Last week, Brandon Walsh taught how to develop a DH pedagogy to our Praxis Fellows (Scholars’ Lab’s annual interdisciplinary graduate DH cohort). In my next few posts, I’m exploring how that class refreshed my own DH pedagogy, with the goal of updating my teaching statement and polishing several new academic course and research workshop ideas.

Walsh on mind mapping DH pedagogies

I recommend Brandon’s full writeup of his overall approach to helping scholars develop DH pedagogies, which spans multiple class sessions and leads to students creating both DH teaching statements and their own DH non-digital workshops. I’ve found it just as useful for iterating my own teaching, as it’s been for graduate student use. As with all Brandon’s, Shane’s, and other staffs’ DH Praxis teaching materials, you can read more about the overarching yearlong curriculum here, including Brandon’s slides for this particular session (“Mind Mapping Your Pedagogy”, under “Resources” near the top of the page).

To contextualize my thoughts, a summary of the session: Brandon’s teaching incorporates the mind mapping approaches we’ve learned from Ronda Grizzle’s past teaching (including her excellent series of staff workshops building on Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s Designing Your Life). He had us sketch out concepts branching out from a central term using quiet, timed writing; then we analyzed these conceptual maps for connected and recurring values and approaches, discussed in small groups, and reported back to the larger group.

In the full version of this session, Brandon has participants go through this process three times: once each for “pedagogy”, “my research”, and “digital humanities”. The end result is an exploration of what resonates across all three areas, producing a foundation for how you define and practice your own DH pedagogy.

Pedagogy beyond the classroom

Much of my pedagogy is tied into how I most often teach these days: rather than my past focus on in-person for-credit classroom teaching, I now regularly practice approaches less bound to the structure of The Classroom. My frequent modes include:

• written and spoken research documentation (e.g. on running collaborative research community blogs with Brandon Walsh and the SLab community);
• peer guidance, external advising, collaborative learning, scholarly and professional mentoring and sponsoring (in person, Slacks, Zooms, email, DMs…);
• public humanities project design, development, and/or participation (e.g. my “When They Came Down: Participating in crowdsourced documentation of racist statue removals”);
• early- and mid-stage project scholarly communication (accompanying my piece of the more widely practiced end-stage sharing), including via the DH Slack, Bluesky (previously Mastodon, Twitter), and blogging (e.g. my personal research blog) ;
• actively modeling possible scholarly practices (often as part of that full-research-cycle scholarly communication; e.g. the meta-graduate-education pieces of my unique DH literature dissertation and meta-DH-scholarship of my early career); and
• designing and developing the infrastructure and practices that support local and virtual learning communities flourish (Scholars’ Lab!)

I draw from an array of humanities, info/data science, library, and tech frameworks in how I teach. For example, I used my user experience (UX) background when writing a friendly peer-reviewed essay that’s helped an international array of scholars build their first research website to make sure my teaching was contextualized, for example:

• what parts of the process would many humanities scholars already be comfortable with
• what metaphors would best make unfamiliar concepts understandable?
• how do I design the info architecture to fit expected readers, e.g. how the text is formatted, ordered; how and where I go into detail so folks know why we’re doing something, vs. provide a high-level quick summary so they can get through the technical steps and produce the site that’s their goal

I found Brandon’s writing on “What’s a Pedagogy, and How Do I Find Mine?” empowering—his framing got me more comfortable calling my methods of teaching teaching, which allowed me to notice some ways I’d been missing out on fully applying pedagogical theory and practice to that work.

More DH pedagogy resources

• Brandon Walsh’s DH and digital pedagogy blog posts and essays
• Hannah Alpert-Abrams’ Academic Job Market Support Network: see the “Job Application Materials” page > “Teaching Materials” expandable section for various real humanities teaching statements, philosophies, portfolios.