Golly, it’s been quite a semester! Between work, classes, extracurricular activities, and everything else that takes up the time of your average student, all of us have been kept more than busy in the academic swirl we call grad school. Between the journal articles and assignments, though, there was one class that showed a lucky few of us how to go beyond just being scholars and taught us not only how to be better librarians and archivists, but how to be better, well—people. That class was TLAM.
TLAM is a class that everyone should experience at least once. Not many other courses will combine teaching scholarship with interpersonal skills, but TLAM truly does teach us how to open our eyes to the world around us. As we learned on the first day, the point of the class is not just to learn about Native issues and culture from books and lectures. It’s all about forming meaningful relationships within the community about whom you are learning and with whom you are working. This was always at the forefront of our minds throughout the semester as our projects progressed, either up at the library at Red Cliff or closer to home with the Ho-Chunk Cultural Center. If you’re going to do a project, don’t do it about someone, do it with someone. Make those connections and form those relationships, and you will find that they will last long after the project is handed in.
But that same principle applied to day-to-day group work and class time with our peers, as well. TLAM is the kind of class where you form not just partnerships to get homework done, but actual, lasting friendships from the work that you do together. TLAM is absolutely an academic class, but to some degree, it is also a family. We all embarked on the journey together to change our perspectives and came out on the other side changed in both our knowledge and our viewpoints. Even now that the semester has ended and some of us will graduate, the friendships that we forged will not break so easily. It’s been quite a semester, yes—but also quite an experience.
-Jenny Barth