The JayPod: A High Library Production - Using Archival Materials in Pre-service Teacher Education: A Conversation with Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh and Brian Booker

Using Archival Materials in Pre-service Teacher Education: A Conversation with Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh and Brian Booker

04/17/23 • 32 min

In this archives-focused episode, host Josh Cohen got the opportunity to talk with High Library archivist, Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh, and Education faculty member, Brian Booker, about their collaboration for Education students in Brian's Social Studies Methods course. Rachel and Brian worked together to create an assignment requiring the students to use archival resources to create a short K-12 social studies lesson.
In the January/February issue of the publication Archival Outlook, Rachel published an article about this project, titled, “Make an Impact with Archival Outreach to Preservice Teachers: Instructing Students to Teach with Primary Sources.”
We discuss that collaboration and its goals and how K-12 social studies teachers can benefit from incorporating primary source materials into their instruction. Plus, we highlight the High Library's Hess Archives collections which feature materials related to the Church of the Brethren, the Elizabethtown College archives, and collections related to Anabaptist and Pietist groups.
For archivists and others interested in Rachel's work with Brian's class, here is a link to the library guide that Rachel created and which we reference in the episode.

Previous Episode

Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" and Its Relevance to American Politics Today with Dr. Fletcher McClellan

In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, the late author Philip Roth explores an alternate version of American history from 1940 - 1942 in which FDR loses the 1940 presidential election against the isolationist, celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, leading to serious consequences for the country, particularly for the Jewish population.
Etown College Professor of Political Science, Dr. Fletcher McClellan has used the novel in his senior seminar in recent years as a way to explore parallels between the fictional Lindbergh presidency of Roth's novel and the Trump presidency, focusing on the similarities between the isolationist, nativist ideology behind the America First movement of the early 40s and the MAGA movement. In this month's JayPod episode, we discuss these and other parallels and how the novel might inform discussions of current American politics and the state of our democracy.
In November 2022, Dr. McClellan published an article, "It Almost Happened (And Might Still Happen) Here: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America" in the Journal of Political Science Education on how he has used the novel in his senior seminars.

Next Episode

Studying the Health Benefits of Mindfulness Training for Undergraduate Students with Drs. Elizabeth Dalton and Tomás Estrada

How can mindfulness training and meditation practice benefit our mental health and well-being? In today's world of constant distractions, it seems harder than ever to live in the present moment with sustained focus while managing the stress of daily life. In a recent study, Etown College's Assistant Professor of Psychology, Dr. Elizabeth Dalton and Associate Professor of Engineering and Physics, Dr. Tomás Estrada collaborated to explore the impact of formal mindfulness training on the well-being of 48 undergraduate engineering students.
In this episode, we discuss the concept of mindfulness and its usefulness both in the classroom as well as in one's personal life to manage stress and improve one's overall quality of life. Estrada and Dalton also provide some background information on how they developed an interest in this area of research and what conclusions they reached through their study, "Implementation and Feasibility of a Group Mindfulness Intervention for Undergraduate Engineering Students" which they published in a recent issue of Advances in Engineering Education.
Some books on mindfulness training that we discuss in this episode and which might be of interest to listeners include Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness and Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein's A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook.