On December 17, 2024, the Modern Language Association, the flagship scholarly association for literatures and languages in the United States, awarded Laura Hartmann-Villalta (lecturer in the UWP) and Heidi Herr (librarian for English, philosophy, and special collections student engagement) a national teaching and publication award recognizing their collaboration and pedagogical innovation for the course entitled AS.004.101: Reintroduction to Writing: Sheridan Libraries Collaboration.

With assignments built around the archival holdings of the Sheridan Libraries and an excursion to the Peabody Library serving as inspiration for the acquisition proposal assignment, Hartmann-Villalta designed this course with significant input from Herr and Margaret Burri, Associate Director for Academic Liaison and Special Collections, to place writing with and about the library’s holdings at the center of the course. 

In addition, Hartmann-Villalta and Herr considered the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (here) as a guide. The “Sheridan Libraries Collaboration” course adds more explicit engagement with information literacy and archival material, understanding that research works in a similar way to writing: one must adapt, acknowledge others, recognize context, etc. 

Because the general aim of the “Reintroduction to Writing” courses is to teach agility in writing, the course design focuses on transferrable skills. Aspects of information literacy, such as introducing research tools, examining indicators of authority through rhetorical awareness, and discussing re-searching as serendipitous, non-linear, and iterative, are part of the writing instructor’s Reintroduction to Writing curriculum regardless of the course, but in their particular course, Herr augments that instruction through examples from Special Collections and Hartmann-Villalta and Herr discuss how expert approaches to building university collections have changed through the decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The assignments allow students to reflect how information creation itself is a process and always in flux. 

In the culminating assignment — borrowed in part and in some moments entirely from Herr! — the Sheridan Libraries Collaboration students work within an imaginary budget to propose their own acquisitions to the Hopkins archive, scouring the rare books sellers (and eBay) online for finds of their own that would complement or expand what Special Collections already holds. Past students have proposed a collection of Chinese restaurant menus that demonstrate the changing American perception and understanding of Chinese food in the 20th century; a collection of Hopi Kachina dolls; extending the existing women’s suffrage collection by purchasing the Welsh magazine Y Frythones; acquiring a small archive of 15 photos kept by a female Johns Hopkins medical student in 1943; a collection of African American cookbooks; and the Mingkwai typewriter, which allows the writer to type using over 90,000 characters in Chinese, despite being the same size as a Western typewriter. Regardless of whether or not these items are purchased (and sometimes they are!), the students imagine a more diverse, representative Hopkins through their proposals.