Open Learning Together

The following is a short, internal lightning talk I gave to UVA Library staff as a part of the Library’s Open Access Week in fall 2024.

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Hello! My name is Brandon Walsh, and I’m Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, one of the twin branches of the UVA Library’s Digital Humanities Center. I was asked to talk a bit about my work in open pedagogy as it intersects with digital humanities, a big baggy field in which we’re constantly confronting what we don’t know and helping others to do the same. From my earliest days working in DH, way back when I was a student myself in the Lab and in the Library, I was drawn to this pedagogical through line. The sheer importance of learning to it all. And this, in turn, has deeply informed how I approach Open with my students.

Always learning. Always teaching.

Together.

My practice of open digital pedagogy is informed by three intertwining principles:

1. Humanities students see themselves as imposters more often than not, particularly when it comes to technical concepts and methods.
2. Students are experts in teaching and learning. There is no one better equipped to explain something complicated than a person who has just learned it.
3. The labor of teaching and learning is often invisible.

My whole career has been about the commingling of these three concepts when it comes to pedagogy—self-confidence, expertise, and visibility.

Open has been the space in which they meet.

Often, this takes the shape of co-authored OER materials with my students. I co-wrote A Humanist’s Cookbook for Natural Language Processing in Python with Rebecca Bultman, then a UVA religious studies PhD. When I was a postdoc at Washington and Lee University, I co-wrote a course book on text analysis with Sarah Horowitz, a faculty collaborator who I was co-teaching with at the time. In each case, the process of co-writing, I hoped, would offer my partners a space to teach themselves something about the topic as well as the technical stack that it took to make it. They learned the terminal, Python, text analysis, markdown, version control, and more. I, in turn, learned to be a better teacher: the materials were much improved by having them involved as partners. The outcomes also presented this labor—the work of teaching and learning—in a space that was available to other learners and also CV-friendly. By positioning these student collaborators as co-writers, co-experts, I hoped to gently affirm that they were more than capable of doing this work. And the work aimed to present this new material in a space that would be more comfortable for humanists, grounding the learning process in public writing and conversation as opposed to pounding away at a programming script.

The production of open materials, by, for, and with students like these has always been a core part of my DH practice. Sometimes, as with these examples, the result explicitly looks like OER, but it’s often just about asking students to write in public about the process of teaching and learning. They teach themselves new techniques, develop workshops for each other, and document the teaching materials for others. My students use open writing as a means of imagining into existence the kind of scholars they want to be on their own terms—they don’t wait for academic publishers to credential them accordingly. The examples I used here were specific to me, but virtually every member of the Scholars’ Lab staff is engaged in this work in some capacity. We want our students to see the Lab and the Library as spaces that see them for who they are—worthy and capable even as they are learning.

All of this is to say that open pedagogy for me means treating students as true partners in the production of scholarly knowledge. They teach me as much as I them, and it happens in public. I’ll close with a quotation by Nicholas Payton, a jazz hero of mine. It’s one I sit with every day.

“There are no great teachers, only great students who give tools to other students.”