For Educators

CML graduate student Kristina Helene Nohe presents affective historical praxis to members of the Virginia Women’s Network of the American Council on Education, fall 2023.
CML graduate student Kristina Helene Nohe presents affective historical praxis to members of the Virginia Women’s Network of the American Council on Education, fall 2023.
CML trains John Lewis students

CML trains John Lewis students

 For the “Stories” community action project, students immersed themselves in pedagogy and research practices devised at the Center for Mason Legacies. With guidance from CML’s Manuel-Scott and mentors from Leadership Fairfax, March and her students set out “to preserve and honor the diverse stories of our community” in Springfield, Virginia.

student work: "GMU Campus History - Fenwick Library"

 

Assignment

 

  • • Look through the archive of GMU yearbooks or the photographs in the Special Collections and choose a picture of a space on campus
  • • Research the current location
  • • What history can you find of the space?
  • • How could you put this in context of the university's history?
  • • Does the space still exist?
    • ° If so, what changes have been made to it?
    • ° If not, what replaced it?

 

 

CML COURSES TEACH STUDENTS [NEED BACKGROUND ON THIS ASSIGNMENT'S CONTEXT] to interrogate spaces for evidence of how dominant narratives were crafted while overlooking much of their context.   

"The reimagining of the space of George Mason University is the story of the evolution of the place: two-year branch campus of U-Va., commuter school, top-tier university," doctoral student Kristina Helene Nohe wrote in a slide deck on spatial history completed as part of her master's coursework. "The history is embedded in the materiality." 

Nohe situates the late-1960s investment in Fenwick Library as evidence of what scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot views as the material implacability of historical archives and narratives buttressed by carefully preserved monuments and places and how they privilege power. "The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us," she quotes from Trouillot. "Mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel small... [T]oo conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history."

>> "Campus History" sample assignment: Fenwick Library