By Miriam Brown ’21
Although Colorado College has been co-ed since its founding, its dormitories were a different story. Archived campus master plans show separate female and male dorms were initially located on opposite ends of campus.
“Who were the voices to say, ‘This is not coeducation if we are engaged in dialogue and discussion during the classes but isolated during our co-curriculars?’” Jane Murphy, professor of history, asks.
A course that will be co-taught by Murphy and Jennifer Golightly, the Information Technology Services department academic applications specialist, in Block 5 is hoping to answer that questions and more. Some other examples Murphy gave were: “What was this land before it was a college?” and “Who owned it before it was colonized?”
The course, titled “Digital History/Public History Practicum: Space, Place, and Belonging at Colorado College” aims to engage students in ongoing, independent projects that will examine the institution’s transformation over time.
Last year during Block 5, professor Tip Ragan and Golightly co-taught the college’s first digital history course, as a part of the Digital Liberal Arts Exploration, funded by a Mellon grant. They are hoping that this coming sequel will be an impetus for more public history courses—courses that engage with local resources to examine the contemporary debates of Colorado Springs.
The course will include a number of partnerships with both local and digital resources, including field trips to the History of Colorado Museum in Denver, Special Collections on campus, and the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs. Using archives, students will learn how to develop research questions and how to use technology to help answer those questions by charting data patterns.
“More broadly, how do we understand an institution’s coming to being and its transformation over time? Who has been here, not been here, and what experiences in what context?” Murphy says. “All of these threads from the past are still with us in humans living in this area.”
