Digital pedagogy is something I think I’ve been exposed to for a long time without the vocab word. My mom and aunt have been implementing things like ThingLink and Jamboard (rip… almost gone but never forgotten), and building classroom websites for years. Being friends and classmates with Kris I’ve had my head filled with still more ideas of what this looks like but on a broad scale, I’m not sure I’d given it much thought. I will admit, when we were talking about pros & cons about “digitizing” your teaching I was confused about what would make it bad, but our discussion of things you’d lose made it click… you can’t actually do everything lol. If you steer your students towards digital tools and learning, they will inevitably be missing out on the more traditional skills of primary source interpretation and quality academic writing. This lesson of scale is something I’m sure I’ll have to learn the hard way when I teach for the first time. That being said, I think there are ways in which educators can achieve a best of both worlds. Dr. Otis’ “Constructing and Contesting the Past: Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia,” in Digital Pedagogy in Early Modern Studies, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies Series is a perfect illustration of this. Teachers of any subject, most grade levels, and any level of DH expertise would be able to sprinkle in Wikipedia activities amidst a more traditional semester trajectory.
Zooniverse
I looked at two Zooniverse projects, the first being Civil War Bluejackets. The Bluejackets project asks people to go in and correct any mistakes in the computer generated transcriptions of the naval muster rolls. It is a super user-friendly interface that would be easy for students across many grade levels to use. I would say though, at least in the beginning, I think transcription of handwritten documents should be done in a small group or even as a class because it can be challenging.
Participating in these kinds of transcription projects would be beneficial for students in a number of different ways. They will be eased in, with the support of a group and very short snippets of text, to being able to interact with and interpret handwritten primary sources. The collaboration with classmates alongside the idea that these projects are unpaid and crowdsourced will be beneficial for them to see the collaborative nature of digital humanities. History has traditionally been perceived as a solitary discipline, but a field shift or maybe a counter culture has emerged alongside the rise of digital humanities and encourages practitioners and academics to lean into one another to build histories through networks. Correction-style transcription projects will also prompt students to consider the shortcomings of machine learning alongside its advantages.
I had never thought about having to use DH “stealthily” in the classroom until this module, and I realized that stealth could mean more than one thing: Stealth used on the educator, or stealth used on the students. While this did surprise me, the idea that both teachers and students can be resistant to having to learn something new makes complete sense to me. There can be an attachment to the mystical tradition of the field and also a fear of being judged/evaluated poorly in a new way of doing things. For that reason, I really loved that a book like Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross exists. It felt almost like a personal travel guide or perhaps like teaching materials that some professionals may be more accustomed to. A bit of handholding and teaching has to be provided, we can’t expect everyone to willingly jump into this unknown and largely undefined field. This goes back to one of the readings from the text analysis optional module, “The Push and Pull of Digital Humanities: Topic Modeling the ‘What is digital humanities?’ Genre.” The multiple authors wrote, as early career digital humanists, that they needed more guidance from those more experienced with the tools they are interested in, particularly when it comes to interpretations. That said, mentorship and openness is what will grow digital humanities over time.
Google Maps
The Google Map tutorial on this module and others I’ve used either in this class or previous, are so simple and make the idea of teaching spatiality feel possible. Maybe I just like spatial history, but I feel like every story can be mapped in one way or another and this style of activity could be done by individual students or small groups across a wide variety of grade levels. These activities depending on the content, could help students visualize the spread of information, the story of a person’s life, the history of how a community was built or destroyed, etc… You could even introduce this to students as a way to tell their personal histories; They could each make a map of their lives and present it. Then when analyzing primary sources, they will be thinking spatially, but also feeling community with historical actors because they now conceptualize themselves as moving through and defining space.
For my current research assistantship, my partner and I are working on a teaching guide for how US history teachers of any grade could use primary sources to weave environmental history into their pre-determined units. This is going to be somewhat of a lift because neither of us have experience in K-12 education ourselves, but we’ve been finding some amazing resources with primary or curated information. In looking for things to include, I stumbled upon the ArcGIS StoryMap below that illustrates and makes interactive all of the segregated spaces in nature that were designated for or created by African American people. The project doesn’t include lesson plans, but if we decide to make this resource part of our guide, we are going to have to decide how to create strategic and fruitful ways for students of various levels to interact with digital humanities media. I’m embedding it below so you guys can see it too!!
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