Advising seems to have changed in the past 40 years- just take a look at the above description for the Art major at Pitzer in the catalog 1972-1973. These days there is a distinct format for how all courses and major requirements are laid out on the Pitzer web catalog. This interesting approach to explaining the major reflects the experimental education I referenced in the blog post from last week. There was space for alternative methods allowing students and faculty to think about their experience in creative ways. This map above may not be as straightforward as the lists available online today, but the four years at Pitzer don’t always need to be, as you are taught different techniques to tackle traditional ideas. Pieces like this in the collection give a glimpse of what Pitzer and similar places in higher education were doing before standardization in the 1980s and 90s, when we began to consider institutions like WASC.
A lot of progress was made this week. We had a bit of a box hunt and explored options for what would be done with the Route 66 box (pictured a few weeks ago). With everything from stickers to food, there are precautions that must be taken to preserve the single item, or its representation, within the context of the preventing possible damage to its surrounding collection. I guess raisins are more dangerous than they first appear. This week, as I have begun to arrange and folder more material, it became more difficult to keep all the intellectual organization and notes in head. This was solved a the suggestion of Lisa to create a spreadsheet of folder titles and notes, that can also be used later for Archive Space. Next week I will continue to work on this, and with all the folder titles in one place, it will be easier to make sure the names and formats are in a standard style.