Exploring the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project as a Teaching Tool

Cancian and Wegge show how they use letters sent between migrants and non-migrants in the classroom for an undergraduate interdisciplinary course on gender and international migration. Their scope is to identify some of the ways in which students can study digitally accessible letters along with other biographical material for discussing in class the interaction between gender dynamics and migration experiences. A further goal of theirs is to enhance students' appreciation of issues related to the access and preservation of historical documents, and explore the efficacy of using migrant correspondence as a viable online source for studying past migration movements.