by Emma Kioko
Now that our Black at Bryn Mawr research project is finishing for this semester, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experiences leading six public walking tours in April and May and a handful of private tours. (Grace and I were even given the opportunity to present an abridged version of the tour to President Cassidy and Provost Osirim!)
Emma Kioko ’15 and Grace Pusey ’15 introduce the Black at Bryn Mawr tour in Thomas Great Hall (May 6, 2015). Photograph courtesy of the Office of College Communications.
When I originally proposed the idea of the walking tour last summer, and then again in the Fall of 2014, I overlooked the amount of anxiety speaking and presenting in front of large groups of people usually causes me. As Grace and I researched for the tour, none of my nerves kicked in–with the amount of research we had to cover, reaching the walking tour stage of our project always seemed so far away. It wasn’t until the morning of our first tour that I started to panic. There are so many stories of black experiences on campus that our semester-long research period was unable to uncover, so many more angles of research that we were both interested in exploring. I felt a little bit unprepared. The night before the first tour, in fact, when Grace and I met to run through a quick overview of the tour, a Spanish professor stopped to tell us a story about Black student Enid Cook (Class of 1931) outraging students and the administration when she was let into Rockefeller dorm by another student. As interesting as the story was, it was just another reminder for me of just how many stories still sat undiscovered, despite how much information we had uncovered during our time in Special Collections.
Emma speaks to Professor Beard’s Black Bards class (April 21, 2015). Photograph by Monica Mercado.
On the day of the first tour, I was grateful that our fieldwork advisor, Monica Mercado, suggested holding “test run” tours. The friendly faces in Professor Linda-Susan Beard’s Black Bards class really helped me get over my nerves and the initial awkwardness of testing out the precarious boundary between presenting academic research and presenting a walking tour. One of the greatest challenges leading up to the tour, for me, was challenging myself to break out of my academic voice. While preparing for the tour, Grace and I even had to scrap a huge document that detailed everything we wanted to discuss, because when we practiced for the tour and read from the paper we had written, it came out dry and incredibly academic. Negotiating the difference between the language I would use for a paper and the language I ended up using on the walking tour was not an easy process. Continue reading
