Wendi Manuel-Scott expects to forge new pedagogical pathways in her recently expanded role of Associate Director for Pedagogy at the Center for Mason Legacies, which she co-founded. The center (known as CML) was recently rechartered in recognition of progress toward its purpose of advancing research, teaching, and public engagement around the historical and contemporary impact of George Mason IV and his family. CML affiliate faculty, students and engaged lay researchers use archival research, digital humanities, and community partnerships to explore themes of democracy, civil rights, and social justice laced through our region’s past.
With CML Director George Oberle, Manuel-Scott develops research and teaching practices that deepen student learning. The rechartering foresees expanding this work by creating a more intentional pedagogical infrastructure that connects coursework, sustained research mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public-facing scholarship. Manuel-Scott’s focus is developing pedagogical frameworks that help students become thoughtful, rigorous, and ethically engaged researchers, particularly as they investigate histories of slavery, race, place, and institutional power that have been marginalized or erased. A central part of this work is mentoring students as they move from foundational research into original scholarship leading to public presentations, digital projects, and community-engaged historical interpretation.
CML is also developing a Research Lab as a structured environment for advanced undergraduate and graduate students to acquire, practice, and refine research skills. As a hub for methodological training, archival research skills, and public communication opportunities, the Lab will build on CML’s current tradition, developed by Manuel-Scott and Oberle, of Friday Circles, bringing together students, librarians, archivists, and visiting scholars weekly. In the Friday Circle space, students learn alongside one another, share their ongoing research, receive collegial feedback, and build connections with faculty and community partners. Through a developing sequence of practices—reading, reflecting, reimagining, responding, and revising—Circle students learn to interrogate archives, examine the historical production of categories and institutions, attend to absence and power, and reconsider their own assumptions and methods. More than a venue for sharing work, the Circles cultivate an intellectual community where students take intellectual risks, ask difficult questions, receive constructive feedback, and develop confidence in their scholarly voices.
The CML Research Lab will sustain structured opportunities for research training, peer mentorship, and collaborative scholarship. Institutionalizing this model will make student research development a sustained, collaborative process rather than an isolated requirement attached to an individual project. It will also strengthen student success in INTS, BIS, MIS, AAAS, WGST, history, and other units across the university. Ultimately, the goal is to increase the visibility of our students’ scholarship and CML’s contributions to interdisciplinary student research and public engagement.
In all these endeavors, CML’s approach encourages students to encounter knowledge-making as more than the simple production of an individual argument. CML scholarship examines study as a relational process shaped by dialogue, uncertainty, experimentation, accountability, transparency, and critical care. The Friday Circle curriculum also infuses developing plans for CML to bring back its path-breaking multi-disciplinary Black Lives Next Door co-taught course, in Fall 2027. BLND will introduce students to AI as a research method, refined through a variation on CML’s framework of Affective Historical Praxis, for pedagogy, that we call Affective Historical Prompt Engineering. Their pedagogical approach is outlined in a forthcoming article in the journal, Early American Studies. Rather than outsource critical analysis and historical thinking to AI, this approach teaches students to interrogate it as a contested technological system for more useable results. They will wrestle with the legitimate concerns and controversies surrounding LLMs while also exploring how to use them as tools to identify patterns across large bodies of material, generate questions for further investigation, explore relationships within datasets, and identify potential omissions, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Through the Black Lives Next Door course and participation in the Friday Circle and future Research Lab, CML students will develop the intellectual habits, methodological capacities, and collaborative practices that demonstrate critical care for the people whose lives their work seeks to understand, preparing them as the next generation of interdisciplinary scholars and public historians.