The Teacher as Accidental Archivist

Abstract

The day my partner of 30 years, the photographer Robert Giard, died, I became an archivist. There were the many artifacts of daily life that take on extraordinary meaning at times of intense grief and there was also the large body of work—thousands of photographic prints, negatives, contact sheets, diaries, and workbooks—that he left in my care. In this essay I explore the complex emotions that creating a functional archive elicited in me and the unexpected ways that this process prompted me to reimagine the work of teaching and learning in classrooms.

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