By Alexis Hart, Department of English, Allegheny College.
As Bill Pannapacker of GLCA member institution Hope College stated in his February 2013 Chronicle of Higher Education article “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities,’” liberal arts colleges work within “a model of teachers and students as co-researchers, collaborating across disciplines and cohorts, attempting to build projects that can serve a wide range of needs,” thus, Pannapacker argues, digital pedagogies are “an enhancement of the core methods of an ideal liberal arts education.” In a November 2013 follow-up article, after assuring readers that he does not “think liberal-arts education should be at the service of employers,” Pannapacker emphasized technological training as an important way “to close the gap between what our students are learning and the expectations of the job markets in their fields,” pointing out that employers are seeking “liberal-arts graduates who are not digitally challenged,” graduates, that is, who not only know something about web design, but who can also “work with data and statistics and are able to make lucid arguments, using spreadsheets and visualizations.” Similarly, Clayton Spencer, president of Bates College, which has recently started to “[frame] computer science as an ‘enabler’ for other disciplines,” remarked on how “[t]he worlds of work and social relationships are all being transformed by digital platforms, computational thinking and the reality of digital connectivity,” making it “incredibly important to embed the learning about the platforms and tools in the context of the liberal arts.”
Understandably, GLCA faculty members who are interested in adopting digital pedagogies or offering students opportunities to design and submit digital projects are sometimes hampered by the challenges of learning teaching (and grading) methods outside of those they have normally practiced, by the concern that such pedagogies must require outside expertise, or by the perception that digital pedagogies should be practiced in their own, stand-alone, courses taught by specially trained faculty.
In an effort to overturn misperceptions and provide accessible and easily customizable assignments and projects for faculty across the liberal arts curriculum, faculty members representing four GLCA campuses (Ian MacInnes from Albion College, Alexis Hart from Allegheny College, Harry Brown from DePauw University, and Jane Marie Pinzino from Earlham College) with the support of a GLCA Expanding Collaborations Grant created a digital archive of materials to encourage and instruct faculty interested in introducing digital pedagogies in their classes and/or digital methods in their research collaborations with students. The Digital Liberal Arts Across the Curriculum website contains a series of course modules for incorporating digital techniques into liberal arts teaching, including:
· a module on digital fluency—“an evolving aptitude that empowers the individual to effectively and ethically interpret information, discover meaning, design content, construct knowledge, and communicate ideas in a digitally connected world” — with links to multiple teaching and theoretical resources;
· a module on digital mapping that offers instructors “both an introduction to the tools of digital mapping and a complete template for integrating a 1-2 week unit on digital mapping into the content of an existing humanities course” in order to enable faculty and students “to use digital worlds to tell compelling stories about physical ones, both ancient and contemporary”;
· a module on literary microanalysis that “offers instructors a brief theoretical and practical exploration of a method in digital liberal arts sometimes called ‘distant reading,’ which uses computational methods to discover and interpret patterns in large samples of literary texts”; and
· a module on video composing and digital storytelling.
These modules are meant to serve as “starter kits” (hence, the abbreviation DLA101) for faculty who are somewhat apprehensive about adding digital components to their current classes yet are willing to use existing materials wholesale or to adapt for their own course purposes existing materials that have been used with success by other liberal arts faculty. Ideally, other GLCA faculty will begin to contribute materials to build on the existing modules and add new ones. Unlike many other tool-based or skill training workshops, the DLA101 approach emphasizes immediate curricular design and a “use it now!” philosophy through the production of enduring, user-friendly, plug-and-play modules, easily adaptable for multiple liberal arts disciplines.
If you are interested in learning more about the DLA101 project or contributing materials, please contact one of the project members: Ian MacInnes of Albion College (imacinnes@albion.edu), Alexis Hart of Allegheny College (ahart@allegheny.edu); Harry Brown of DePauw University (hbrown@depauw.edu); or Jane Marie Pinzino of Earlham College (pinzija@earlham.edu).
