The Bolted Desk

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. So I will tag the posts accordingly to make them easy to connect. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

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“What is digital humanities?”

I was on my way to the annual meeting of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute when the customs officer posed the question to me. DH is a baggy and specialized academic field that suffers from as many competing definitions as it does detractors. I have been asked to define the field more times than I count, but, standing in the immigration line at the Canadian border, I suddenly felt renewed urgency to get my terms straight. To describe my work with precision and clarity for a general audience. The officer ostensibly asked for an explanation, a narrative of my being in this place at this time, but he really just wanted facts. My actual response was unimportant. They just wanted to determine that I had a plausible reason for attending a conference they already knew was taking place (it was a small port of immigration and a large conference). There was a right and a wrong to the exchange. He wanted me to prove that I knew the proper response.

There was a pedagogy to the conversation, even though the officer might never have framed it as such. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire speaks at length of the banking model of education, the sense that typical educational practice sees students as operating at a deficit. The instructor, with their surplus of knowledge, deposits this valuable commodity in their pupils who are asked, in turn, to regurgitate learned facts at a later date. Power exists in the hands of the teacher, whose position of authority structures the economics of the classroom. Even though teaching and learning were far from the arm of the state I encountered at the Canadian border, a similar system of policies, power, and relationships structured our exchange. I was asked to participate in a quiz without being properly coached in the material, but the expected response was clear. “Show me you have the appropriate knowledge to show you are not a threat. Show that you have learned what it means to be a docile traveler,” the officer seemed to say, “and I will let you pass.” Freire’s central metaphor for this kind of encounter was economic: deposits, withdrawals, deficits, and surplus. But my encounter with customs showed that the same pedagogical apparatus operates in many walks of life. In this moment, I felt the pressure to teach this person something about digital humanities. To teach, in the face of an administrative official whose response to that instruction carried real stakes. To teach, while being confronted with an architecture that appeared to force my work to justify itself before knowing anything about it. Teach well, and I could continue to the conference. Teach poorly, and I would be subject to unknown bureaucratic hurdles. I only got so far as “Digital Humanities is…” before the official stamped my passport and let me through.

My encounter with Freire while traveling haunted me even once I returned to the University of Virginia and faced a different kind of border. It was the cusp of a new semester and the end of summer, so I took a few days to scout out the room I would be teaching in for the upcoming term. The space I found was a relic of an older era, before smart boards, inclusive design, or dynamic classrooms. With horror I found rows of old, wooden desks fastened to the ground with a series of bolts that prevented them from moving. The chairs produced an almost visceral response for students: they were physically uncomfortable, designed for normative bodies, and unyielding to whatever adjustments the user might need for their own work. I too had once sat in these very chairs during my undergraduate days at the same institution, and I remembered well the discomfort they caused. With an almost inexorable effect, the sense of being trapped led students to vandalize the chairs, and each chair was scrawled with the ink, carvings, and etchings of graffiti from decades of students. The chaotic, jubilant writings on each desk felt like an explicit act of rebellion against the physical space of the room and the desks themselves. Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair.

A fresh-faced graduate instructor, I viewed these rows of desks from a perspective that was new to me: the front of the room. They might make sense for one kind of classroom, but I was puzzled as to how I would fit them to my needs for literary discussion. After all, they enforced a specific relationship between teacher and student by means of what Jesse Stommel has referred to as the “rhetoric of the room”—“the ways the shape of the room affects the learning we do inside of it.” The bolted chairs demanded the instructor take center stage, whether they wished to or not. While I had observed teachers carry out group work in those spaces, the physically restricted desks required students to turn sideways in their chairs in order to see one another. The room quite literally fought back against the pedagogy of the teacher and tried to enforce its own. Lecture; not discussion. Hierarchy; not democracy. As if aware of the tense dynamic between the instructor and the spaces given to them for teaching and learning, the students found themselves drawn back to carving their own frustrations into the furniture itself.

Still pondering these desks, I made my way over to the Scholars’ Lab, a center for digital research in the University Library where I had recently begun the first in a series of digital humanities fellowships that would lead to my present-day position as digital library professional. As was often the case, I plugged away on a group project with my fellowship cohort while sharing space with the librarians who taught us. I remember well the kinds of staff conversations we would overhear as we worked: endlessly supportive student mentoring, careful guidance in digital humanities project design, and the best instruction I had ever observed in my time as an educator. After one such meeting, as I expressed my frustrations with my role as a graduate instructor, one of these mentors floored me with their response: “I imagine that would be frustrating, but I don’t really teach.” This librarian was one of the best mentors I had ever had, and I regularly saw them shaping not just student research projects, but also providing expert guidance in how to shape a life doing this work.

How could someone so engaged in the act of teaching be so convinced that their work did not count? What was teaching, if not this? And who gets to make such determinations?

The immigration officer. The bolted desk. The university. They each regulate bodies, attitudes, and relationships. They share a crucial connection to my coworker in denial about their own teacherly identity. Our institutions carve out pedagogical relationships using spaces, policies, and actions while at the same time often rendering these dynamics invisible. As Stommel’s rhetoric of the room shows, spaces exert unexpected wills of their own, often over and above those of their inhabitants. But we can take his formulation one step further. The Canadian officer was acting in accordance with a long series of governmental policies enforcing social and legal procedures at the border. And rooms do not exist in isolation. The campus buildings at UVA contained many such rooms with bolted desks. Each of these roles and rooms was designed. Even though the UVA architect might not have thought of themselves as a teacher, their decisions actively shaped the experiences and pedagogies of those who do. Institutions of higher education are comprised of thousands of small decisions like these, innumerable small acts of pedagogy that affect teachers and learners—who we are allowed to be and who counts themselves as part of our number.