Telescoping Digital Pedagogy

I’ve always been fond of Ryan Cordell’s description of distant reading as a kind of telescoping activity in which near and far are intertwined. In Cordell’s formulation, you don’t take the result of the machine for granted. Instead, you compare the results of digital methods against your own, human understanding of the text. Close meets distant, and each has something to offer.

In the waning days of Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, I was on the books to teach a course with Kristen Mapes in the same spirit called “Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula.” The underlying idea behind the course was that DH teaching requires you to operate at a variety of scales. Here’s the lightly edited course description:

From individual course assignments to full syllabi, informal training to structuring of degree programs, digital humanists are frequently asked to teach their students and collaborators new methods for digital research in a variety of different situations. This course focuses on digital humanities instruction as it takes shape at several scales: individual assignments, semester-long courses, and full programs. While the conversation will be geared primarily to sustained, long-term instruction typical of credit-bearing courses, the activities and discussions will be relevant for a range of different teaching contexts. 

Participants will work together to consider how their individual teaching values and philosophies shape their digital and analog pedagogy. We will focus on tangible expressions of digital humanities pedagogy: 

* Digital humanities teaching philosophy statements;
* DH course assignments;
* Syllabus frameworks;
* Curricula for a DH program (minor, certificate, etc.).

Participants will discuss theoretical approaches to each genre, critique examples, and spend time collaboratively workshopping draft components for their own use.

This course is open to instructors looking to integrate digital humanities into teaching. Students interested in digital humanities pedagogy are especially encouraged to enroll in the course. It may also be relevant to administrators or others charged with developing digital humanities curricula at their institution. While not a prerequisite, some experience in teaching will be helpful for participants taking this course. Please feel free to write if you have concerns about your background or ability to participate in the course – we are happy to discuss it with you.

With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking lately about how scale can operate as a useful constraint when brainstorming new ways to teach DH. I’m calling the following activity “telescoping digital pedagogy,” and it offers a way to exercise your teaching muscles at a variety of different scales. To carry out the exercise, you take a single idea and think through the different sizes and shapes that teaching it might take. You’ll necessarily need to operate at different levels of completeness—it takes far more work to float a syllabus as opposed to a workshop. But working through the thought exercise can push your teaching in different, unexpected directions. To practice telescoping your digital pedagogy, you imagine an idea taught in the smallest way possible. Then you scale it up to be as big as you can imagine.

1. How would you teach the idea in a single sentence?
2. Construct a classroom activity on the idea.
3. Design an end-of-term course project where students exercise the topic.
4. Draft a course description and six selected readings on the topic (meant to stand in for a whole syllabus).
5. Build out a certificate, minor, or major based around the course.

As an example, here’s my attempt to run “digital pedagogy” as a concept through the telescope.

• Sentence
  • “Digital pedagogy considers the many points of intersection between teaching and technology, how teachers can effectively use new tools and methods in the classroom as well as how the very nature of education has fundamentally been changed by them.”
• Classroom activity
  • This ninety-minute activity asks students to explore their own relationship to technology as teachers and learners. It involves three phases: reflection, planning, discussion.
    • In the first phase, participants will reflect on their most significant learning experience involving technology. What comes to mind? What about it was effective or traumatic for you? Summarize the experience in one sentence and then distill it down to a principle.
    • In the second phase of the activity, participants will work in pairs to select a piece of technology available in the room. Their task is to discuss two different ways to teach something about that technology, each approach modeled on the pedagogical principle they wrote down in the first phase.
    • In the final phase, participants will discuss their different approaches to teaching the same idea with the class. How did their pedagogies differ? What continuities did they find?
• Final project
  • For a final project in a course on digital pedagogy, I would have students develop a “pedagogical scrapbook.” This collection of documents can take a range of shapes and would collect various teaching materials—lesson plans, course descriptions, workshop activities—designed in conversation with the students to be the most useful for their own particular professional contexts. I would frame it as a scrapbook so as to encourage personal reflections, meaningful connections, and narrative approaches to the topic as well. All of these materials can be useful for teachers to collect.
• Course description
  • Title: Digital Humanities Pedagogy
  • Course description: This course assumes that to practice digital humanities is to teach it. Students will be introduced both to theory and practices for teaching digital humanities methods and ideas while also considering the ways in which digital humanities might alter our approach to pedagogy. Assignments will include a digital pedagogy teaching philosophy, a workshop on a digital method related to the student’s research interests, and a syllabus. Topics for discussion will include but not be limited to critical digital pedagogy, curricular development, feminist approaches to teaching, project-based design, digital liberal arts, universal design, and more.
  • Selected readings:
    • Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
    • Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
    • Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross
    • What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, eds. Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
    • Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, eds. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, Jentery Sayers
• Curriculum
  • Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities Pedagogy
  • This graduate certificate offers students a chance to focus on the practice and theory of teaching digital humanities. All students in the program are required to take a foundational course in digital humanities pedagogy. Students are expected to supplement their study with two further electives drawn from a generalized list of digital humanities courses, working with the instructors for each course to gear their final assignments directed towards the construction of teaching materials. Finally, upper-level students in the program develop and teach workshops based around their own interests. The certificate is meant to prepare students for a broad introduction to digital humanities pedagogy that can serve them in a variety of professional contexts.
  • 12 credits total
    • Required core course on digital pedagogy theory (3 credits)
    • 2 electives (6 credits) drawn from a list of digital humanities courses
    • Practicum course (3 credits) during which students teach in-house workshops on topics of their choosing.

Phew. That was a lot! In particular, I found the exercise in developing a curriculum in digital pedagogy made me desperately aware of how much work I would need to do if I were to develop one for real. For example, I would want to examine CUNY’s Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. But the activity gave me the space to think through how I might begin to approach such a question in ways that I hadn’t otherwise explored.

How often do we teach to the moment, putting together only what seems like it will work to get by? Considering a range of options for any teachable topic is a luxury most of us don’t have. This exercise in telescoping digital pedagogy invites you to sit with a single idea such that you let it unfold in as many different ways as possible. Each of these different constraints requires you to think in different ways about the same set of ideas.