A 360° class held in 2022 recently had two papers published in the peer-reviewed journal Museum & Society, a rare case of an entire class of undergraduate students having their research published.
The 15 students in Minerals, Museums & Western Colonialism were coauthors on the papers with Associate Professor of Geology Selby Hearth, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts Carrie Robbins, M.A. ’08, Ph.D. ’13, and Collections Manager Marianne Weldon. But even more meaningful was how the course brought students and their instructors together as genuine collaborators as they examined issues prevalent in the wider museum community.
“More than anything, this program embodied what education should be: a dynamic partnership where students and teachers engage in creative mentorship, exchanging ideas and growing together,” Hearth says. “It was a model of how learning can—and should—break traditional boundaries to create something greater.
The papers examine how mineral cataloging practices erase the environmental and human cost of mineral extraction, and how they could be revised to instead center and preserve those stories.
The students presented their initial findings at a remote conference for the Geological Curators Group and the Society of Mineral Museum Professionals and then summarized that research in the papers.
“I've never had a course that generated a peer-reviewed paper, let alone a peer-reviewed paper with student co-authors, let alone one where all of the students were co-authors,” Hearth says. “And this 360 did that twice!”
Read the papers at the links below:
Cataloguing Minerals, Part One: Historical Cataloguing Practices and the Logics of Colonialism