Embedded Pedagogy

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

This is a book about teachers, the labor they take on, and the structures that prevent them doing that work well. Our institutions often define teaching as something that happens in specific spaces, at specific times, and by specific people. In higher education, positions are often described with a common shorthand: “I teach a 2-2” or “I carry a 4-4.” The formulation describes both a calendar distribution as well as the supposed burden of teaching. Once your courses are done—your course load carried—you can get back to work. And the implicit encouragement is to spend less time on teaching and more time on your tenure file. The classroom is a space to be escaped. And when we describe some positions and institutions as teaching-intensive, however true the designation might be, we create boundaries. We suggest that some spaces are for teaching and some not.

Staff positions often distribute identification with the craft of teaching in a similar way. A Teaching and Learning Librarian might explicitly focus on classroom instruction. An Undergraduate Success Librarian might specialize in undergraduate outreach. Some roles might work with patrons directly to answer questions and roles, while others might think of themselves more as back of house and removed from the community. As with faculty positions and their associated teaching responsibilities, the ways we distribute staff labor can suggest separation between those who teach and those who do not. Some are in the classroom, while others might never set foot in it.

But we all teach.

It is understandable that someone without explicit classroom responsibilities might see themselves as disconnected from the act of teaching. But we do ourselves and our students a disservice when we fail to recognize the teaching that takes place across the institution by instructors in a range of different job titles. This book specifically speaks from the point of view of the teaching librarian, in part, because library positions entail a range of types of interaction. In some cases, librarians might design for-credit courses as part of the curriculum. But so much of the work of librarianship takes place in other spaces: reference consultations, collaborations with faculty members, one-on-one mentoring, workshops, one-off instructional sessions, and more. To be a librarian is to dance along the cracks of the institution, engaged in a thousand small teaching acts. Because of this, library perspectives are helpful for illuminating the cross-cutting impact of pedagogical decisions.

In the same way that teaching occurs throughout the university, staff positions like those in the library are useful case studies for discussing the pedagogies of institutions because they are regularly called upon to engage in the infrastructure of the university. Even if their job titles do not contain the word “administrator,” staff positions often make policy decisions that affect others. Digital humanities library positions, in particular, expose the ways in which teaching is an intersection of pedagogy and policy. Throughout this book I use the term teaching administrator to refer to individuals inhabiting such complicated roles in places of higher education. The term refers to those faculty and staff who inhabit administrative roles within their respective institution but also provide instruction in some capacity. I use the term administrator quite liberally here: it refers not only to directors or managers but more broadly to anyone engaged in the inner workings of university infrastructure and making policy decisions for it. Teaching, too, is construed broadly. Teaching takes place throughout the university, in its cracks and its hallways, in all manner of forms. The teaching administrator might direct a center but teach a course periodically. They might be a GIS Specialist who also runs regular workshops. Or they might be a developer engaged in paired programming with a student as part of a project development. Teaching administrators, no matter their specific job title, regularly find themselves implicated in and exerting force upon the various policies and norms that work on the institution and, in so doing, upon their embedded pedagogies.

More specifically, this is a book about all those principles, practices, and structures that intersect in a kind of pedagogy in the institution around them. When a local government reduces its budget, forcing secondary educators to dip into the own bank accounts to pay for classroom supplies—that is an observable act that impacts pedagogy. The material conditions of the classroom are changed based on administrative choices that are removed from the classroom. When the chairs in a public classroom are welded to the floor so as to prevent them from being moved from neatly arranged rows—that is a kind of pedagogy. The decision to bolt chairs to the ground may never have been made with actual instruction in mind, but it nonetheless affects the possibilities for learning in that space. The university encourages the idea that teaching takes place in the classroom, and this mode of thinking is a function of policy, power, and politics. When conversations are not explicitly about teachers and students—a kind of pedagogy is still being enacted. After all, an absence can still be noted and remarked upon. Why aren’t we talking about teaching? What does it say about what we value instead? A pedagogy.

This is a book about administrative choices like these, about the ways in which they help or harm the teachers in their midst. About all the myriad ways in which the work of education is routinely damaged by forces outside the classroom. This book argues that these institutional norms, policies, and structures act as embedded pedagogies that are operationalized for or against teachers and learners. Most often, as in the case of budgets cuts or prescriptive classroom spaces, these institutional pedagogies put teachers on the back foot, forced to teach in ways they might not otherwise do so in part out of a survival instinct. The first step to finding our way to the teaching we want to see in our work is to recognize the obstacles facing that labor, the pedagogies running counter to our own. And it can be especially difficult to notice the things affecting our teaching when they happen far outside the classroom, carried out by those who don’t consider themselves educators. By recasting institutional activities and actors in pedagogical terms, I hope to empower teachers to find their own path to enduring administrative difficulties even as they work to change them. These embedded pedagogies can be especially challenging to work against because the pressures they exert are often invisible to the teachers and learners in their midst. The first tactical decision we can make to counter them is to render them known.

Universities invest vast resources in making themselves known to their students, their communities, and their publics, from marketing to branding, communications to legislative testimony. In the process, though, this knowability is limited by design, as elite universities necessarily want themselves to be only so known, in specific ways, and by particular people. Institutions frequently obscure their actual administration in ways that distance teachers from their core functions. This web of policies, practices, and pressures shape our ability to teach and learn in seen and unseen ways, forming the network of embedded institutional pedagogies. By rendering these opaque practices transparent, we can empower educators to intervene in the forces affecting their ability to do the work of teaching.

In a certain way this book was also my own attempt to chart a pathway to survival in the face of the embedded pedagogies of my own institution. During a period of administrative upheaval at my place of work, blogging became a way for me to vent and reflect about the challenges I found for supporting student work. The audience I found for this writing seemed to be largely people in positions like mine: mid-career digital humanities administrators who had a hand in research, teaching, and administration. Positions like these are sometimes called “alt-ac” for the ways in which they offer a landing for graduate students outside of the traditional faculty path. Alt-ac staff often refer to themselves as scholar practitioners, a phrase that further serves to illuminate the fact that we often see administrative praxis itself as a subject for research and critique in its own right. The term “teaching administrator” is a similar riff, both a description of a hybridized identity and an attempt to instrumentalize it.

In moments of despair I sometimes referred to this manuscript as “the book I’m writing about bullshit and how to deal with it.” Invariably, others would respond with their own, similar frustrations at their own institutions. Embedded pedagogies carry power, in part, because they refuse to be seen for what they are. Writing this text is a first attempt at making legible the relationship between administrative policy and teaching in a way that makes them visible. To describe what I see so others can notice as well. To know and be known. To use the unique position of the teaching administrator to push back on the limited knowability of the institution and render legible its embedded pedagogies.