Notes
Introduction to Issue Twenty Six: Local Networks
At the time of writing, educators may find themselves bleary-eyed, worn to the bone, and increasingly apprehensive about the future. A global pandemic, emerging technologies, and the state of higher education weigh heavily in our classrooms, where the work of teaching is demanding enough on its own. In response, JITP’s General Issue 26 invites readers to process these pressures upon our global community through pedagogies grounded in openness, care, and community. Echoing bell hooks’ (1994) call for education as a liberating practice forged in connection, this issue invites reflections on the intersecting relationships, places, and solidarities that undergird our shared educational spaces and practices. The concept of local networks frames learning as rooted in specific contexts, even as this learning finds itself distributed across interconnected systems, timeframes, and technologies of exchange.
These articles cover multiple stages of educational development, including K-5 classrooms, college coursework, and graduate capstone projects. Their pedagogical models range from place-based archival learning at The City College of New York (CCNY) to social annotation and affective modes of reading at the University of New Delhi. With applications spanning digital archiving, data analysis, affective reading, computational literacy, and design thinking, these articles offer diverse routes for educators to cultivate student agency and situate learning within their own local, networked contexts.
In “Let My People Know: Place-Based and Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Action,” Stefano Morello and Isabel Estrada detail a co-taught cultural studies course at CCNY that combines archival recovery, open pedagogy, and digital humanities methods to connect student learning with local histories of anti-fascist activism. Centered around a collaboratively built digital edition of a 1942 pamphlet documenting CCNY student volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, the course addresses post-pandemic challenges like disconnection and isolation by structuring classroom work around concentric circles: the text, the campus, and the city. Students engage with historical texts and digital tools—including the CUNY Manifold publishing platform—to annotate, edit, and recontextualize a primary source tied to CUNY’s institutional history. As Morello and Estrada show, even in under-resourced environments, a critically designed DH curriculum can cultivate student agency, affirm local community knowledge, and help students contribute to a living archive of student activism at their institutions.
Zapparrata et al., explores how educators can support the development of statistical literacy skills for students enrolled in introductory psychology courses at the departmental level through low-stakes, self-paced asynchronous assignment types in “Using Excel to Promote Statistical Literacy in an Introductory Psychology Course.” Specifically, the authors discuss how digital resources and software such as content acquisition podcasts (CAPS), Microsoft Excel, and diverse approaches to quantitative reasoning for students can increase opportunities for successful learning outcomes relevant for statistical literacy, especially when complimented by academic and social support for students.
Meha Gupta’s study on affective landmarking in “Feeling the Reading: Affective Landmarking and Literary Studies in India,”—an analytical method that focuses on the experience of reading textual information with technology—visualizes the close readings of banned texts by students with the open-source text annotation tool, docanno. In pursuit of a deeper understanding about the holistic learning experiences of students, Gupta tackles sociological, experimental, and pedagogical questions about objective, subjective, and cultural approaches to analyzing texts for educational outcomes through an experimental methodology and interviews with student subjects.
With a focus on “computational thinking” in lesson planning, Denise Cummings-Clay’s “Advancing Equity in the K-5 Classroom” outlines how computer-integrated education can be employed by teacher candidates to center equity in the classroom. Accompanied by a robust lesson plan template that highlights learning and practice techniques, the article illustrates the ways educators can implement “innovative content and instructional materials in diverse ways” to encourage digital literacy, equity, and expression in the classroom.
Finally, in their article “Combining Design Thinking and Generative AI Technologies in the Classroom,” Eda Sanchez-Persampieri and Katja Schroeder blend design thinking with uses of generative AI to support learners in prototyping and building graduate-level capstone projects. Based in experiential learning theory and scaffolded over an iterative design cycle, their approach was piloted in a graduate capstone course where students developed product concepts across disciplines. The process emphasized cycles, stages, and feedback, with multiple avenues of support, from weekly peer review to step-by-step milestones across the design thinking cycle. Sanchez-Persampieri and Schroeder then used class time to surface concerns around the ethics of generative tools, grappling with bias, privacy, misinformation, and AI’s environmental costs, while exploring its potential for audience simulation, visual thinking, and reflexive inquiry.
We hope our JITP audience feels a renewed sense of dedication to pedagogy in praxis through Issue 26. May these examples inspire critical innovation, reflective practice, and a collective commitment to creating educational experiences that are not only effective and meaningful but also deeply connected to the local networks and communities we serve.
References
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.