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0:00 Olivia: CAMPPFire Stories is a documentation of the work of members of the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing, or CAMPP, at the end of a three year incubation period at the University of Colorado Boulder. CAMPP’s mission promotes faculty and student curation, cultivation, co-creation, and publication of knowledge. Under this umbrella, members developed and published various projects that meet academic standards and are open and accessible to the community at large. These audio recordings contain first hand accounts from CAMPP and community members about their projects and their experiences throughout this period of development.

0:39 Catherine: In this episode, we will hear from Nicole Jobin and Suzanne Magnanini on their projects involving student contribution to sustainable education resources. Nicole Jobin is a Teaching Associate Professor (Senior Instructor) at CU Boulder’s Stories and Societies Residential Academic program (SRAP), with over 20 years of teaching experience and particular expertise in first-year education. She teaches European history courses for both SRAP and the Department of History and is passionate about making the past come alive through access to documents, artifacts, and archives that encourage students to make meaning of the past and their present. A CU Boulder 2021 Open Educator Award winner, she is also a participant in the ASSETT Innovation Incubator Initiative as a member of the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing (CAMPP). Suzanne Magnanini is an Associate Professor and President’s Teaching Scholar in the Department of French and Italian at CUBoulder. As a member of CAMPP, Suzanne has been experimenting with experiential learning and student publishing in her classroom, in part by building a Digital Annotated Bibliography of the exceptional fairy tale holdings in Norlin Library’s Special Collections. This work has been conducted in collaboration with Librarian Sean Babbs, graduate students in French, an undergraduate research team supported by UROP, and students enrolled in her classes.

2:13 Olivia: Ok great well thanks again for being here. I am with Suzanne and Nikki who have both been part of the CAMPP project for the last three years, and to allow them to introduce themselves I was gonna start us off by asking each of you how CAMPP began, for you both.

2:35 Suzanne: Well, for me, it began with the call for participation, and I think it began as something quite different because it seemed like it was a grant competition and they were going to be funding individual projects. And as it morphed it became more of a collective and a group project and a community project, which was interesting for me because I started with a completely different idea of what this experience was going to be like. That was going to be like many other experiences where you write a grant and you do your own project and then there’s an outcome or something, your project is completed.

3:19 Nikki: Yeah I honestly couldn’t remember what my original proposal was, and I was looking frantically through files trying to figure out if I could remember, and then I kind of stopped and thought, you know it almost doesn’t really matter. Because what I remember is that first meeting that was sort of chaos with all the different groups and different people, and once we started to talk together because our projects had been somewhat similar in original form as individuals. You know, realizing that there was a sort of vision underneath that that was all about projects related to getting information collected and out there and student participation potentially in that. And even though our projects were all really different that thread seemed to emerge pretty quickly of student involvement in creating something lasting, you know. And that even though each of our projects look really different, that was a piece of it.

4:14 Olivia: Definitely. So when you sort of set off on this journey for each of your individual projects, what were you kind of expecting out of being part of this collective?

4:25 Nikki: I actually feel like when I started it was pretty vague in some ways. I mean, I knew I wanted to, I go, I take students every year to special collections, all my classes go to special collections or archives or the CU Art Museum or some combination of all three. And I knew I wanted to do something to help kind of make that be an experience that wasn’t just a one off, that somehow we were collecting information or building a database or building some sort of repository that could be built on from one class to the next. So that’s kind of where I started, I don’t know. Suzanne?

5:02 Suzanne: I think it was similar for me. I was beginning to experiment with experiential learning, so moving away, and it was born of a kind of frustration of being a humanist. A lot of the assignments that we did were papers, writing an essay, which I still think is hugely important to know how to do that, but the students would spend all this time writing, I would spend all this time commenting, they would get the essay in their hand, they’d flip to the back, look at the grade and then shove it in their backpack. Not every student, but this would occur a lot. And so it felt like unfortunately the investment for the student was really just the grade, and so I began to experiment with some projects, doing things that- I was doing the exact same thing Nikki was doing- taking my students to the art museum, taking them to special collections to look at rare books, and had done a couple of book exhibits in the traditional form. And was thinking about ways to integrate this sort assignment into almost every class that I do, so that was sort of where I came at it.

6:18 Nikki: I would agree too that half the battle is getting students into some space, whether that was the art museum or special collections where you could see them get excited about what they were seeing in front of them. But then where do you take that? I mean you can take that to “hey this should be one of your primary sources for your paper” and that’s a step up from just doing all the research on the internet, right? But it just felt like there could be more to it than that, so definitely a lot of thinking about how to turn this into something more interesting, more engaging, and potentially that’s not throwaway, that’s not something that will just be left behind when you move on to the next semester.

6:59 Suzanne: And I think part of experiential learning is also creating something that’s durable, but that also somehow benefits the community in some way. And so it’s in some ways it dovetails nicely with the kind of ethics of digital humanities where we build stuff. That’s what we do with digital humanities. And so I think students felt more engaged because they were creating something that could be shared with other people in a way that maybe an essay on Petrarch’s sonnets cannot be shared with widely, and that what they created was going to endure. So when they went on, they could also come back, and you know, tell their employers, tell their family or just know that other students were benefitting from the things that they had created. So I think that was also a driver for me, thinking, you know, how can we get students engaged in this sort of activity?

8:04 Olivia: Yeah, that’s something, you know. Obviously, I was going to ask about this idea of this engagement being a little bit more sustainable, a little bit more durable. Not that essays don’t have their place, but having all of us, both students and teachers, you know, seeing the difference in that kind of engagement and that kind of feedback. I’m curious, kind of what student’s reactions have been to this? I imagine it’s a little bit new at the beginning, it might take a little bit of a little coaching, a little prompting. I’m curious, kind of how you see students evolve with this type of work in your classes.

8:44 Nikki: Go ahead, Suzanne.

8:46 Suzanne: I think they can be hilariously terrified, because all of a sudden, what was once between you and you know the professor- and grades are obviously private, they’re protected by the law, even- becomes a public display or public performance of sorts. And so I think that I encourage students to up their game. I think students became invested on the other side of the project. And what I mean by that is, at least for me, building a database, an annotated database of fairy tales. And we’re working with this collection of two thousand pieces in special collections, and we’re trying to make it more accessible by documenting every single fairy tale. So if there’s a single anthology with many tales now you’re able to actually dive in and see what individual tales are in this collection. And the books are beautifully illustrated. So we have all of these things and it’s funny, usually when I give an assignment students just do it, right? But in working with CAMPP they started to critique the platform we were using pretty early on, and they said this looks like your grandmother’s internet. And they were nice about it, they weren’t that mean, but they critiqued a number of things, and so it’s interesting. At that point, the student isn’t just responding in doing the task, but the student is saying, let me ask about that task and I’m going to push back on the task. And what I found was that students were pushing back both with the digital platform we were using, and we’ve moved to Web Express after looking at different choices, but also content. So they were really the drivers to say you know,

10:38 Suzanne: This is really Eurocentric, you need to be more global in your perspective. I’m an Italianist by training, so I tend to be Eurocentric and Italian centric even beyond that, so it was great to have them pushing back on the task itself and not just, you know, tweaking the assignment or their response. So it really put the students in a position of being collaborators with me, if not drivers, the driving force behind a lot of the choices we ended up making over the course of the year and a half, two years that we’ve been working.

11:17 Nikki: Yeah I would agree that probably some of the more exciting moments come from when students are willing to be more active participants in framing how things are going to look and what’s the scope and how we are going to do this. And I will say that even though my vision started out very similar to Suzanne’s of “oh let’s create a single collection that’s around a theme,” I am much more paramedic frankly and I have a pretty wide range of classes that I teach in terms of subjects and so it ended up being a lot less focused I think than what Suzanne did with the fairy tales. But the nice thing is I’ve bounced around a bit, I’ve taught, I mainly teach in the residential academic programs and so I mainly teach first and second years or mainly first years and a few second years and then occasionally I teach an upper division for the history department. And the nice thing is by doing both of those I’ve been able to actually involve students in projects kind of on both ends and so now I kind of have a lot of things that are sort of one off projects but they’re, each one has taught me something. And the last one which was an upper division class last semester, they really did what Suzanne was talking about with the critique of what it looked like, and what are we trying to do with this, and how do we want it to look when people land on this page, and it was really fun to have them be more engaged. I would say on the opposite end with the first years I think they are the most timid about the whole idea of something being public and I honestly dialed back my expectations on that.

12:52 Nikki: I said, look, everybody has to do the project but it’s up to you whether or not that actually hits the airwaves for public consumption, you can keep what you have done private. The entries you’ve made that are literally adding objects to our sort of repository of things that are cataloged, those are public no matter what but your piece of it, your story, your narrative around that does not have to be public, and I think they appreciate that. But you do occasionally get the question of remind me why we’re doing it this way, and I think you hear that more from the first years than you do from the upper division students, but in the end most of them get to the place where it’s like “oh you know I was afraid of this but it was, it turned out to be really cool” or “oh I wasn’t too sure about doing this when you talked about it at the beginning of the semester but I really like the way this turned out.” And so it is worth it.

13:46 Suzanne: And I think what you said, Nikki, is so important, that aspect of choice, so I’ve also done that, asking students whether they want their entry to be anonymous or not. And I think that is really important with public projects because obviously people have different levels of comfort with being public. It might just be, they’re not feeling great about how they performed in this single class and they don’t want their name attached to the work, perhaps, or something like that. So I’ve always provided students with a choice and I think that’s really key.

14:26 Suzanne: And that’s one thing I’ve admired about your work because I’ve been working with students in upper division classes or with students who are highly motivated and are part of a UROP team, an undergraduate research opportunity team, I have a team grant. And I work with them, and I collaborate with Sean Babbs in the library. So those students have self selected into the project and that’s hugely different because when you’re dealing with first year students, I think they’re- you’re teaching them how to learn and you’re teaching them how to be a college student along with whatever content you’re required or you’re trying to convey and teach there. And so it’s both exciting, probably for them, but I could see it also as being hugely intimidating. And I’m working with my group now to devise classroom prompts that would be friendly and welcoming for students at all levels. And so I’m hoping that by having that student input again at the creation end of an assignment might help to address the anxiety or the stress that maybe first year students might have. I’m not sure if that’s going to work, but it’s one thing that we’re trying. And so it’s like having the students design the assignments rather than have me with my professor language design the assignment.

15:35 Nikki: Yeah that’s, we actually did something like that last semester with the first years in that I literally gave them choices between writing a blog post, making it a narrative timeline- I’m trying to think what other things- atlas, a historical atlas page. I mean I gave them like five or six different choices and all of them involved essentially using an object and kind of going through the same types of steps to research context and all that stuff. But the product was very different based on their comfort level with how much they wanted to get their hands dirty on the side of what they were producing digitally and I think that really helped. It made them less afraid of it, and some of them changed their mind and did things that were more complicated as they got into it more which was cool.

16:24 Olivia: That’s awesome and I think in everything you’re describing- those critical thinking skills not just to do an assignment for the grade and maybe have done decently on that assignment, but to interrogate the assignment, interrogate that context, be thinking about the platforms, and what you both are saying- the critical thinking skills about why you’re doing something is always what we want to be teaching. Usually the goal, those critical thinking skills, and yet they can be hard to coax out of students. So this pathway seems to do that well. So I’m curious, you know as both you know CAMPP collective members, how has your work sort of evolved alongside together? You know, you do your individual projects and you have your individual students, sometimes shared students, but then you also meet as a collective and update each other, and what that has been like to see each other’s work grow over the years.

17:23 Nikki: I have I guess I would say that it kind of goes along with one of those things I most admire about Suzanne’s work is because you’ve had this focus on fairy tales and in sort of it’s much more tight that what I’ve been doing. I feel like I’ve seen the idea stay really consistent about that focus. But watching you be creative about obstacles you’ve come into contact with or seeing like you said the way the students responded to the platform and just kind of hearing about the response to each of those challenges and what you did, it’s given me ideas, it’s given me ideas all the way along. And so I really appreciate that and I feel like that’s the benefit of the collective, is that you get that. Everybody’s sort of pieces, warts and all around the table and sometimes you learn just as much as you do from the super success piece as you do from the obstacle and how somebody confronted it and I think it’s a really cool advantage to doing something in a collective.

18:19 Suzanne: Yeah, I think the collective also supplies a network of people. So you have people you can count on, or you have people. Thinking about Nikki’s, you know, working with first year students, now I can imagine, like well maybe I’ll try that, maybe I’ll try it with the first year group, but now I know maybe what to watch for. As Nikki was saying, obstacles and part of it is just camaraderie, especially because we’ve been working over the pandemic. We didn’t start that way, but it was always nice to be able to get together with like minded people. Some people who I already knew. Nikki also works on Italian history, so our paths had crossed many times before, but other people in the collective I didn’t know at all, and came to see the different projects they’re working on and the different directions they’re taking with their work. So I think that was great, and we also had an opportunity, at a lot of our meetings there were even other people coming in to help us answer questions, to talk to us about resources, to talk to us about theory, pedagogical theories, and all of that I think really helped. And for me, this is going to make me sound like a slacker, but just to know that, you know, I have a lot going on, I’m a chair of a department, I have a research agenda unfolding that doesn’t have to do with this project, I’m teaching. I’m doing all of these things and to know that you had to sort of go back in a month, and people were going to say how’s the project going, and to know that even that there was that year to year that you were trying. There was a rhythm throughout the year and you would stop and assess at the end. For me that was very helpful, because it was a way for me to prioritize the project within. I think you know Nikki’s the same. We all have all kinds of work that we were doing, so having that group was a way for me to really move this project that I’ve been thinking about for you know, fifteen years, probably ten years. But this was a way to really bring it to a point where I think you know in a year or two I could be applying for grants if I wanted, bigger grants to support the project. So I think that was super helpful.

20:48 Nikki: Yeah I think also watching some of the- to bring up the grants I mean- watching your work with UROP really helped me envision what it would look like to work with a student as somebody not just you know a class as assignment but hey what would this look like if we had a partnership going on for the semester, for the year. And because of that I actually just worked out an agreement with a student from Sewell, from my residential academic program, who is going to help me next semester. And we’re kind of doing a piece of this that I couldn’t do with a class because it just wasn’t, it didn’t fit the assignment, part of the idea of creating something for an assignment, and so I’m really excited about that because that’s something I wouldn’t have I don’t think had the confidence to do without watching what you did. So I think it’s all that piece of you do keep learning from each other and you have a little bit of responsibility back to the group to say okay here’s the next piece that I did. And it’s exciting to be able to share that too because you get good feedback on it as well.

21:49 Suzanne: That’s great that you’re going for the UROP. I think you’re going to- maybe you’ll create a team or something.

21:58 Nikki: Yeah I mean I want to, I want to apply next year for actual students, this is we kind of worked it out inside with some of the money from ASSETT and some help from Sewell. But this is like getting my toes wet and then next year I’m going to try to see if I can’t get two or three students involved and that would be really cool.

22:15 Suzanne: Yeah, for students, I was really struck that, uh, so the students I had working on it last year, one was a French- I guess I had an Italian major and a French minor and the other two students came from astrophysics and mathematics, and I guess one was with a French minor and they came from very different backgrounds, and I was surprised at how important that project ended up being for them no matter what their major was. So for me it was really heartening to see that now that they’ve gone out into the working world, or they’ve gone to graduate school, it’s something that they really valued, being a part of that team and working alongside a professor as a collaborator. And not just, I don’t know, you know, doing photo copies, or that kind of like an internship, in that sense, so I think it’ll be exciting for your students, too.

23:21 Nikki: Yeah I’m really hoping, I mean it reminded me of how my first work study job went when I was an undergrad forever ago, but I did work on a library guide for one of my professor’s classes and it was one of those things where in and of itself it doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was the idea that I was getting to see kind of the inner workings of his building a new course and then I was working on things that would help that and help future students. And I don’t know, it just connected me to the whole subject in a different way and I kind of see that opportunity happening here that you know here’s a student that’s interested in these works that we’ve been looking at. He wants to do more with them, okay, what are we going to do to build something that’s going to benefit future students but also give him an opportunity to learn more about the back end of what this stuff looks like when you’re building it. So it’s really exciting, it’s really cool.

24:16 Suzanne: It is because it does in some ways career exploration in a way that a class- and I teach literature classes and loved them all, every one I took and love to teach them. But it’s different in that it provides the students with again, coming back to that idea of experience. It turns what we do into work, and I think of my research as work, with all the values and all the things that are attached to the idea of work, but I think for students they are sometimes having a, they’re having to make a leap from the separation of work and school to the idea that these two things are going to, somehow, at one point come together, right? And maybe what you learned in school you’ll be using at work, or your work becomes what you studied. Or maybe it doesn’t, but there will be some relationship in the future. And so I think that these opportunities allow students to navigate that or to see those connections really clearly in a way that, especially in the humanities, I think it’s harder for some students to see the connection between history class and maybe a career in museum curation, or a career in library science, or a career in some other field like that.

25:29 Nikki: Yeah I definitely agree with that.

25:41 Olivia: So we’ve sort of touched on this a little bit, but I’m curious, you know. Is your destination and this journey in CAMPP is this, has it changed over the last three years? And we’ve definitely touched on the ways that it has and it hasn’t, but I am curious in what ways it maybe has changed, as you’ve learned and been a part of the collective over the past three years.

26:04 Nikki: I guess maybe I’ll start where I just ended, which is, even though I talked about it I think earlier on, just the reality of trying to have some student employees working on this with me or student researchers working on this with me in a way that’s closer to what UROP does. It was scary and I didn’t know if I would even be able to do it since I mainly have first year students. You know I do get to teach upper division but it’s kind of like once every other semester or every third semester or something like that so it’s not a steady stream of people that I have contact with to sort of advertise this idea to. So yes that piece is really different from where I started, the other thing I would say that just really changed over the course, the pandemic made kind of this big hole in the middle where we couldn’t go to special collections, and Susan Gwen Chipman from special collections and I had to do a lot of improvising to try and get students access to things online and do virtual visits and that kind of stuff. And it was really, it was really neat and I’m really glad we did it but that detour actually got me off on other tracks of things that are still going to keep going now that CAMPP is winding down, including working on some open educational resource texts and actually have students contributing timelines to a history text I’m now using that I adapted that somebody else wrote but I’ve adapted it and added some stuff to it including these timelines that students have created. You know so they’re like these side avenues that happened and I think they might not have happened if it weren’t for the pandemic. Maybe they would have anyway, I don’t know, but it’s really cool because again I can see it how it all connects to the original purpose of what we kind of set out to do and it’s neat that there’s all these different threads that came from this one experience, lots of things to pursue in the future.

28:01 Suzanne: Yeah, I just had a, I guess because this was called an innovation incubator, I didn’t really know much about incubators so I went and spoke with a neighbor who works in the tech incubators down in Boulder. And so I just had this idea that was, you know I was that there was going to be a product at the end of this, right that that it was going to be three years, and then you come up with a widget or product and then you try to sell it right to make some money off or something like that, and um, we, we're not there. Yeah, we're getting there, like I think we're getting there, we have many more entries in the database. We've switched platforms. We're thinking about different features. So I think that I, I thought I was going to. It's kind of hilarious because I think I thought like a student essay. Like, well, there's a due date and that thing is going to be done. And it's not so. I think I'm here with an open project and will look for ways to move forward, and ways to keep going forward. So I think that's where I'm probably heading towards developing it more, and looking for more support. So I think that the pandemic in a way made me think more about access and equity, issues of access and equity to document. And maybe maybe that's sort of the place where we're going Is is to make this really stunning collection of works available to many more people, even k through twelve where they would have access and maybe could even be contributors to the project in some way, so

29:54 Olivia: Well, that segways perfectly to what I was going to ask next. Which is sort of where is your endpoint for the journey right now, but where is it going to take you next, and of where's your next road or pathway for this?

30:07 Nikki: It's so hard to think of it ending. I know that sounds kind of crazy but I think because I've been so process oriented rather than product oriented in some ways partially, I mean just by necessity you start focusing on getting the process right and figuring out you know “oh I tried this, this didn't work, this part did work, okay how can I move that forward'' it doesn't seem like there is an end to this. I mean the incubator might be over but I feel like yeah what I've started to do here is going to go forward into future classes. And yes hopefully in the long run there will be more products in the sense that my pursuing the past website will have lots of links to different student created sites and things that people can explore and look at that relate to the projects that go back to their origins in CAMPP. I guess the other thing I would say is I really hope that even though the incubator is over that maybe there there is some entity that comes out that lives on beyond it whether it's a community of practice or you know even just that CAMPP sort of hangs on as a thing that those of us that have done this or people who are newly interested meet once a semester or a couple times a semester and talk about issues like this. What are some of the best tools, what are the projects you're working on, and how can we help support each other. I just hope that there's some piece of that that can go forward even if it's not as intensely as we've been working on it now. So we'll see, we'll see whether or not that's possible.

31:43 Suzanne: Yeah, I think we always had this idea that CAMPP, it was a collective, in all senses of that word, and that it was going to be something that was going to invite more people in and grow a community in some ways. And I mean in the beginning that was, we were even thinking of taking colleagues to lunch, that kind of person to person, grass roots building of an idea or an ethos on campus about student publishing. I hope that is one way that we move forward, and it might be another way that I'm thinking of moving forward, too, is to create. It's interesting, the first group of UROP students that I had at the end of the year, they immediately wrote a guide for the next year students, and so it was like that was their initial impulse, again, students driving like that was their impulse, like I can make a guide. That, and one student took it upon herself to make this really incredible guide to how to add to the database and what's important and questions that we still have. So I'm wondering if that's not maybe one way that the project will live on. I think for me, I started with no database, and now I have a little database, sort of like Nikki, now she has all these assignments or these projects there, so that's sort of an endpoint. You know, where that's an accomplishment in itself, but I hope that this will grow, and people will join and be interested about how they can either integrate the projects we already have up and running, where we could provide portable assignments that professors could just download or have a page for Canvas and then be using our plans or our projects, or something more involved. Where if someone were interested in getting a UROP team together, they could just say hey, Susanne and Nikki. How did you do that? How is that done? And what advice would you give me?

34:02 Olivia: Well, that might be a nice little end point for this, is what advice might you give people interested in doing this kind of publishing with students, being a collective sort of thing.

34:16 Nikki: I would say, and this may be different than what Suzanne will say, because I would say there's so many choices out there. Start small, pick one thing you're passionate about that you think you could get students interested in being passionate about, being creators around, and if you can just get that one thing you know even if it's only adding one assignment or adding one little element to whatever it is that you're doing with a class. It will grow if it's successful it will happen so just don't be intimidated, start small.

34:53 Suzanne: And I would say, lean in on other people's expertise and lean in on other people's experience. So for example, both Nikki and I, our projects are born out of collaborations that we developed with Norland Special Collections librarians, Susan Gwen Chipman, Sean Babbs, Greg Robl. All of these people have helped us imagine projects using objects, so object based learning. Also, Hope Saska in the CU Art Museum has been instrumental in teaching my students at least how to look and how to observe visual culture. And so I think that you're not alone and that might be the first step for people who are interested is to get yourself outside of your classroom and get yourself into someone else's space. We have multiple museums on campus, we have multiple resources in the library, we have film archives, we have this rich collection of objects right on campus a short walk from your classroom. So I would advise people to get out and see what's out there as a first step. Do that first assignment as Nikki said, and then build from there.

36:24 Olivia: Amazing. Well, thank you both so much for taking this time and sharing a little bit of your stories and what it's been like to be a part of CAMPP over the last three years.