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- Archival Film Flashes Back to 70s Student Life
- Manuscript Traces SFU's Architectural History
- Early University News Publications Now Digitally Available
- Digitized Programs Commemorate SFU’s Opening & Installation Ceremonies
- Archives Celebrates Fall Convocation with Release of Digitized Programs
- Films Capture Visual History and Sentiment of Time Gone By
- Lost and Found: Simon Fraser Letters
- Oral History Provides Glimpse into Mind of SFU’s First Chancellor Gordon Shrum
- Early SFU Photos Tell a Story That Frames Our World
- Aerial Photos Capture Campus Landscape & Photographer’s Legacy
- You have what...?!! and other interesting things you didn't know about the SFU Archives
- Charting the course of history: documenting SFU's early days from the student perspective (Part 1)
- Charting the course of history: documenting SFU's early days from the student perspective (Part 2)
- Helping others find their history in the future: Preserving the records of the Students of Caribbean and African Ancestry at SFU
- Preserving the sparks of global revolution in the Adbusters Media Foundation fonds
- Reflections of a co-op student
- Debunking popular myths and conspiracies with the Barry Beyerstein fonds
- In "The Beginning...": First student film returns to SFU
- "Got any pictures of Terry Fox?"
- My summer in the archives: a co-op placement retrospective
- Seeing the world through Arthur Erickson's eyes
- Beer (records) in the Archives!
- Quartet in the Quadrangle: PSQ Records Come to SFU
- Navigating silences and filling gaps: finding Black stories in the Archives
- Boxes, boxes, and more boxes: my summer co-op at SFU Archives
- Finding queer joy in the SFU Archives: Out On Campus records now available
- The Selma Wassermann fonds
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Faculty records
The Selma Wassermann fonds
Every now and again I would get an email from Selma Wassermann.
Could we provide a copy of some documents from her papers, donated to the Archives back in 2015? Yes, of course, no problem. Why did she want them? Because she is working on a book. Again.
Selma Wassermann is Professor Emerita in SFU's Faculty of Education, having joined SFU in the university's second year of existence, 1966. Now in her 90s, Wassermann is the author of over 20 books and a hundred articles, more than 30 children's books, and numerous educational resources and teacher's guides. Several of her works have been translated into multiple languages. Since 2017 she has published a new book almost annually. Teaching Reading in the Organic Early Childhood Classroom is her latest, due for release later in 2025. As her friend and colleague from the Faculty, videographer Linda Hof, puts it: "Selma is a force."
Researchers can now experience something of that force for themselves – or at least the documentary expression of it. Wassermann's archives have now been arranged and described as the Selma Wassermann fonds. The records are available for acess in the Archives' reading room, and there is an online finding aid to guide researchers through the records.
Wassermann began her career as a teacher in the elementary public school systems of California and New York in the 1950s. She obtained her doctorate of Education from New York University in 1962, then taught for several years at Newark State College. In 1966 Wassermann came to SFU to lead the development of university's new teacher education program, and for many years she served as the Director of SFU's Professional Development Program (PDP). Wassermann retired in 2001 – but only because she had to, as Canada's mandatory retirement laws were still in force at the time. She continued teaching on contract and taught her last course at SFU in 2007.
Wassermann is known for her child-centred pedagogy, teaching for thinking, and development of the case method of teaching. This approach uses problems drawn from the complexity of real events as a vehicle of instruction, requiring pupils to learn how to reason from the data. What kinds of materials will you find in her archives? There are her writings – articles, speeches, conference presentations and a small selection of her books (for a full list of her publications, see the appendix to the pdf finding aid). The fonds includes the teaching files that Wassermann retained for a number of innovative courses she developed at SFU that went beyond the traditional lecture format – including the course with which she is probably most closely associated, Curriculum Studies: Teaching for Thinking (aka "The Delicious Alternative"). The records include a set of case materials that she and her collaborators prepared and collected to support case-method teaching in the classroom (the Case Clearinghouse). Wassermann also transferred some of her correspondence, notably letters from over two decades with the educational scholar Louis E. Raths, described by her as "my great teacher, mentor and friend"; and correspondence from the 1990s with C. Roland Christensen, a founder of case method teaching at the Harvard Business School. Alongside the textual records, the fonds also includes audio-visual materials, such as interviews, classroom footage, and various educational resources she created as CDs.
To learn more about Selma Wassermann and her archives, consult the online finding aid in SFU AtoM (Access-to-Memory), SFU's portal to the archival holdings of the university.