What Drew Me to Digital Pedagogy

This year, I am working with Rachel Retica and Seanna Viechweg on a digital pedagogy reading group (join us!). Our plan is to run a yearlong series of sessions, rotating who is in charge of any one meeting, as a means of giving each of us practice teaching at the same time that we’re discussing it. My first session focused on digital pedagogy and labor. Rachel’s session will focus on reading, interpretation and information literacy, and Seanna will run her session as a discussion of culturally responsive pedagogy. As a part of this work, we’ll also be aiming to work up a collectively authored piece at the end of the year. As we’re still in the brainstorming phase now, we decided to take on a series of writing prompts to gather some raw material to discuss our own orientations to this work.

Our first: what’s your origin story?

It was hard for me to come up with a single answer to the question, so I opted for a kind of refracting approach. Many sketches instead of a single one. I could not think of just one origin story, so I chose many. I wrote these all in chronological order, but I scrambled them at random to present them here. After all, I’m still that kid who cried in a trumpet lesson and skipped class in college, even now when I’m more often teacher than student. I’ll leave off reflections on them for another post.

What is your origin story with digital pedagogy? What brought you to it?

I am a student. I am quiet in class. I know whether or not I speak is tied to my grade, but I feel intense anxiety over this fact. It gets in the way of me speaking.

I am fresh out of my graduate fellowship in DH at the Scholars’ Lab, co-teaching humanities programming with Wayne Graham at HILT. I mention that there is a job in the region I want to apply for but don’t feel qualified. He tells me that I absolutely am qualified. That job is at W&L.

I am a graduate fellow in the Scholars’ Lab. The staff ask us to volunteer for roles on a collaborative project. They ask, “What do you want to learn?” rather than “What do you think you are good at?”

I am crying on an overlook on Afton Mountain. It’s the very last day that I will be commuting back to Charlottesville from my postdoc at Washington and Lee University. I have loved my time there, but the drive has been eating away at me in ways I did not understand. I won’t have to do it any longer.

I am a graduate student at UVA. I ask if I can use a laptop in the Scholars’ Lab. One of the staff responds with a laugh: “Of course - we’re not fascists.” I just came from an English department lecture in which they were banned.

I am crying in my weekly trumpet lesson. My teacher Paul Neebe gives me two pieces of advice. All bad sound can become good sound. The mistake I am making is thinking I will stay the same if I work at improving something.

I am a fourth grader trying to learn how to type. Our instructor teaches us about home row and how to use it to guide our fingers across the keyboard. It never sticks, and to this day I still use a whacky self-taught version of typing that usually involves me elevating my right pinky for no other reason than habit.

I am a second grader sitting off to the side of our classroom for mandatory computer time. My task for the afternoon is to practice clicking and dragging an icon across the desktop of the classroom computer. This feels easy for me, who used to play educational games on my dad’s work laptop whenever he would let me. I hurry through it to go back to playing games.

I am a freshman at UVA. We are on break during a weekly two-hour seminar that the instructor fills with incessant lectures. I am on my back staring at the stars beginning to emerge in the evening sky. There has to be a better way to learn. I decide I want to teach.

I am an undergraduate who thinks they can handle a 9:00 AM class fresh out of high school. I miss class constantly.