Community Diary Project/ Student Voices: An SSU Community Archive

The Center for Community Engagement (CCE) is partnering with Sonoma State University Library Special Collections & University Archives to collect primary sources related to life at Sonoma State. We invite you to consider taking advantage of this opportunity with your classes. This is an important learning experience for our students and provides a valuable service to our campus community. 

The ultimate goal is to develop and nurture a living archive that speaks to students’ lives—stories of life and community happening right now. 

The last few years have been a very challenging time for all of us but have also been a time of reflection for many as we are forced to slow down and contemplate what is currently happening and how it makes us feel. 

This project is about both your class content and living in this unique time period. 

Tips for Including a Community Diary in Your Course

How are students handling life during these unique and challenging days? One approach with your students for this project could be personal reflections with prompts related to the course. Additionally, the prompts could include reflections on continuing to live and deal with COVID, school and learning disruptions, coping with fires, participating in and responding to the Black Lives Matter movement and protests, and so on. 

Prompts should connect your students' experience to your course content, and can include reflections from their own experiences on campus. This can mean materials created:

• From their own initiative and concern, like the Student Chalk Art created in response to the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

• In response to an instructional assignment, like the Black Lives Matter Oral History Project and the Pandemic Oral History Project.

• As a reflection on their life as SSU students and/or as members of a unique community, club, or affinity group on campus, like this Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority photo.

Sample questions for students could include:

• How have you engaged as a student to make sure your voice is heard?

• What do you want current and future SSU students to know about you and your community?

•  How have you responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?

• How has the Black Lives Matter movement shaped your experiences as a student?

Sharing for the Future

Student work will be documented and preserved for all to use in support of campus memory and the history, growth, and development of SSU's diverse student body. The work will be shared with the Sonoma State University Library and its Student Voices: An SSU Community Archive to be preserved for future generations as part of the Library’s University Archives. The library will accept writings or images in digital format. 

Contributors will need to complete a donation form in order to share items with the library. 

Contact Us

If you would like to discuss further or would like your students to participate in this project, please contact cce@sonoma.edu.

In Appreciation

This program began as a collaboration with Sonoma County Library on the Community Diary Project/Sonoma Responds from the summer of 2020 through the end of 2021. We appreciate the support of Sonoma County Library in launching this program and in working with us to transition it to the University Library.