Everyone who has taken a degree or a master’s degree has had the feeling that what was explained in class sometimes had little to do with the reality of the non-academic world. As if the teaching staff lived on another planet. Avoiding this is one of the great concerns of the teaching team at the UAB’s School of Archiving and Document Management (ESAGED).
It is quite a challenge to find the bridge that connects training with the professional environment where the knowledge acquired will be applied, especially in areas such as marketing and communication because the reality of archival institutions greatly limits the capacity for action when it comes to dissemination and it is then that the enormous distance that can exist between the theory explained in the master’s degree and the reality of the working world becomes more evident.
For this reason, ESAGED proposed collaborating with Archivists Without Borders: We wanted to put into practice the theory explained in the sessions by working in a real environment. I recently learned that in the jargon of current pedagogy this is called something like “learning by doing”, but for me it is nothing more than getting your feet on the ground and gaining experience while being aware of the difficulties that one finds outside of a classroom.
And this is what was done during the first semester of the 2022-2023 academic year with the students of the second year of the Official Master in Archival Studies and Document Management. The work mechanics were very simple and it was only necessary to create teams of about five people to take on the tasks previously agreed with AsF: make a communication plan; prepare the press kit; devise a campaign to attract new members; propose an improvement to the website; propose a digital communication strategy through social networks; think of a campaign to attract financial resources to purchase material for the archive of the Sahrawi Republic; and create a dissemination product to publicize the fund of the Sociedad de Beneficència de Naturals de Catalunya de l’Havana.
As agreed at the beginning of the course, between September 2022 and January 2023 the teams met weekly and gradually became familiar with the chosen task. The result was a series of magnificent proposals, the result of the commitment and effort of the students, who spared no hours to carry it out. I saw them suffer, get stuck, hesitate… but I never saw them give up or compromise their efforts. It was exciting to witness their evolution and see how little by little they gained security and confidence until the moment they presented some very good work. For me personally, what I experienced in the classroom during that semester was memorable and gives meaning to the task that a teacher is supposed to do and to the mission that the university has.
In addition, it will have been possible to help advance an entity like AsF, which carries out extraordinary work and which I hope that both its board and the social mass can do even better thanks to the enthusiastic contribution of a group of students who are now also part of the history of Archivists Without Borders.
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