics, and finding related images.

For the digital exhibits, students received instruction on a variety of literacies. They applied archival literacy skills when they conducted their primary source research. The class started with an introduction to the project and analysis of digital exhibits created by students at other universities. Students were introduced to the historical method and a source analysis framework in their textbook, Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences.⁴⁴ They put that into practice with a trip to Special Collections, where the archivist led a document analysis exercise, provided context about the purpose of archives and how the project was contributing to preserving and providing access to the historical record, and shared information on the department's procedures for use of its materials and basic archival terminology. During the document analysis exercise, the archivist and students discussed how documents in “collections in cultural heritage institutions reflect and reinforce societal power structures.”⁴⁵ Additionally, the librarian liaison for the History Department held a class session for the students on searching for secondary sources in databases. Furthermore, the professor offered instruction on useful digital primary source collections. From there, students researched textual sources on their own, with occasional guidance from the professor, archivist, and librarians.

To strengthen the exhibits, students were also tasked with finding images. According to the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, “Users need to understand the ethical concepts related to applicable laws and regulations, privacy rights, cultural context, donor agreements, copyright, and intellectual property when working with primary sources.”⁴⁶ To help address these student needs, the scholarly communications librarian provided class instruction and a research guide about copyright law and licensing, particularly as they are relevant to this project; intellectual property more broadly; and practical techniques for identifying digital images that are in the public domain or free to use under Creative Commons licensing. Most students found images in Special Collections or on Wikimedia Commons. The archivist provided supplemental one-on-one consultations with students during their visits to Special Collections about how donor agreements and copyright impacted their ability to use images from particular collections. This aspect of the project also addressed multiple standards of the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.⁴⁷

The final step was to start building the site. Library staff created the new site's shell, added student users, and adjusted settings. In this way, the archivist and librarians acted as hosts, partners, and advocates for the student-created digital humanities project—a role that Ying Zhang, Shu Liu, and Emilee Mathews argue is important for LIS practitioners.⁴⁸ After digital archives and metadata instruction from the archivist, students added the audio files, transcripts, and images to Omeka and created descriptive metadata about the oral histories and images. Finally, they uploaded their text and images, working in two groups to build the digital exhibits. Students went through multiple rounds of revisions before and after putting together the exhibits, thereby learning that public history and academia rely on an iterative revision process to continually improve.

The instructors assumed that the students of traditional college age (approximately eighteen to twenty-two) would have a higher baseline level of digital literacy, since they grew up with computers and the Internet. Instead, we found that many digital skills were lacking within this population. For example, none of the students had used a cloud storage service to back up their files despite the university providing free storage with Microsoft OneDrive, and many were completely unfamiliar with cloud storage services. We seemingly overestimated the technological experiences of undergraduate students in general.

While the class met in a library computer lab for the metadata and site construction days, computing was needed for other class days as well. It was nearly impossible to have students use their own computers on the non-lab days, as a couple of the students did not own computers, some had older models, and one had a Chromebook, which did not support installation of software, including Audacity, the required audio editing software.⁴⁹ When the professor covered basic audio editing with in-class instruction and a workshop, student struggles were compounded by slow wireless Internet on campus, which made it hard to download and upload large files. The professor ended up doing a one-on-one tutorial with about two-thirds of the students outside of class. This worked well but was only possible because the class contained only twelve students. On other parts of the project, working as a class was hard. When creating the metadata for their images during a class session, for instance, the archivist led them through the process field by field. It was difficult to be sure that students worked at the same pace during this exercise.

Outcomes and Assessment

In completing this semester-long assignment, students gained skills in finding and evaluating sources, writing, and applied technology. The Metaliterate Learner Roles document published on metaliteracy.org illustrates the many different roles a learner can perform.⁵⁰ Many of these roles were performed by students during this digital project. Students acted as authors, collaborators, researchers, publishers, producers, and communicators. Students collaboratively created a digital exhibit published on the public web. Students curated oral history content by editing digital audio files, transforming them into different formats, and publishing them in a digital collection. They also reused archival images by finding, assessing copyright, and publishing them on the web. Students performed primary source research and produced written content for the digital exhibit. The entire class worked together to publish their research and their curated content in a content management system (CMS).

These activities required digital literacy or basic and intermediate digital curation and information communication technology (ICT) skills. Students were required to manage files, transform file formats, edit digital audio, work with basic HTML, and work in a CMS to publish content to the Web. The activities also align with aspects of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.⁵¹ Creating the digital exhibit demonstrates the “information creation as process” frame. Ethically reusing or curating existing content demonstrates the “information has value” frame. The original research done by students demonstrates “research as inquiry.” Working with archival images, oral histories, and primary sources to produce the digital exhibit required archival literacies. In all, the project required metaliteracy to curate and produce the content of the digital exhibit.

Despite the higher workload for such a project and determining we would make changes for future iterations, all involved felt it was worthwhile. After struggling at times throughout the semester, the students felt proud of their work and more confident in themselves, especially after seeing the final product. Hayden, Hernández-Ojeda, and Finkel note that “All of the[ir] students [at Hunter College, CUNY] began to understand how their voices were contributing to efforts to interrogate public memory. Writing, here, became a direct form of activism, as well as an academic exercise.”⁵² Indeed, at a library showcase event over a year later, several students from the class, including one who had graduated, volunteered to discuss the digital exhibits with university donors. As such, future research and assessment might evaluate the effectiveness of assignments in relation to building students' confidence and the feeling of belonging to a community.

Toward the end of the semester, we decided to develop a postassessment questionnaire to gauge student learning and ask for student feedback on the project (see Appendix). We designed multiple-choice questions about metadata and digital file preservation to indicate if students had retained these digital literacies taught by the archivist. Some questions addressed students' retention of information and archival literacies and public history fundamentals. For example, students were asked to define peer-reviewed scholarship and to explain why it is important for public historians to rely on primary sources and peer-reviewed secondary sources. Questions such as “Did you find it easier to work on various parts on your laptop in the classroom or in the computer lab?” were designed to help instructors gather opinions about the course logistics. A final question, “How do you think students in future courses could contribute to the STS Omeka site?” allowed students to envision digital curation as a continuing process as well as contribute to the future vision of the site.

In the postassessment, students illustrated that they had learned valuable skills and literacies. When asked what they found most meaningful, they enjoyed connecting environmental history and Mexican American history to local history and felt they learned a lot about these topics. They also talked a lot about learning digital curation, with one student writing, “I'm not as bad in technology that I thought I was. It's not that hard after all.” Furthermore, since the project created an online exhibit with students' names prominently displayed, it made them proud of their work and gave them something to share with their families and add to their résumés. In the postassessments, students shared that they were most challenged by finding archival and secondary sources, writing (especially directed at public audiences), and working with HTML in Omeka. They also provided thoughtful and helpful suggestions for expanding the South Texas Stories digital archive in the future and for improving the assignment. All of the suggestions received dealt with scheduling and due dates. The students felt rushed during the research phase and the exhibit building phase. They wished for more time to work on the exhibit as a group after team members added their individual contributions.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

For the professor, archivist, and librarians involved, it was a meaningful endeavor both as an engaging class project and as a helpful pilot for the future. Furthermore, the project pointed to some larger implications about teaching, metaliteracy and transliteracy scholarship, and addressing the digital divide. In addition, metaliteracy projects such as this one further the university's vision of student-centered success and career preparation.

This was the first time librarians and archivists at TAMU–CC led a digital multimedia class project of this nature. We felt generally that the project turned out well and that most of the students met learning objectives, but to varying degrees. We also learned a variety of lessons for future projects. Upon reflection, two major themes emerged: planning and preassessment of student skills. Our overall lesson learned, which relates to both themes, was the importance of making sure all our actions in the course were intentional so as to not miss opportunities or provide less student support than needed.

In terms of planning, project “infrastructure” (technology, class sizes, and other practical concerns) could have been dealt with more effectively. Small class size proved essential to the success of this project, but it is often not plausible for larger regional universities. At these institutions, the practicalities of digital projects loom large.

Furthermore, project planning in a collaborative setting offers distinct challenges. Multidisciplinary knowledge lies at the center of successful transliteracy and metaliteracy projects, yet it is often learned through experience. Upon reflection, we realized that we began without having all the connections between pieces in the forefront of our minds. In the future, making sure all our actions in the course are intentional so as to not miss opportunities or to provide less student support than needed seemed critical. In this case study, it would have been helpful for the librarians and archivist to meet with the professor as a group instead of in one-on-one meetings.⁵³ In these meetings, coverage should have been discussed more fully so that team members could have better addressed particular literacies to make the project truly transliterate. For future iterations, we would also rearrange the order of coverage, putting library instruction and secondary source research first, followed by archival instruction and primary source research, and finally the technical aspects of the project.

Additionally, the team felt that producing more examples and guides for students ahead of time would have helped these novice learners and saved in-class time during the semester. We believe that creating a metadata example, having students work on it outside of class, then finalizing and entering it into Omeka in a quicker lab session would have worked better than trying to lead them through the metadata creation exercise as a group. Likewise, a research guide including instructions on the technological aspects of Omeka that could be used as a reference would potentially have lessened confusion and saved in-class time. Similarly, students did not absorb everything intended from the in-class presentation on copyright and fair use. Therefore, we would consider having the students do a fair use assignment in addition to a class visit by the scholarly communications librarian. Such an assignment would provide the librarian with the opportunity to give individual feedback and really see where students are confused.⁵⁴ Given the multiple elements of curating a digital exhibit, advanced planning, more guides, and more small, hands-on assignments would have better facilitated student learning. Because of the instructors' experiences helping students with copyright and technical confusion, the scholarly communications librarian created a research guide for a different course that was incorporating a digital project for the following semester.⁵⁵

Second, we realized that assessing students' skills, particularly their digital skills, at the beginning and end of the course would enable us to better address their needs and plan for the course more appropriately. However, we also believe our experiences in this course exemplify the digital divides between certain populations. In this case, the holes in the digital literacy skills of the traditional college age students may reflect their largely lower socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the class included some adult students who were either returning to school later in life or attending college for the first time who also lacked many digital literacies. These revelations emphasized the importance of conducting a preassessment of skills, such as a short multiple-choice quiz or a short assignment that gauges students' competency with multiple literacies and technological skills. Furthermore, future research should assess transliteracy adoption at the end of the class.

A future project designed with a preassessment and postassessment would further contribute to pedagogical research about transliteracy and metaliteracy in digital history and public history projects. Those who plan to assign digital projects should not attempt to address every standard for information literacy, archival literacy, and digital literacy. Educators should rather adjust the specific aspects of these literacies and the degrees to which they are addressed based on the nature, needs, and goals of each course.

Conducting a preassessment activity would enable instructors to adjust their lesson plans in pacing and skills taught to better meet student needs. Since students often are not good judges of themselves, the usefulness of self-reporting is likely to be limited.⁵⁶ Therefore, preassessment questions would need to be crafted with this limitation in mind. Projects that think about research design, including preassessment, prior to the course could enhance the scholarly literature. Hayden, Hernández-Ojeda, and Finkel suggest an additional approach to assessing students' technological competencies during class time through individual assignments. This can be a useful method to ensure that students are paired with peers of a similar level of digital literacy competence during group assignments.⁵⁷ More studies on how students conduct research or that address discipline-specific aspects of metaliteracy and transliteracy and how they are best implemented in the classroom would enrich pedagogy and scholarly understanding in a variety of disciplines.

For students, digital projects incorporating metaliteracy and transliteracy skills have value after graduation. Many information, archival, visual, and digital literacy skills are critically important for students as they navigate today's job market and society. Peter J. Wosh, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Esther Katz observe that digital history is a necessity for public history graduates.⁵⁸ In a survey, their graduates attested to the importance of digital literacy.⁵⁹ Public history professors who have incorporated digital projects into the curriculum have also observed the need for more training.⁶⁰

Furthermore, this case study brings to light larger implications of addressing historical inequalities and the digital divide among underserved students. Public historians also have struggled to address the digital divide. In his case study, Andrew Hurley argues that digital public history projects can help address the persistent digital divide among certain populations.⁶¹ Well-designed public history projects hold the potential to increase digital literacy among students, local community partners, and/or the general public. In our case, a preassessment would have helped consciously address our underserved students and the digital divide. Yet, some larger socioeconomic realities cannot be addressed during a class project or even by an institution of higher education, including unequal access to off-campus, high-speed Internet and computing devices. Despite these drawbacks, a more conscious attempt to serve and to prepare students through digital projects that address metaliteracy and transliteracy could have positive outcomes. More studies, however, remain to be done.