Enhancing small group learning activities for students discussing archival bias: Using assigned roles, new prompts, pen, paper and a digital padlet.
‘The presences and absences embodied in sources or archives are neither neutral or natural. They are created […] Sources are thus instances of inclusion, the other face of which is, of course, what is excluded.’
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past
In our work in the Archives and Special Collections Centre, we run many one-off workshops for courses, in liaison with tutors. These sessions introduce our services, what archives are, share items from our collection and some of the things to consider when researching with archives.
We encourage students to become critical researchers, and introduce students to the topic of archival bias. (Trouillot, 1995) 1.
Having introduced and explained the concept, we ask the students to get into small groups to consider the following questions:
- How might archival bias affect your research and/or creative practice using archives?
- What strategies might you use to try to mitigate the effects of archival bias?
We then offer students the chance to feed back to the whole class.
- Challenge 1: With one-off sessions we cannot build up a relationship with the individual students to understand their needs.
- Challenge 2: Many students do not feel comfortable participating verbally in class. There may be different reasons for this (Harris, 2022; Orgill, 2023), including due to language barriers, or neurodivergence.
- Challenge 3: During the collective feedback to class, students sometimes “switch off” once their group has fed back. This is especially so if there are many small groups in a large class. Students not listening to their peers does not foster an inclusive environment.
Group Activities and Verbal Participation
Using group activities is already intended to facilitate peer-to-peer learning (Kryousi, 2022; Chickering and Gamson, 1987).
But there might be more we can do to develop some of these activities to help students engaging with the content (Harvard Kennedy School, 2025; Espey, 2018; Davidson et al, 2014; Biggs, 2003).
My colleague Georgina Orgill (2023) did research for her PG cert on the expectations around verbal participation in our sessions, and using an anonymised padlet, as a way to help students to feel more comfortable to do so.
Small group work can also be a way of facilitating verbal participation, towards an intersectional practice, where students feel more comfortable sharing ideas within smaller break-out groups (Willcocks, 2023)2.
Small Group Activities and question prompts:
Davidson et al (2014) and Roberson and Franchini, (2014), argue that for productive conversations in short-term small group activities, the prompt needs to focus students on a particular problem, where they are tasked to decide on a course of action and their reasons for it.
So, in this context, rather than starting with an open-ended question, e.g., “How might archival bias affect your research and/or creative practice using archives?” we might instead present the students with live examples from our collections in a scenario where the students have to make a decision and reflect critically on why.
Listening and taking notes:
I wanted to find a way for the collective group feedback to be done differently, via Padlet, in a way that would:
- Still allow students to hear from each other and find out at least something of what was discussed in other groups (This is what is sometimes called ‘Jigsaw-ing’). (U. Waterloo, 2023; Harvard Kennedy School, 2025).
- Be accountable to each other, and demonstrate active listening, by assigning roles within the group (Washington University, 2025; TPP Unit, 2025). If one person is assigned to take notes on the padlet, the rest can really listen.
- Allow us as teachers to hear/read something of what was discussed to assess how well students had grasped the key concept (Imperial College, 2025).
- Allow students to consolidate their learning by referring back to the conversation later, through notes taken in a shared space. The padlet therefore acts as an additional asynchronous resource, to remind students of what they discussed (adhd centre.co.uk, accessed 2025; Imperial College, 2025).
Bibliography
Books:
Trouillot, M-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press
Chapters and Articles:
John Biggs, J. (2003), ‘Aligning teaching for constructing learning’, The Higher Education Academy
Chickering, A. W. and Gamson, Z F. (1987), ‘Seven Principles For Good Practice in Undergraduate Education’, Washington Center News, Fall 1987
Davidson, N., Major, C. H., & Michaelsen, L. K. (2014). ‘Small-group learning in higher education—cooperative, collaborative, problem-based, and team-based learning: An introduction by the guest editors’. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 1-6.
Espey, M. (2018) ‘Enhancing critical thinking using team-based learning’, Higher Education Research & Development, 37:1, 15-29, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2017.1344196
Grout, H. (2019). ‘Archiving critically: exploring the communication of cultural biases,’ in Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 4:1, pp.71-75
Karen Harris, (2022), ‘Embracing the silence: introverted learning and the online classroom’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, Vol 5 / Issue 1, pp. 101–104
Kyrousi, A. (2022), ‘Laying the foundations for groupwork’, in Active Learning Network, University of Sussex, 100 Ideas for Active Learning, (Creative Commons).
Roberson, B., & Franchini, B. (2014). ‘Effective task design for the TBL classroom’. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 275-302.
Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K, (2023), ‘The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education,’ Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Volume 22 Number 2, 2023
Talks and teaching:
Orgill, G. (2023), ‘Student Participation in One-off sessions’ UAL Education Conference, 2023.
Group Activity (2025), experienced during ‘Theories, Policies and Practices’ Unit 1 of PG Cert [Developed by UAL Academic Practice team]; delivered by Kwame Baah and Victor Guillen, January 2025.
Online resources:
ADHD Centre, London, (2023) ‘Our top tips and strategies to help students with ADHD’ https://www.adhdcentre.co.uk/our-top-tips-strategies-to-help-students-with-adhd/ (Accessed 1 June 2025)
Harvard Kennedy School, nd., ‘Guide to Small Group Learning,’ https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Academic%20Dean’s%20Office/Guide%20to%20Small-Group%20Learning.pdf (Accessed 1 June 2025)
Imperial College, London, (2025), ‘Padlet for online teaching and learning’ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/staff/education-development-unit/public/Padlet-for-online-teaching-and-learning.pdf (Accessed 1 June 2025)
UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre Lib Guides, ‘Critical use of archives and collections’ https://arts.ac.libguides.com/c.php?g=681650&p=5196399 (Accessed 1 June 2025)
University of Waterloo, Canada, (2023) ‘Group Work in the Classroom: Types of Small Groups’ https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/catalogs/tip-sheets/group-work-classroom-types-small-groups (Accessed 1 June 2025)
Washington University in Saint Louis, Centre for Teaching and Learning, ‘Teaching Resources: Using Roles in Group Work,’ https://ctl.wustl.edu/resources/using-roles-in-group-work/ (Accessed 4 June 2025)
Footnotes:
- We explain what Trouillot means by Archival Bias with the following:
“Archives can only show you what was recorded and later selected for preservation.
Material that has been preserved often relates to groups which have held power in a society or culture.
Underrepresented groups in archives broadly mirror historically marginalised groups in our wider society.”
We then link students to a collection of resources that we add to on our Libguides that address this further as well as our ASO sessions, which help to unfold these issues in different ways, over a longer session.
Our activity was reflected on by fellow archivist Hannah Grout (2019), “Teaching with archival materials creates a space to critique collections and the attitudes of the archive, enabling inclusive approaches to pedagogical and artistic practices, as well as provoking discussion of the archival process.”
↩︎ - ‘Student teams met in online breakout rooms to work with their digital objects and were invited to share some thoughts with the wider group when they returned to the main online classroom. While presentations and talks were recorded, breakout sessions were not, the aim being to create a safe space where students could share their ideas freely.’, Willcocks, 2019.
So this is why it is important in my example that the first part of the activity happens within the small group discussion using paper, not on the padlet, to allow people to share their ideas to begin with and decide what to write down together, before sharing on the padlet. The padlet is then used at the next stage in the group sharing, to collectively take notes. ↩︎