CAMPUS PROFILE
(Sewanee, Tennessee)
The goals of this project consisted of two new courses, new course modules for the public schools and Sewanee students and faculty, and dissemination of the results of this research and use of these modules in community organizations. The two courses are still being developed, one in public history and the other in Anthropology, to be offered in the academic year 2021-22. The mini-modules are also under development, and one has been piloted. Additional piloting and dissemination of this research and related mini-modules will proceed during the summer and fall of 2021.
Jim Peterman, Director of Civic Engagement and Professor of Philosophy
Highlights
Through the Bonner Community Engaged Learning initiative, faculty at the University of the South piloted an innovative learning community designed to create place-based education modules for the public schools and Sewanee classes. Beyond the specific place-based education goals outlined below, this project has an existential significance for the University of the South.
This project is designed to take seriously Vice-Chancellor Reuben Brigety’s and the University of the South’s Regents’ call from last summer to the University to “wholeheartedly commit itself to an urgent process of institutional reckoning in order to make Sewanee a model of diversity, of inclusion, of intellectual rigor, and of loving spirit in an America that rejects prejudice and embraces possibility.”
These projects in public history and public archaeology outlined below move our institution significantly along a path of greater understanding of our history and the history of the people who have lived alongside the University for the past 150 years. Faculty will work with small local history organizations, and local school systems to develop an improved sense of their history as a stepping stone for advocacy for a ballot initiative that will call for a significant change in the wording of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to eliminate any possibility of state-sponsored forced labor.
This project is foregrounded by the innovative work being done by two scholars who have recently joined the University as part of a new Southern Studies Program that is seeking to change the way we think about the history of the South and to expand that story to include the diversity of its people and the diversity of those people’s experiences. Dr. Tiffany Momon is a public historian who brings expertise in how to work with community groups to build out a richer story of the community. Dr. Camille Westmont is an historical archaeologist who not only is writing a book on activist archaeology but is also opening a local archaeological site that they believe will prove to be a critical investigation to understand the history of the convict leasing system and its connection with modern-day systems of mass incarceration.
Progress on the Public Archaeology Goals
The public archaeology portion of this proposed program will help the community understand a local site better and connect that understanding to social action for racial justice. The public history portion of the proposed program will focus on work with local heritage groups and will instill best practices for collecting, securing, curating, and displaying cultural resources while giving the community full say in the stories being told. This research, being developed in two new courses, will produce course modules for use in local public school and college courses interested in fostering an understanding of place.
Visiting Assistant Professor of History Camille Westmont, in front of a coke oven in South Cumberland State Park, near the site of the Lone Rock Stockade. Lone Rock prisoners burned coal in the ovens to produce coke, a fuel used in ironmaking. Photo by Buck Butler
Professor Westmont is actively developing her syllabus for the Activist Archaeology course in the fall. This process has been slower than anticipated in part because Dr. Westmont is attempting to ensure that the syllabus’ reading list incorporates an appropriately diverse selection of scholars and writers. The course is now listed with the Registrar and will be on offer to students Fall 2021. She is also actively working on two mini-modules. The first is on Public Archaeology and the second is on Cultural Heritage. This course will incorporate advocacy for a ballot initiative that will call for a significant change in the wording of the Tennessee Constitution to eliminate any possibility of state-sponsored forced labor, removing the wording “except as punishment for crime” from language prohibiting slavery in other circumstances.
Westmont’s public archaeology work is ongoing and reaching an ever-growing audience. Although icy weather and COVID precautions limited trips to the archaeological site during the winter, Westmont has continued to engage communities through groups “Transcribe-a-Thons” of the Lone Rock Stockade convict records. She hosted a Transcribe-a-Thon in January for Sewanee’s VISTA volunteers that was a resounding success; she will be hosting additional Transcribe-a-Thons with members of the Nashville chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in early April and another Transcribe-a-Thon for the greater Sewanee community in mid--April. This project will support a course this summer (Anthropology 357) that will use work completed to train students in historical archaeology as they excavate at the Lone Rock Stockade.
Progress on the Public History Goals
St. Marks Community, during its first summer (2019) homecoming, public history data collection event
Tiffany Momon is designing a new course on public history and community archiving. This course aims to immerse students in a semester-long study of community archiving and standard archival practices. Additionally, this course will involve lectures from leading community archivists. The second part of the course takes a “maymester” approach by immersing students in hands-on community archiving practices with community groups and historical societies for one month in the summer. Building on work completed in Summer 2019 by Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, students in this course will host community events to digitize community records leading towards the creation of a network of digital archives. Momon is actively involved in creating a prototype digital archive focused on Sewanee’s African American St. Mark’s Community. Scheduled to launch in June 2021, this digital archive will serve as an example of what Sewanee students can create for other communities through the power of community archiving. In support of this project, Momon has created a mini-module on student-led oral history projects and used this mini-module to help students prepare for oral history projects with members of Sewanee’s St. Marks Community and piloted it with Sewanee’s Bonner Leaders program.
Public Dissemination Projects for Fall 2021
This preparation, being done Winter and Spring of 2021, will be prepared for use in the schools and piloted by Dr. Daniel Carter in his Education 250 course: Curriculum Design for Place-Based Education. This way of using student and faculty research also allows them to offer a model for high-level academic research that at the same time can be put to community use to develop a shared sense of place.
With this learning community, which in its full development will involve community members, faculty, students, and local teachers and students, Sewanee seeks to develop more robust multidisciplinary collaboration with community-engagement focus and to bring the public humanities resources to support a shared understanding of local history with the hope that this will spur not only community-building but also a shared vision for continuing collaboration across our South Cumberland Plateau region of Appalachia.