contributed by Lizette Royer Barton
Welcome to the third installment of CCHP Pandemic Projects. These fully digital learning projects give students a way of engaging directly with primary source, historical material. They are useful for teaching history, historical research skills, history of psychology, information literacy…the sky is the limit!
Volume I tackled Asylums and Epidemic Diseases and in volume II we tackled Eugenics and the Census. Both of those projects were geared more towards college students. Volume III is more adaptable to K-12 students but also works for college students. Critical thinking knows no bounds!
In this next installment, we explore something many of us are intimately familiar with right now: being alone, slowing down, taking a pause.
So let’s dig in.
Psychologist Martin Reymert (1883-1953) was an immigrant from Norway. He immigrated to the United States in 1925 to serve as the head of the psychology department and director of the psychology lab at Wittenberg College in Springfield, OH. He moved on to Mooseheart, IL in 1930 to establish the Mooseheart Laboratory for Child Research and he remained the lab’s director until his death in 1953.
Martin Reymert in his office at the Mooseheart Laboratory. Martin Reymert papers, box M1228, folder 6
Reymert’s manuscript collection is very interesting for several reasons, including the insight it provides about immigration and American life from an immigrant’s viewpoint.
Martin Reymert was interviewed by a Minneapolis radio station on this topic and the three page transcript is the document we will analyze for this project. You can access all the materials you need for this project including a document analysis instructor’s guide, a document analysis sheet, and the radio transcript in full text here: American Psychosis and Creative Laziness.
The reason I selected this radio transcript for a Pandemic Project is because it provides a perfect opportunity for us to talk to our students about isolation during the current health crisis.
Martin Reymert papers, box M2896, folder 4…average Americans are afraid to be alone….we are always rushing into some one crowd or another…it takes an awful lot of mental sanity to squarely face ones’self in solitary moments….
Martin Reymert papers, box M2896, folder 4…creative laziness….apparently doing nothing and experiencing the sacred moments of inspiration, new ideas, etc.–in short, the sort of things that are the actual dynamos for the world’s progress.
The COVID19 health crisis has forced us to face ourselves in solitary moments. How are we handling it? And almost more importantly, how are our students handling it? Can we use this transcript from the Martin Reymert papers to reach out to our students and check on them under the guise of an archival document analysis project? I like to think so.
We can use Reymert’s ideas of “American psychosis” (inability to be alone) and “creative laziness” (inspiration by way of solitary reflection) as the starting point for a discussion with our students about how THEY are coping. Of course, the difference here is that we are in isolation through shelter-in-place directives and social distancing, rather than simply choosing to be isolated.
The document analysis sheet I created for this project can (and should) be adapted to best suit your needs as an instructor. This project can be adapted for use with middle school and high school students or undergraduate and graduate students. If you’d like a bit of help with that reach out to me directly. I am happy to help! ([email protected]).
A note to instructors and students: we would love to hear back from you if you have used any of these projects in class. Your feedback helps us as we continue to develop archival projects that can be completed remotely.
To access more CCHP remote learning materials click here: CCHP Pandemic Projects.
