“Annotating the Past: Students’ Critical Engagement with the Lady’s Museum”
Karenza Sutton-Bennett (PhD, University of Ottawa) and Karen Griscom (Professor, Community College of Rhode Island)
At the core of The Lady’s Museum Project is the abridged teaching edition with its curriculum, [1] crafted by Susan Carlile and Karenza Sutton-Bennett to facilitate the teaching of Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–61).[1] This open educational resource (OER) enables instructors and students from a variety of contexts to use, revise, and remix it.[2] Among its notable features is the glossing assignment, a potent tool that cultivates collaboration, enhances critical thinking, and upholds the foundational goals of open education—accessibility and social justice.[3]
The glossing assignment is an effective assignment for a variety of contexts. From 2021 to 2023, the glossing assignment was used in a variety of undergraduate courses at the University of Ottawa, the Community College of Rhode Island, Wayne State University, and Texas Woman’s University, as part of the collaborative creation for the teaching edition of the Lady’s Museum Project. For the assignment, students engaged actively with the open educational text by looking up unfamiliar words and creating annotations for future readers in an open-access collaborative writing space, using another freely accessible educational source, Johnson’s Dictionary Online.[4]. When the annotation activity was assigned to students, they were given a choice: whether they wanted their annotations to be published on the website as part of the teaching edition, [2] for the project’s co-editors understand that not all students want to have a digital footprint.[5]Starting in 2024, graduate students have been participating in the content creation for the scholarly edition of the Lady’s Museum Project.
In the hybrid classroom, teaching the glossing activity allows for immediate on-ground scaffolding and direct interaction between instructors and non-English major undergraduates. Co-editors Karenza and Kelly Plante initially introduced this assignment in Karenza’s synchronous, hybrid class focused on fiction and prose, a literature analysis and writing course intended [3] for first-year undergraduates, primarily non-English majors. This course, designed to enhance skills in research, textual analysis, and essay writing, found an engaging entry point through the glossing assignment with “The History of Harriot & Sophia.”[4] This serialized novel, the first the class tackled, provided an ideal setting to hone close reading and critical thinking skills.[6] Karenza and Kelly facilitated the assignment by first demonstrating with examples from other annotated social editions like The Poetry of Gertrude More.[7] After collectively annotating a few passages, they assigned each novel installment to a different student group for further annotation.
The following year, Karenza successfully navigated the logistical complexities posed by students in different time zones through a blend of synchronous and asynchronous activities. Karenza and Kelly taught the assignment in Karenza’s fully online fiction & prose class, accommodating students across different time zones. The class was divided into a synchronous lecture and an asynchronous writing tutorial, where students, using the course’s LMS, chose whether to meet via Zoom, email, or chat. Introduced during the live lecture, the assignment involved annotating Lennox’s serialized article, “Philosophy for the Ladies,” with guidance provided through an asynchronous mini-lecture and a detailed instruction sheet on footnote formatting. This flexible approach, allowing a week for completion, showed the assignment’s adaptability to in-person, hybrid, or fully virtual formats.
In spring 2023, Karen Griscom’s British Literature I students at Community College of Rhode Island[5] , Rhode Island’s largest public education institution, and a Hispanic Serving Institution[6] , completed an annotation assignment from The Lady’s Museum Project’s imperialism module, [7] featuring “The History of the Princess Padmani, which was published online as part of the teaching edition for The Lady’s Museum Project.”[8] The class composition is diverse, ranging from English majors and prospective high school teachers to those fulfilling Gen Ed or Humanities requirements, including some high school seniors from the Running Start program. To accommodate diverse literacy backgrounds, Karen integrated pre-course self-assessments and scaffolding modules, including an introduction to reading and writing about literature. This included strategies such as annotation (with models), vocabulary practice, and literature analysis guidance. As scaffolding to the glossing activity, students used theOxford English Dictionary early in the semester to create glossaries for Everyman (1530), Paradise Lost (1674), and Oroonoko (1688). [8] For the Lady’s Museum Project, they were introduced toJohnson’s Dictionary Online and read selections from Samuel Johnson’s Preface to ADictionary of the English Language. Because this fully asynchronous class consists of students with varying problem-solving skills and self-directedness, detailed written and video instructions are essential. Karen created customized videos for students demonstrating word selection, consulting Johnson’s Dictionary Onlineand the OED, using context clues, and annotating the Google Document. Introducing the Lady’s Museum Project’s content and the glossing assignment through strategic scaffolding activities facilitates meaningful experiences with the material for community college students with diverse literacy levels and preparedness.
In February 2024, co-editors Karenza and Kelly launched the scholarly edition phase of the Lady’s Museum Project. The co-editors re-mixed the glossing assignment to invite scholars to add annotations that are useful to scholars, rather than students. To kick-start the edition, the co-editors guest taught in Vicki Burke’s (University of Ottawa) graduate book history course. The premise was to have students take a look at the glosses the undergraduates created and remove the ones they thought were unnecessary for graduate students and scholars. In the assignment’s student-centered [9] approach, co-editors queried graduate students[10] on the preferred distinctions between annotations for teaching and scholarly editions. The consensus of Burke’s class was that they favored more detailed annotations [11] for the scholarly edition that included cultural references and clarified the evolution of word usage from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first century. As a collaborative knowledge creation resource, students were encouraged to expand on, rather than remove annotations from, those the undergraduates had made.
As part of the Lady’s Museum Project, the glossing activity is an exercise within the education resource that [12] ensures access for all and allows users to create, remix, and revise content. It fosters ‘collaborative knowledge’ by allowing students to work together and choose which words to gloss.[9] This process-oriented task allows each class and individual student to choose their own gloss targets. The assignment is renewable, permitting students to edit, add, or delete previous annotations. As Evrim Barron and Dana Alzubi note, “renewable assignments provide students with an opportunity to engage in open pedagogy to create and share OER.”[10] Karenza found the assignment encouraged a “participatory culture” that helped to “build trust” and promoted community engagement between the students that were in-person and online.[11]
The glossing activity cultivates critical thinking and enhanced understanding of the course material. Maha Bali explains that “digital annotation has clear potential pedagogical benefits as acts of annotation enhance deep reading.”[12] Deep or critical reading is vital in undergraduate courses. Throughout the semester, Karen observed her students’ growing independence with annotation tools. Initially, only a third engaged with the online textbook’s annotation feature, though most said they found instructor annotations beneficial. By semester’s end, usage had increased significantly, with students reporting they appreciated the clarity and context provided by the glossing assignments. For example, Jovan Garcia reported, “After doing the glossary and annotation assignments, I realize that the editorial notes make clear something that could be ambiguous, or simply modernize a definition for a reader of this century. Now, I rarely skip over the editorial notes and continue reading.”[13] The use of glossing activities not only fostered a higher level of textual engagement but also enhanced students’ abilities to interpret and appreciate complex materials through improved critical reading skills.
The glossing assignment supports the core principles of open education, namely accessibility and social justice. The glossing assignment utilizes OER to ensure equal access and is socioeconomically aware, requiring students to use Johnson’s Dictionary—an open-access, culturally specific eighteenth-century resource. Karenza and Kelly emphasize using Johnson’s over the OED, which is behind a paywall, thereby promoting equity among marginalized groups in deciding which word definitions to include in the footnotes.[14] In Karen’s community college classroom the collaborative annotation of “The History of the Princess Padmani” empowered students to engage with and contribute to a text that centers an Asian heroine whom many students said reminded them of a modern-day superhero. Despite its being a low stakes activity, its meaningfulness should not be underrated. Sally B. Seraphin et al. emphasize that “NDAs encourage students and faculty to examine their own identities and social locations to learn withand for members of multiply marginalized groups.”[15] The glossing assignment fostered productive learning that empowered students as creators of valued knowledge for themselves, their peers, and future readers of the teaching edition.
Jason Rodriguez Taveras, a spring 2023 CCRI student, completed a summer internship with the Lady’s Museum Project. In an interview, he said that the annotation experience in class and during the internship was “incredibly important, especially because I am planning to have a career in academia and editing.” Jason said, “It was rewarding to see my name in association with what will be a resource to many students, professors, and independent readers.” He emphasized, “My first outside-of-class experience working in academia . . . was a great experience that helped build my resume and build my confidence.”[16] Jason and his classmates’ experience creating knowledge through editing for the Lady’s Museum Project is an example of the best kind of open education practice (OEP)[13] ,[17] one that aligns access with social justice, something Sarah R. Lambert terms “representational justice.”[18]
Thanks to the multiple classes, volunteers, and interns who provided “content creation,” the teaching edition was completed in Fall 2023.[19] Along with the annotations, students contributed infographics, letters to the Trifler, and critical essays that helped to complete the teaching edition. In February 2024, co-editors Sutton-Bennett and Plante initiated the scholarly edition of the Lady’s Museum Project, adapting the glossing assignment to enhance its relevance for academic scholars through collaboration with Vicki Burke’s graduate course at the University of Ottawa. The glossing assignment effectively fosters collaboration, boosts critical thinking, and supports the core objectives of open education—accessibility and social justice–for diverse groups of learners.
The Lady’s Museum Project, guided by a process-oriented approach, features assignment prompts that promote peer learning. This method significantly enhances the social edition, central to the project’s focus on open educational resources, open pedagogy, and its growing community of Triflers.
[1] For further details of the curriculum, see Karenza Sutton-Bennett and Susan Carlile, “Teaching the Lady’s Museum and Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, and Beyond,” ABO: An Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts, 1640-1830, vol. 12, Summer 2022.
[2] An OER is defined as a learning object that is open and evolving by users interacting with it.
[3] Karenza Sutton-Bennett and Kelly Plante, “Gloss an Article” Lady’s Museum Project, accessed April 10, 2024,https://ladysmuseum.com/community/glossing-activity/.
[4] An open educational text is an electronic critical edition of a text that is openly available to read or download from the Internet.
[5] Seraphin, et al. note that “ethically instructors must give full advanced disclosure of ultimate users for student work with the option to contributed work shared anonymously or refrained all together (i.e. opt-out of public exposure) when appropriate, may instead consider offering ‘disposable’ alternatives (e.g. essays) of equivalent weight for students who are averse to this experimental/innovative pedagogy.” Sally B. Seraphin et al., “A Conceptual Framework for Non-Disposable Assignments: Inspiring Implementation, Innovation, and Research,” Psychology Learning & Teaching 18, no. 1 (2019): 89, https://doi: 10.1177/1475725718811711.
[6] See Karenza Sutton-Bennett and Kelly Plante, “The History of Hariot and Sophia,” The Lady’s Museum Project, accessed April 10, 2024, https://ladysmuseum.com/category/the-history-of-harriot-and-sophia/
[7] Raymond Siemens, et al. argue that “the social edition is process-driven, privileging interpretative changes based on the input of many readers; text is fluid, agency is collective, and many readers/editors, rather than single editor, shape what is important and, thus broaden the editorial lens as well as the breadth, depth, and scope of any edition produced in this way,” Ray Siemens et al., “Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media.” Ray Siemans, et al., Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 4 (2012): 483, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqs013.
[8] The imperialism module is one of two curriculum options created by Susan Carlile and Karenza Sutton-Bennett for the teaching edition of The Lady’s Museum Project. Carlile and Sutton-Bennett, “Curriculum Options,” The Lady’s Museum Project, accessed July, 9, 2024, https://ladysmuseum.com/teaching/curriculum-options/. Karen’s students’ work appears in the Course Reader. “The History of the Princess Padmani,” The Lady’s Museum, https://ladysmuseum.com/teaching/course-reader-documents/history-of-the-princess-padmani/.
[9] Maha Bali, Catherin Cronin, and Rajiv S. Jhangiani, “Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective,” Journal of Interactive Media in Education 1, no. 10 (2020): 4, https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565.
[10] Evrim Baran and Dana Alzoubi, “Affordances, Challenges, and Impact of Open Pedagogy: Examining Student Voices,” Distance Education, (May 2020): 4, https://doi: 10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409.
[11] Baran and Alzoubi, “Affordances, Challenges, and Impact,” 7.
[12] Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani, “Framing Open Educational Practices,” 4.
[13] Jovan Garcia, British Literature I Self-Reflection, CCRI, May 8, 2023.
[14] Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani, “Framing Open Educational Practices,” 5.
[15] NDA: Non-disposable assignment. Seraphin et al., “A Conceptual Framework,” 87.
[16] Jason Rodriguez Taveras, Personal Interview with Karen Griscom, February 19, 2024, CCRI.
[17] In their essay “Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective,” Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani define open educational practices (OEP) as those exercises that foreground process rather than content, learners rather than instructors, and social justice and equity priorities. Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani, “Framing Open Educational Practices, 1–2.
[18] Sarah R. Lambert writes, “The development or selection of a new version of a textbook (or perhaps a new resource altogether) written by people of colour where they are free to represent their own views, histories, and knowledges would be an act ofrepresentational justice, to give voice to those who are often not heard.” “Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education,” Journal of Learning for Development 5, no. 3 (2018):227–28, https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v5i3.290.
[19] Baran and Alzoubi assert that “content curation, the process of gathering information to co-create and produce open resources, was acknowledged as one of the most critical components of open pedagogy practices [. . .] through content curation [students] are [sic] able to acquire knowledge by building on available resources and tailoring them to satisfy contextual needs,” Baran and Alzoubi, “Affordances, Challenges, and Impact,” 7.