To celebrate Women’s History Month, librarian Keri Burns teamed up with Rho Kappa, the social studies honor society to host a gallery walk in the library. Held on March 27-28, the gallery walk showcased milestone events pertaining to famous women and major events in women’s history.

“Part of the whole reason behind recognizing these monthly celebrations is to talk about hard-hitting topics and to talk about events that were controversial or difficult,” Burns said. “It’s to make sure that we’re acknowledging how far we’ve come and how much more work we have to do so that we don’t backtrack.”

Rho Kappa often collaborates with other organizations and entities in the school. According to sponsor Jennifer Fortenberry, the library, which brought students together and got Rho Kappa involved with the community, showed great synergy for Women’s History Month.

“[We wanted to show the] progress of women and that it is an ongoing process of improving access for women to vote, to be able to not experience discrimination in the workplace and access leadership roles in society and in politics,” Fortenberry said. “We wanted to make sure that people could see these inspirational moments through history and see that it’s a process that we’re always trying to improve.”

Gallery walks are similar to art galleries or museums, allowing people to absorb information at their own pace. Burns said that this allows students to organically and informally have conversations and share moments during the walk.

“In Rho Kappa, we’re really big on community service, especially when it comes to societally relevant topics,” senior Rho Kappa Vice President James Sanderson said. “Women’s History Month is a very important subject and we felt that we should help. When the library decided to do a gallery walk for women’s history events, we sent members down to help out and guide people around.”

According to Burns, when deciding which women’s history milestone events to choose for the gallery walk, it was difficult to narrow it down. Sixteen events total were chosen to be hung up along the bookshelves in the library.

“We wanted to make [each photo and caption] adjustable and bite sized, something that you could absorb in ten minutes without taking up a whole hour,” Burns said. “I think a challenge was pairing it down because how do you decide what’s more important than the rest?”

When deciding which events to showcase, the students chose the recently overturned court case, Roe V. Wade. Burns said that although some may have found it controversial, she wanted an environment open to conversation.

“It is healthy, important and necessary to make it safe to educate and talk about those things,” Burns said “I think especially in a library space we’re all about access, but also about your freedom to read and [learn] information. Pretending like a controversial event didn’t happen or excluding it from something like this would be irresponsible. Some people may not have liked that we included it, but I think it’s important.”

Each section of the gallery showcasing an event had a caption with information about the event in it. Eight Rho Kappa volunteers stood throughout the library at these stations providing background information on the events and helping participants through the gallery.

“When I was looking at all of these milestones, the ones we ended up picking weren’t in my lifetime so I think it’s even more important to me to be aware of those,” Burns said. “When I think of those as a woman and in context to the other women in my life helps with making you realize that yes we’re making progress, but it wasn’t that long ago. I really hope that people will continue to stay open to celebrations like this, so that we can all continue to talk about it, learn from it and grow so that we don’t lose and slide back.”