The first time I was given my own class to teach, I had exactly 16 days to develop a brand new course on Digital Humanities and Academic Libraries. The students were enrolled in a Master of Library and Information Science degree (from which I had graduated 3 years earlier) and were used to lecture-style courses and three essay assignments. I followed an outline of another MLIS course in constructing both my lessons and my assignments, kindly provided to me by a long-time faculty member in the department. I was thrilled and excited to share everything I had learned about DH over the past three years with budding librarians.
The class was a total disaster (or so I thought). I went in teaching as I had been taught throughout my time as an undergraduate and grad student; with the ‘expert’ at the front of the room, providing lectures, links to slides, and discussion questions. However, I found that the students truly disliked DH as I presented it: they simply did not want to engage with a field could not be defined, much less experiment with techniques and platforms built by the DH community, despite my best attempts showcasing how closely-aligned many of these approaches were with librarianship. Six weeks into the course I went home and wept, wondering what I was doing wrong. Somehow we all made it to the end of
And so I became a student. I did some poking around on various websites for how DH was being taught elsewhere. In 2012, I took the DH Pedagogy course at DHSI taught by Diane Jakacki, Jentery Sayers, and Katherine Harris. In this course, I learned a lot about structuring course time around digital projects, and how things would not always turn out as planned. In 2016 I co-taught Intro to DH with Dr. Susan Brown, an interdisciplinary class made up of English and History majors. Classes were part lecture, part discussion, with students each leading a seminar in the term. Their final, digital projects were developed out of their own interests, which guided the sources they included and the platforms they utilized. This was the first time I was helping students see themselves as part of the spectrum of scholars I know as digital humanists.
From that point on, in creating my own courses at Guelph, I have developed several principles that guide my teaching. I’ll list these here, and expand on each of them below:
1. Let the students lead the way.
2. Discussions are (usually) better than lectures.
3. Essays and exams are not my
4. Give students room to fail, and help them to learn from this failure.
5. Demonstrate the applicability of each course to the world outside academia.
1. Let the students lead the way. In each of my classes I prepare the reading lists in advance, leave two classes without specified topics, and only hint at the final assignment (to date, all of my classes have had a digital or hands-on component to their final project). We walk through the outline on the first day, and I give the students two weeks to help me shape the course. If there are topics they were expecting that are not covered we talk them through as a class, working out if others thought the same way, and where these topics might fit. I usually wait until a month into class before assigning their proposals and their final projects, so I can provide options which will fit with the different learning styles I encounter. This usually means having a ‘hands-on’ component for those that are more technically inclined, a self-reflection component for the more critically engaged, and, when possible, a range of topics that lets them follow their own interests. Is this a lot of work for me? Yes. Is it worth it? 100%.
2. Discussions are (usually) better than lectures. The five classes I’ve had the pleasure of teaching during my post-doc at the University of Guelph have all been small in size (12-23 students). Unlike many professors who just start out, I have yet to be assigned a large-scale 1000-level course, and the time may come where I’ll have to do some creative thinking about this principle, but for now, I do not lecture. Every class, I prepare a set of questions and topics pulled from the readings and I engage the students in discussion. It’s sometimes difficult, with undergrads who have never taken a seminar before, to get them talking, but I usually find that by the time three weeks have passed we are all comfortable enough to converse. I also provide a digital discussion (Slack, CourseLink) outside of the classroom for students who prefer that method of communication. Student-led discussions and my reminding students to respect each other (and me!) help motivate discussion, but I also make a point of not putting students on the spot and keeping time every few classes for them to ‘check-in’ about things they are not feeling sure about. Occasionally, after an assignment is given back or if there is a topic that the class seems to be skirting, I’ll prepare a few slides or a short hand-out to walk them through, but I have found that nothing engages students as much as genuine interest in hearing what they have to say.
3. Assigning essays and exams is not my style; creativity is key. Please do not think that I am against the essay. I think that this form of writing has its place, is a good way of gauging student understanding, and, when written well, is a wonderful way of presenting an argument. However, I do not think its place is the DH classroom. My students learn to write essays elsewhere, but the assignments I give them are usually meant for an audience larger than one. A lot of the time they write for the web, and we spend time thinking about this public audience, and how it changes what and how we write. Many final projects end up being a mix of digital approaches to answering a humanities research question, and the best thing they can write for me is reflection. First-person, honest-to-goodness, I didn’t get to where I wanted to, reflection. And that’s where number 4 comes in…
4. Give students room to fail, then help them to learn from this failure. When I eventually hand out the details for final assignments, a look of terror will, without doubt, cross over the faces of at least half of my students. Then I remind them of something I’ve likely already said before, but this time it’s more important: It is okay to fail. I know going into the final weeks of my courses that students will be stressed out, that they will find that the question they were hoping to answer is not within their reach given the digital tools they have chosen, and that they will not complete everything they had hoped. I assure them that, although they might feel like they are failing, what they are actually experiencing is learning-by-doing.* I do not expect final, polished projects. I do expect them to be able to walk me through their steps, tell me what went wrong, what they could improve, and to critically engage with the DH community (through articles, blog posts, and even tweets) in their reflections on this process. What amazes me every class is this: although I give them room to fail, my students push themselves to the point of having a presentation-ready project at the end of every term. And the projects just keep getting better and better.
5. Demonstrate the applicability of each course to the world outside academia. Two things happen at the end of all my classes. First, students present their projects somewhere outside of the classroom. This might be at the library or in our DH centre, but they have to be prepared for people they have never met before approaching them and learning about their projects, which are usually either displayed as posters or digital demonstrations on tables in front of them. This year, for example, we are taking our digital, oral history projects back to the retirement home where the interviews were recorded, to show the participants themselves the contextualized histories that grew from their memories. Second, my final class goes back to Principle #1: the students get to use that class for whatever they need. I volunteer to give advice on everything from job-seeking to resumé building, and I take the time to list every skill they developed in my class (text analysis, writing for the web, interviewing skills, collaborative project work, basic web-design, etc) and how they can use it to enhance their chances of success after graduating. This serves two functions: it helps them feel prepared going forward, and it rewards them by showing them how far they have come in only thirteen weeks.
I am not very far into my teaching career. I repeatedly hear from more experienced instructors that I will eventually give up ‘trying new things’, and that I’ll resort to lecturing and essays. I hear that students like me ‘because I’m young’ and that it will be difficult in coming years to maintain the rapport I have with them now. I have to disagree. I never thought I would enjoy teaching as much as I have in the past three years. Making each experience different keeps me interested, and my passion for the students and their success can be felt in the classroom (or so I’ve been told). In 2010, I stumbled into the DH community as a graduate student and found a place where I was respected and rewarded. I consider my teaching a success when I can make my classroom a place where students feel the same way.
The first time I was given my own class to teach, I had exactly 16 days to develop a brand new course on Digital Humanities and Academic Libraries. The students were enrolled in a Master of Library and Information Science degree (from which I had graduated 3 years earlier) and were used to lecture-style courses and three essay assignments. I followed an outline of another MLIS course in constructing both my lessons and my assignments, kindly provided to me by a long-time faculty member in the department. I was thrilled and excited to share everything I had learned about DH over the past three years with budding librarians.