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Oct. 23rd, 2012 12:46 amMy last ANU course for the year starts Thursday week. This means that in a few days time my blog is going to be not quite so obsessed with academia. It's not full (though the class has a healthy number of students) so I'll give Canberrans the URL, just in case there's a wild unmet desire for writing family histories. You can find the link here: http://www.anu.edu.au/cce/cecourses/outlines/literature/Writeyourfamilyshistory.pdf
This isn't a genealogy course (there are better people to teach that than me) - it's writing skills and understanding history and family and how to handle and interpret documents. It's about actually writing a family history: as fiction, as narrative, as something else entirely. I've taught it so many times and each time it comes out completely different for the very first thing we do as a class is work out what each and every student needs most from it and it's never the same needs. I always teach the writing skills, but sometimes I teach oral history skills and sometimes publication options and sometimes give an introduction to document preservation and sometimes teach how to find out about a place and a time when it looks as if there is nothing to find.
It's the last of my non-Wednesday teaching until at least February and it's one of my favourite courses. I wanted something to look forward to, just in case everything went awry with my end of the doctorate. Which it didn't. The materials are now in other hands (mainly my supervisor's) for the next step. I wanted something cheering, though, just in case. It's rather wonderful when the 'just in case' doesn't materialise and there's just that little bit of fun in life without something dire to counterbalance it*.
*I need to touch wood, cross my fingers, mutter warnings to myself, since I do tend to attract the dire and positive statements are probably a bit daring.
This isn't a genealogy course (there are better people to teach that than me) - it's writing skills and understanding history and family and how to handle and interpret documents. It's about actually writing a family history: as fiction, as narrative, as something else entirely. I've taught it so many times and each time it comes out completely different for the very first thing we do as a class is work out what each and every student needs most from it and it's never the same needs. I always teach the writing skills, but sometimes I teach oral history skills and sometimes publication options and sometimes give an introduction to document preservation and sometimes teach how to find out about a place and a time when it looks as if there is nothing to find.
It's the last of my non-Wednesday teaching until at least February and it's one of my favourite courses. I wanted something to look forward to, just in case everything went awry with my end of the doctorate. Which it didn't. The materials are now in other hands (mainly my supervisor's) for the next step. I wanted something cheering, though, just in case. It's rather wonderful when the 'just in case' doesn't materialise and there's just that little bit of fun in life without something dire to counterbalance it*.
*I need to touch wood, cross my fingers, mutter warnings to myself, since I do tend to attract the dire and positive statements are probably a bit daring.