Teaching with rare books and special collections is, frankly, the most exciting and rewarding aspect of what I get to do. A major stream of my work at the Rutgers Book Initiative is to co-curate and steward a teaching collection of books and media to bring book history into Rutgers English classrooms. My colleagues and I catalog the items in a public Zotero library, making them discoverable to faculty as a resource for one-off and recurring workshops tailored to course content.
For a sample of the kinds of hands-on activities that I have helped design and run using our teaching collection, see the lesson plan below (co-written by Javiera Barrientos and me).