Faculty Resources - Teaching Support

The Moakley Archive staff works with Suffolk faculty to integrate archives, oral histories and other primary sources into the Suffolk University curriculum. Building course content around primary sources can provide an engaging, multi-sensory experience for students that helps develop their critical thinking and information literacy skills.

Suffolk faculty members from across the disciplines have found meaningful ways to use the Moakley Archive’s unique resources in their courses.

Contact archive staff to for resources available through the Archives and how to incorporate the collections in your class.

Teaching Tools

  • El Salvador Foreign Policy Lesson: students analyze selected historical sources about U.S. interests in El Salvador during the 1980s and 1990s (Lesson Plan)
  • Digital Collections: browse the Archive's digital objects (yearbooks, photos, documents and multimedia)
  • Online Exhibit platform: available for student projects
  • Customized Assignments and Projects: work with archivists to create course-specific activities

Instruction Sessions

  • Archival Research Tutorials: students learn how to find and use primary source materials
  • Content-based Sessions: students examine and discuss primary sources on a specific theme (ie.busing, foreign policy)
  • Class Visits to the Archives: small groups (10-15 students) can examine primary sources on themes related to course topics or learning objectives

Examples of Course Collaborations and Student Projects

  • Gateway to the Past: The Historian’s Practice (HST 200): Primary sources are used as readings, course assignments and exercises to support an exploration of history as an academic discipline and profession. Students examine course catalogs to understand changes in the history curriculum over time, create digital exhibits using primary sources (Boston Massacre exhibit), write a document analysis essay, and use maps to study Boston’s busing crisis.
  • French Resistance Project: A Suffolk undergraduate translated and described interviews of women in the French Resistance from the Weitz papers.
  • History of Boston (HST 383): Students designed digital exhibits featuring oral history interviews with former Mayor Raymond Flynn and Congressman Stephen Lynch using the Archive's online content platform, Omeka.
  • Study Trips to El Salvador and Vietnam (GVT 387): Students’ pre-trip preparations include examining documents and media from Suffolk's collections and Congressmen Moakley’s papers to understand perspectives on the political, social, and economic context of the wars in Vietnam and El Salvador.
  • Government Research Methods (GVT 120): Using documents from the Moakley Papers focused on busing and foreign policy, students are introduced to archival research and the importance of observation, context, and multiple points of view.
  • Legislative Politics (GVT 347): Students explore the inner workings of Congress through materials from the Moakley Papers and the Dick Armey Papers at the University of Oklahoma. Course readings, assignments, and in-class exercises are drawn from the collections’ strategy documents, policy briefings, constituent correspondence, oral history interviews, photographs, and other media.
    Archer Fellows Seminar: Students gained hands-on experience doing archival research and completing projects such as editing oral histories and creating a walking tour of Suffolk’s campus.

Course Development Grant for Suffolk Faculty

The Moakley Archive Faculty Course Development Grant provides stipends of up to $2000 to members of Suffolk University's faculty who wish to incorporate primary sources from the Archive’s research collections into new or existing courses. Information about the grant program.