On the Limited Knowability of Institutions

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.

Every institution has embedded pedagogies—tacit structures, policies, and norms that govern the possibilities for teaching and learning. The curriculum is only one place in which teaching happens in higher education: every interaction is also a form of teaching, whether it pertains to a syllabus, a budget, or the use of campus space. In other words, the classroom is inseparable from the infrastructure that supports its work. The teacher struggling to find resources for her students, for example, cannot help but have her work affected by the threat of budget cuts. As sociologist Jessica Calarco and others have argued, students are often subject to a hidden curriculum of expectations and practices that reinforce social inequalities. I build on this work by offering a theory of the embedded pedagogies of institutions, those interrelated sets of strictures that pressure instructors to adopt particular pedagogies regardless of their own personal inclination. The book argues that, while these embedded pedagogies could feasibly support effective teaching, they most often inhibit justice-oriented approaches to education. 

Educators are under threat, struggling with institutional instability, scarcity, and political attacks on their work. This book offers guidance for instructors struggling with how to teach effectively in such uncertain and hostile environments, whether that teaching takes place in the classroom or elsewhere. With digital humanities pedagogy at US-based institutions of higher education as a frame and focus, I argue for an approach to teaching and learning that seeks to build more just and equitable institutions while also offering strategies to endure the negative ways these structures influence our work. This book offers a theory and practice of DH pedagogy by speaking from the position of a practitioner tasked with both teaching and administrating in the context of a public university in crisis. Teaching administrators, as I call people in roles like mine, are uniquely positioned to lay bare the pedagogical implications of infrastructural decisions at the same time that they implement a classroom practice that intervenes in their local institution. However, since many of these positions are institutionally unique, term-limited, or one-off, this unique vantage point has not often been formally explored. By focusing specifically on this intersection of teaching and administration, this book offers as much in the way of day-to-day approaches to the DH classroom as it does a far-reaching vision for how our pedagogies can help to bring about a university that is more stable, more sustainable, and more just.

The institutional structures that impact teaching are especially salient for those instructors who work outside departmental silos. For staff who work across departments, the warp and weft of the institutional pedagogy is particularly noticeable because we so regularly come into contact with patrons from across the university. DH pedagogy serves as a useful object of study in this regard, as so much DH teaching takes place in the cracks of the university. As a librarian, I have taught credit-bearing courses as well as one-off workshops, consulted on a graduate certificate in digital humanities as well as mentored students individually. Teaching in these spaces, I argue, reveals the pedagogies operationalized by our institutions for and against our work as teachers. Furthermore, because of its intensely collaborative and cross-disciplinary work, digital humanities teaching frequently forces encounters—and friction—with the university in ways that more narrowly discipline-specific instruction might not. Any instructor is subject to policy. But the librarian providing instruction in digital technology is especially aware of its impact and the ways in which it can be hostile to learning. 

In meeting the limited knowability of the university, we meet the first of the five characteristics that will give this book its structure:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

These characteristics form the basis of the stories that institutions of higher education typically tell about themselves and who they want to be. They form the basis of the neoliberal university and its mode of describing itself. In each case, these values exert power over the kinds of teaching and learning possible in their spaces, often in ways that instructors would not willingly ascribe to. The body of the book centers on the narratives that universities use to frame themselves as bastions of neutrality, intellectualism, and prestige. In each chapter, I critique the ways in which these values impose themselves as pedagogical forces on DH teachers and offer a pair of action-oriented responses, first as an administrator thinking pedagogically and then as a teacher thinking administratively. The result is one part theory, one part lesson plan. One part discussion, one part assignment template. As educators faced with frustrating circumstances, it can be easy to feel disempowered, as though the institution is too large to change, and to turn inwards, narrowly focusing on the day’s lesson plan in order to carry on. I argue, instead, for a renewed view of higher education institutions in familiar terms for teachers. By demystifying and breaking them down as pedagogical systems, teachers can find opportunities for change and create the conditions for our learning communities to thrive.

The book concludes by meditating on the contested futures at the center of university life. Universities often claim to look towards the future while enshrining hyper-conservative institutional values that favor the past and refuse change. As such, I conclude by questioning the futures towards which universities are working. Who do these futures belong to? Our communities? Or a substratum of donors, politicians, and pundits? We cannot afford to treat the classroom as closed off, separate from the broader administrative context that shapes its spaces. By seeing teaching as an extension of policy—and policy, in turn, as a set of pedagogical interventions—educators can co-create a more hopeful future with their communities. Taken together, the book offers a roadmap for DH educators aiming to push their teaching and their institutions towards more just futures for teachers and learners. By rendering visible the pedagogical structures at the core of the university, I hope to empower educators to develop the tools to change them, in and out of the classroom.

For a first foray into the ways in which the teaching administrator may intervene in their own institution, we can meet the university’s limited knowability with a pedagogy of transparency. The first experiences many members of the university community have of their institutions are heavily manufactured. Whether through mailers to prospective students, new faculty orientations, or ongoing marketing and communication campaigns, universities have a vested interest in the careful articulation of themselves as particular kinds of institutions with specific values, processes, and audiences. Despite these broad campaigns to appear known in the public eye, I argue that this knowability is limited by design: universities deliberately obscure their workings from their community members, a fact that can hide the ways in which institutional policies and choices structure the possibilities for learning available to teachers and students. From an administrative standpoint, I first examine budgets as pedagogical technologies¹ that can offer students a vehicle by which they can better understand the infrastructure of their university. Second, from a classroom perspective, I examine digital humanities student projects that challenge the narratives universities share with the public and that attempt to make known their difficult histories. By questioning the received knowability of our institutions in our teaching we can illuminate their effects on our work. By recognizing administrative decisions as pedagogical ones we can recast them on grounds in which teachers might intervene.