Lisa Hager, Caitlin Kelly, and I will be talking about Digital Pedagogy at the British Women Writers Conference in Athens, GA on Friday June 3. Visit Lisa’s blog for the panel abstract and everyone’s slides. http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=049349ebd44424a5695f61cae13dcc17&query=media&mode=corpus&view=CollocatesGraph I’ll post my full talk here tomorrow, but for now, here are my slides. See you tomorrow! Read more →
For this exercise, in small groups, I want you to pick two of the following professional websites and examine them for the production and curation of professional academic identity.
Questions to consider:
Then, scan all of the sites (and others you may be familiar with) and consider the following:
This week, I am at Arizona State University attending the annual HASTAC Conference. Today, I’ll be on a panel discussing a recent collaboration I had with Sofia Dueñas, an undergraduate and our inaugural Digital Liberal Arts Cauffman Fellow, at Whittier College. Below is the abstract of our panel, and some information and media from our panel.
Digital Humanities have expanded methods and forms for scholarship, increasing opportunities for participation and funding for those in the academy. While alt-ac (alternative academic) staff, faculty, and graduate student collaborations have been an oft-discussed topic in higher education journalism and at academic conferences, collaborations with undergraduate students have received less attention. This panel brings together faculty, academic staff, and undergraduate students from a range of disciplines (English, Education, Mathematics, Public Health) and institutions — private, public, religious, and Hispanic Serving institutions — to present short papers and facilitate a working session on faculty-student partnerships in research, pedagogy, and community-based activism. Panelists will explore the value of and obstacles to collaborative partnerships between faculty and undergraduates.
Anne Choi (CSU Dominguez Hills) will share a case study of a digital humanities project, “Recreating the Aloha Spirit”, undertaken at a medium-sized state university, and the process by which students become experts through learning digital tools. Anne Cong-Huyen (Digital Scholar, Whittier College) and Sofia Duenas (Junior, Whittier College, HASTAC Scholar) will speak about their work in designing a new course that interrogates gender and race in digital labor, and incorporates digital assignments and activities to reinforce the content. Annemarie Perez (Loyola Marymount University) will discuss of the creation of a digital archive on The Chican@ Gothic. This public humanities project allows students to hone their digital writing skills while prompting conversations between the students authors and critics, both in person and via digital means. Lastly, Andrea Rehn (Whittier College) and Bill Kronholm (Whittier College) will speak about an experimental team-taught undergraduate project-based learning course titled “Just Hacking.” In this course, undergraduates with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds worked together on a project they titled “Operation F.I.S.H.” (food insecurity and stigmatized homelessness) that advanced from initial conception through prototype during a single semester.
This past year, Whittier College’s Digital Liberal Arts program was the recipient of a generous alumni endowment that created an ongoing student fellowship. The specific parameters of the donation required that the student would work in collaboration with a faculty member to develop or redesign a course. Sofia Duenas, the inaugural recipient of the Cauffman Fellowship, will speak with her faculty mentor, Anne Cong-Huyen, about their work in designing a short, intensive course on race, gender, and digital labor, “Digital Labor: Race, Gender, & Technology in Literature & Film”. This new course, cross-listed in English and Gender Studies, models digital student-centered pedagogy, integrating various technologic tools and methods to interrogate the history of work in the technology industries, and to examine everyday digital labor. Anne and Sofia will speak briefly about the challenges and benefits of designing and co-teaching a course of this nature.
Annemarie Perez, has put together a précis of her talk on the Chicana/o Gothic project she built with her student. You can find that over at her blog, Cited at the Crossroads.
Discussion of the creation of a digital archive on The Chican@ Gothic by students at Loyola Marymount University as part of a course examining Chican@ literature through a gothic lens. The very limited critical publications on the topic became a virtue as individuals and groups of students created digital objects by collecting family folktales, variations on the La Llorona legends, reviews of Chican@ texts as gothic, and visual representations. The public nature of this digital writing prompted conversations between the students authors and critics via email, in person and on social media.
Recent pedagogical trends in higher education have underscored the importance of high-impact practices such as undergraduate research. However, the emphasis on undergraduate research has largely been focused on STEM disciplines. Employing undergraduate research and assessing its impact in the humanities has received less attention. In an effort to address this lacuna, this paper provides a case-study of “Recreating the Aloha Spirit”— a digital humanities project which is currently under development at California State University, Dominguez Hills. This case-study provides insight into the process of building a digital humanities project from the ground up that simultaneously serves the different interests of faculty and students. In particular, this paper explores the processes in which students become the expert on a particular “Recreating the Aloha Spirit” field of knowledge by utilizing digital humanities tools.
This presentation will describe an experimental team-taught undergraduate project-based learning course titled “Just Hacking.” The goal of the course was to decide on a social justice issue students’ collectively wanted to address, and devise a (digital) method to contribute to efforts to resolve that issue. The course was purposely offered without prerequisites in order to attract students who might otherwise avoid either computer science-sounding classes OR social justice-oriented classes. Undergraduates with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds worked together and on a project they titled “Operation F.I.S.H.” (food insecurity and stigmatized homelessness) that advanced from initial conception through prototype during a single semester. The course was a radical experiment in student-initiated learning: students organized themselves into project teams, chose project managers, set their own deadlines and goals, and struggled to work together constructively toward an overall goal they envisioned for themselves.
This presentation, which will include faculty and student members of the class, will describe the failures and successes of this experiment. At the beginning of the course, we urged students to realize that the project could fail, and there were some aspects of it that did. But what was created was a radically democratic learning experience in which students developed skills (technical, personal, and social) in response to the needs of the project or the team. In the process, students and faculty engaged with issues as diverse as defining food insecurity, addressing a digital divide among class members as well as among the projected users of the class’s interactive mapping project, ethical interviewing strategies, and questions about student-led projects in an educational system structured by grades.
Click on any course below for detailed descriptions of Fall 2016 English Department courses. Click on English News Vol 16, #2, March 2016 for the full “In English” newsletter, edited by Professor Charles Adams, with news and updates about the department’s faculty and students. Read more →
I love my job. I really do! There are times however, that I struggle to remain motivated and my creativity is clouded by the many to do lists in my life—from work to home.
Last week I took a day off work. I didn’t alert my family. I told my boss I just needed a day. “Mental health day” she said “got it.” I love that she gets it. It was spring break at the college and there wasn’t lots of the usual activity going on anyway. One of the reasons I enjoy my job is because of the leadership in my office. There’s little micromanaging with encouragement and support when needed. I find that I thrive in this work environment. Sure, there are timelines, scheduling, and ‘deliverables’ that are required. But I believe a certain level of autonomy is important in what we do. We are humans after all, not machines. We recharge our batteries in different ways.
So I took the liberty to re-arrange a day in my life.
8:00am Took the kids to school but with no makeup, hair in a tousled ponytail and dressed in yoga wear (wasn’t going to a yoga class). Came back home and hubby had left to work. I had the WHOLE house to MYSELF! Omigosh! I poured myself an extra cup of coffee and read a couple of chapters from a book I’m using for research with the subtitle, “:uncovering the secrets of the world’s happiest country” (I see a pattern here).
9:00am Netflix time! I watched a few episodes of a series that was recommended to me with tons of swearing and nudity that I can’t have on with the kids in the house.
10:00am Maybe I should go get a mani and pedi? I’ve been avoiding sandals and it’s not because we haven’t had warm, sunny weather. I text my friend asking if she can have lunch and then I run a bath with some aromatherapy product I got last Mother’s Day. I decide that I have all of the tools to make my own nail salon at home and I pick the prettiest, brightest red nail lacquer that I own. On fleek! I’m the only one at home which means I launch my Fleetwood Mac radio stream and now I’m singing out loud to “Dreams” while I pretend I’m in one of those “Calgon, take me away!” commercials from the 1980s. I didn’t understand that commercial as a young girl but I do now. This is also my way of saying I remember the advertisement but I’m not that old.
11:30am Drive to meet my friend for lunch. In the car I switch station streams to Notorious BIG radio. Usually inappropriate for my mommy mobile but I’m alone and I proudly practice my rapping skillz while driving. This is the only multitasking I plan for today.
Noon Meet my friend for lunch. We start off asking how each other is doing. We order more kimchi and proceed to catch up on gossip and other BS over Bibimbap and I’m pleasantly surprised that we don’t mention each other’s children or husbands once. We catch our breath from laughing so hard over a shared memory and then we make a pledge, though not a date (yes, many schedules to consult before a set date) for another lunch like this. Good friends are magic for the soul. I am grateful!
2:00pm It’s only early afternoon. I treat myself to a frothy, decadent venti drink that I normally don’t spend $5 on and I head over to a nearby bargain department store where I take my time going aisle by aisle. I’m only window shopping but it feels incredibly nice not to have anyone rushing me or the constant worry that I’m on my lunch break and need to get back soon.
3:30pm It’s happy hour somewhere! I send another text and decide to continue the tour of dive bars that my husband and I have been visiting near our neighborhood. I walk into a questionable yet cheerful one that has a sailing motif but we are not near the sea and my eyes take a moment to adjust to the low lighting of this drinking den. I take an empty seat at the bar and I order a beer. The Barflys go about their business shooting the shit with the bartender and I pick up that there’s some inside jokes that are a part of their high-pitched laughs. I search my wallet for a dollar bill and I feed the Lotto machine to get a Scratcher. I hold my breath expecting that I’ll be California’s newest millionaire but I don’t even get one matching pair. Oh, well! A handsome man walks in and squints while his eyes adjust. I smile at him and he takes the seat next to me. He asks if I’d like a drink. I tell him that I’m playing hooky and he tells me a joke he heard at work. We laugh and ask for the check. Then he turns to me and says, “I’ll meet you at home. I’ll stop to get milk.”
5:00pm I head home at the same time I’d be leaving work. I think about how my day went and how relaxed I feel. I so needed this.
Establishing a work-life balance is hard for working mothers. Our needs are usually at the bottom of the list- any list. When I first started my career someone told me “take care of number one— that’s you!” When I became a wife and then mother the idea of ‘taking care of yourself’ seemed selfish. When someone would say ‘take care’ to me that meant, get a flu shot, be careful with the pine cones near the sidewalk so you don’t sprain your ankle. Your children depend on you and there’s no down time. It didn’t mean, get more sleep or take a day to do things, no matter how small, that make you feel refreshed—like a software update for your brain.
The importance of self care is obvious but not always easy. But of course I should take care of myself. This will help me be a better wife, a better mother, a better colleague, a better employee. My day off wasn’t Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was an opportunity to recharge, hear my thoughts, and turn off the digital reminders on my phone that say I have a meeting coming up in 15. I’m still figuring out what the right balance is for me and my family but this day reminded me that it’s not selfish to take some time to yourself. Perhaps I’ll stop looking at my phone or email after I put the kids to bed. Instead, maybe I’ll put on one of those moisturizing sheet masks that I love and browse the backlog of my Vogue magazines. It’s a start and I like it already!
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting Fresno State University to give a talk at Manning Library to a digital humanities focused Faculty Learning Community about digital pedagogy and digital humanities. Many thanks to David Drexler for the invitation, and to John Beynon and Kathee Godfrey for their hospitality!
I’m sharing the talk and slides below. I spoke mostly from notes, so I’ve tried to recreate it as closely as I can from memory (with some added references). A note of preface: this talk was written for a community is just getting started with dh, and the talk is aimed at people who have never heard of dh, but also was meant to be practical and helpful for those who are already in the field and looking to bring digital methods into their classes.
In any case, enjoy!
This is somewhat of a loaded question, but the definition that I’ve heard Miriam Posner and others use, that I like, goes something like this: Digital Humanities is the scholarly endeavor of using digital tools and methods to answer humanities questions.
Digital humanities has been described as a “big tent,” an inclusive umbrella under which many activities and people can be labelled “dh.” (Melissa Terras gives a nice definition and critique of big tent dh here, and Patrik Svensson has written broadly on the topic.) Despite this big tent, dh is known for its large projects. Often big, multi-year grant-funded public humanities projects, featuring collaborations with different institutions and campus units.
Here, shared several examples of long-standing (and some newer) dh projects:
The English Broadside Ballad Archive under the direction of Patricia Fumerton at UCSB. This project has won numerous grants, and is a long-running project involving the work of multiple faculty members, archives (across nations), and has funded many an English grad at UCSB.
The Women Writers Project at Northeastern, and formerly of Brown, which is under the direction of Julia Flanders. This is a massive, multi-pronged project that recuperates, contextualizes, and encodes the work of pre-Victorian women. Though the project shares many materials, their archive and resources are primarily accessible through a subscription.
Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon, directed by Christopher Warren at Georgetown, visualizes social networks of Early Modern Europe, with the support of the institution and Carnegie Mellon Foundation.
The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, headed by Connie Geer and Matthew W. Shepard, and hosted by the University of South Carolina Libraries, Digital Collections, and African American Studies Department. This project maps locations present in the Green Book, which documented safe locations for black travelers in the mid 20th century. This project is possible through institutional support and staffing.
In addition to these higher profile projects, there are many projects on shoestring projects. These are often labors of love for those involved, and are created to address social issues or concerns. These are almost always created as public humanities projects as platforms for public education.
Projects aside, there has been a lot of controversy about the digital humanities.
Some have been saying it’s the savior of the humanities:
While, others have been vocal in their critique, often to help shape and mold the practices and methods of the community:
Before I go into the main part of this talk, I should preface this talk with a bit of background about me:
I have a PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara, where I studied digital humanities, Asian American, transnational, and global literature & media. Aside from my training in writing composition instruction done in a separate MA program, I don’t have much formal training in pedagogy. Very few graduate students in the humanities receive any pedagogical training. Much of what I will speak about comes from my post graduate school experience working in a library as an academic staff member supporting digital pedagogy and research at a small liberal arts college. Here, I also teach my own courses in Asian American and digital literature. I also serve as the co-facilitator of FemTechNet, a distributed network of scholars, artists, activists teaching and producing resources for teaching feminism and technology. My experience then, comes from a few different perspectives that inform my take on digital pedagogy.
Digital projects can be fancy, get you attention and funding, but ultimately, most faculty in higher ed are not going to be receiving thousands or millions in grant funding to take on digital projects of this scale, we won’t have a wealth of time to travel to or attend workshops to learn new digital skills, to hire technical labor. Our bread and butter is in the daily work of teaching. Teaching is also the one place where we can purposefully weave digital methods and tools into our daily practice to help students engage with course content, reinforce content, etc.
Brian Croxall and Adeline Koh, organizers of the Modern Language Association Digital Pedagogy Unconference in 2013, explain it as “the use of electronic elements to enhance or to change to experience of education.” (citation)
If we focus on the “pedagogy” of that phrase…
Jesse Stommel of Hybrid Pedagogy states: “Pedagogy is not synonymous with teaching or talking about teaching, nor is it entirely abstracted from the acts of teaching and learning. Pedagogy is praxis, the place where philosophy and practice meet.” (citation)
Digital pedagogy then, should not be additive.
It’s not just about using technology or digital tools.
We’re not looking for new hammers to hit the same old nails. Instead, digital pedagogy must be self-reflexive.
IF we bring tools into our classrooms, as part of activities, for group projects, as elements of assignments, etc. and we don’t always need to bring tools into our classes, we must always ask a few questions before we do so:
In my own teaching, and in working with faculty, I would say there are many potential benefits to taking on digital pedagogy in your own classes (or in working with faculty). But, as with all things, it depends on many factors. I would say, however, that there are many potential pros to digital pedagogy if it is undertaken thoughtfully/
When we get to the end there, and examine the potential for digital pedagogy, it starts to look an awful lot like critical or radical feminist pedagogy:
As a graduate student, I co-founded the #transformDH collective with a handful of other graduate students working at the intersections of critical race studies, gender & sexuality studies, and digital studies. I’m now the Digital Scholar at Whittier College, where I’m the co-coordinator of the Digital Liberal Arts program, where I support digital pedagogy and research, and where the early work of #transformDH still informs the work I do with faculty and staff across the campus.
In a forthcoming “manifesto”/reflection co-written with Moya Bailey, Alexis Lothian, Amanda Phillips, and to be published in Debates in DH 2016, eds. Matt K. Gold and Lauren Klein, we identify the following key claims as constitutive of #transformDH:
These tenets that guide my work, and the work of many who see themselves as somewhat marginal to digital humanities, are essential to how and why we may bring digital elements into our classes.
At my own home institution, we have a very different institutional identity than previous universities I’ve worked at (UCLA, UCSB): We’re first and foremost a teaching college. Though officially secular, we are still Quaker in practice, with a commitment (at least among faculty and staff) to social responsibility and community. We pride ourself on the diversity of our student body, which is 60% students of color, 20% are 1st generation students, and 1/3 of our students are Pell grant eligible. Most of our students hold jobs, if not multiple jobs. Increasingly, our faculty and our administration are reflecting this shift in our student body; they are increasingly less white, less male. Our faculty are aware and sensitive to the notion that we should endeavor to be a Hispanic Serving Institution, and not just a Hispanic enrolling Institution. Across the board, faculty and staff care a lot about issues of race, of gender, of equity.
With this in mind, I firmly believe that in our teaching, we can mobilize digital pedagogy for these transformative purposes.
So, I’ll repeat. It’s not just about tools, it’s about how you use them. Why you use them. Where they come from. How they change or improve learning. How to empower students to go out there and be fearless. To know that they can learn, can teach themselves any digital skill and then use it for good.
Now that you have an idea of what digital pedagogy is. How can you do it or work to support it? Some things I would encourage all faculty and staff to make sure they do:
Bonus tip!
And always come back to my own institutional context. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your institution? Always keep your students in mind. They are not digital natives. That is a myth. They’re also not just media consumers. How can we best prepare them for the future? What skills do they already bring to your class? They’re already using social media, producing content, circulating and sharing media – but we can help steer them to do this same activity critically, responsibly, and with purpose.
On our campus, “digital stories” started with narrative videos (see: University of Houston, Center for Digital Storytelling) and has expanded to include podcasts, digital books, and narrative games.
From Environmental Science to Child Development to English, I’ve worked with Faculty to develop scaffolded assignments using Piktochart (other options include Powerpoint) to translate dense information into visual arguments. This activity is actually deceivingly difficult, and I help faculty to break this project up, starting with a research paper (with citations) and then work to condense that information. I suggest including in-class close-reading activities of effective (and less effective) infographics, and building in peer-review workshops so students can get feedback on their work. As with writing, students need to understand that communicating through visual rhetoric is also a process.
If your institution has an institutional subscription (ask your librarians!) to PolicyMap or SocialExplorer (SocialExplorer also has a limited free edition), students and researchers can very easily map narratives and arguments onto geospatial visualizations using social science data, census information, etc. Alternatives include MapStory, which doesn’t require an institutional license, and doesn’t have its own data sets built it, but which may be more helpful for students working on regions outside the US.
I love pairing with librarians and archivists to bring archival materials into a classroom. It helps students to understand the materiality of history, and gives them experience in working with primary materials. The National Archives have resources on doing this with collections (both visual and textual) of digitized materials curated around historical period. The University of Iowa also made their DIY History project open, which allows students and community members to contribute to transcription efforts that will make the institution’s digitized (but not machine readable) materials accessible to larger publics.
Lastly, the Domain of One’s Own project, which started at UMW, is expanding to a range of different campuses, and allows instructors to teach students digital literacies, and to give them the space and the opportunity to take ownership of their online identities, curate their digital content, and interrogate the tools and platforms that they use.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Facebook Group: DigLibArts, Digital Learning Professionals in Higher Education
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
It is a commonplace of academic life that we all need to learn to say “no” to requests and opportunities. The ability to determine our own priorities is a great privilege–one that not all of us are lucky enough to have. I am, therefore, grateful to know that I can turn down invitations. However, I rarely actual do. How do you decide… Read more →
I recently found a picture taken of me on a hill overlooking the Krak des Chevaliers in western Syria during a 2003 trip. I am pictured with my video camera, tripod and a bag strapped to my waist that holds brick-like backup battery packs and as many mini DV recording cassettes as I could carry. I was filming a documentary on women, history, and the middle east. I remember the challenges of the heat and the altitude along with the heavy gear I had to trek on some of the expeditions. But once I got the shots I wanted: Magic! Exhilaration! So many ancient stories to tell, beginning with one picture.
I’ve held on to this feeling and I’m thrilled to begin an idea I’ve had in the works for some time: pocket documentary filmmaking.
Later this spring, Kathy Filatreau (Instructional Technologist & partner in Digital Storytelling projects) and I will be traveling with 20 students from Whittier College’s anthropology and social work 300 course to Copenhagen, Denmark. The course taught by Professors Paula Sheridan and Lisa Ibañez are studying the ways in which welfare and workfare states contribute to the well-being of children and families. For many of the students in our group, this will be the first time they are traveling abroad. Along with their excitement to visit a different part of the world they also bring specific topics they would like to research. Some of these include education systems, clean energy plants, and the Dane’s renowned culture of happiness. Their main assignment is to create a digital story that reflects their research and findings. In 2016, the tools students will use to create their digital stories are all in their pocket. We will use our mobile devices, including phones and tablets to take photos and gather interviews and footage to edit with a personal narrative. The result will be a series of pocket documentaries that students will share with each other and a group of Danish faculty and students.
Our trip will include class meetings hosted by Metropolitan University College’s Social Work Program and we will share workshops on creating digital stories with our Danish partners. Students will take part in field visits relevant to course content and cultural excursions that will include a photography tour of the city focusing on techniques for capturing images and sound that will add dimension to student narratives. We will be blogging our learning adventure and sharing our digital stories on DenmarkDS.soniachaidez.com. We hit the ground running on May 20, 2016!
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