About

In Spring 2017, the First-Year Composition Program in the English Department at Oklahoma State University launched a new curriculum that put the concept of the archive at the center of instruction about research methodologies and scholarly reading and writing practices. The intention of this curriculum change was to help students recognize and understand the ways in which archives and archival practices – and, therefore, also the histories they make possible – do not maintain static, objective relations to the materials they collect and preserve but advance ideological motivations and biases (sometimes entirely unspoken) that can change (sometimes drastically) over time. Now, students fulfilling their general education Writing requirements at OSU must reflect critically not only on the topics they are researching and writing about but also on how knowledge about these topics is made available to them in the form of physical archives, digital collections, oral history projects, and the scholarly writing that benefits from these institutions.

The Archive Oklahoma Initiative was created in response to this curriculum change to give special attention to the ways in which Oklahoma history and culture has been shaped by the questions of what is included and what is excluded from archives. Requiring students to undertake research projects that address topics and concerns unique to Oklahoma gives them a more refined appreciation of the campus, city, and state in which they attend college; it also ensures that they are exposed to and use archival holdings of Oklahoma State’s Edmon Low Library that they could not find at any other repository on earth.

Finally, the Archive Oklahoma Initiative aims to supplement coursework in The First-Year Composition Program at OSU with speakers series and other events which we hope to lead to service-learning partnerships between on- and off-campus communities and agencies. This website, which we will use in part to advertise such events, will also serve as a repository of student writing and other completed coursework so incoming classes of students completing their first-year writing requirements at OSU can benefit from the work of their peers and so the wider world has the opportunity from benefiting from it as well.