POST: How We Teach? Digital Humanities Pedagogy in an Imperfect World

Diane Jakacki (Bucknell University) posted the text of her keynote delivered at the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) Conference in Calgary. The talk explores what it means to teach digital humanities and how practitioners “must differentiate it from other practices of digital pedagogy, and whether in this world that is so imperfect in so many ways, that we can effectively support the Digital Humanities at a curricular level.” Jakacki goes on to discuss how digital humanists “have to adopt more formal pedagogical styles” as “our institutions, our disciplines, the press…are finally paying attention to us” including co-teaching between instructors of record, instructional technologists, librarians, and/or digital scholarship coordinators, professionalization of digital humanities practice and pedagogy, and embrace multiple paths for graduate students to teach and practice in the academy.

So maybe those of us who are coming up in whatever wave of DH this is – I’ve never quite figured out how it maps against waves of feminism – need to stop worrying about titles, make sure that we are employed, and figure out what it means for us to teach. Because our academic world is always going to be imperfect. And because so many DH scholar-practitioners are amazingly agile and amazingly resourceful and amazingly generous teachers, we need to get on with it and do what has always worked for us. Now we’re just doing it on a larger stage.