Notes
Introduction to Issue Twenty-Eight: Collaboration, Community, and Knowledge Production
Both in its content and its form, Issue 28 of JITP highlights the importance of collaboration and community in the process of knowledge production. As with all installs of JITP, Issue 28 emerges from the collaboration between the authors, the journals’ managing editor team, and the issue editors, and a commitment to ensuring labor is shared across the community.
For this issue, members of both the managing and issue editor teams were new to the journal. JITP’s long-time managing editor, Patrick DeDauw, has moved on to new ventures, and his extraordinary work over the past eight years has been foundational to the journal’s development. His sustained commitment, strategic insight as a labor researcher, and deep understanding of scholarly collaboration adeptly stewarded the Editorial Collective as we worked collaboratively to advance the journal's mission. On this issue, as members of the Executive Committee, Zach Muhlbauer and Cen Liu managed the transition and welcomed JITP’s new managing editor, Anna Schlenz, into the fold. On the Issue editor side, experienced JITP-er Inés Vañó García worked with first time issue editor, Laurie Hurson. These transitions and new collaborations re-emphasized the importance of community support in the knowledge production processes, established relationships and workflows that will ensure the continuation of the journal, and revealed a few kinks in our editorial processes along the way. This transitional time for JITP has only deepened our commitment to values this issue exemplifies: open knowledge, transparency, community, and collaboration.
Looking more broadly at our current moment in higher education, as we face increasing attacks on academic freedom, diverse intellectual communities, and plural ways of knowing, a commitment to open knowledge, collaboration, and community are needed now more than ever to resist oppressive conditions. The journal remains steadfast in its mission to publish scholarship that adopts a critical approach to teaching with technology, and our Editorial Collective reaffirms our commitment to carefully consider the context, provenance, and politics of our educational technologies and feature approaches that resist market logics and instrumentation. As this issue demonstrates, knowledge is produced by people within and through communities of practice. Creating and sustaining spaces for collaborative and publicly engaged scholarship is not simply an intellectual effort, but part of the comprehensive work of resisting narrowing definitions of whose voices, histories, and ways of knowing are allowed to shape and (re)define both higher education and public life.
Recognizing that students need educational spaces that encourage critical inquiry and allow them to question the systems and technologies shaping their everyday lives, the interdisciplinary nature of this collective creates space for multiple ways of understanding, questioning, and embedding technology within teaching practices. In doing so, we support faculty agency in choosing how to integrate technology into teaching. Discussions about pedagogy and technology cannot be separated from the material and labor conditions under which educators and academics currently work, and from the political and economic conditions that produce the technologies we choose to integrate into our teaching. A critical approach to pedagogy and technology, therefore, must address the institutional realities that shape our use of technologies and the conditions in which knowledge is produced and sustained. The articles in this issue explore the interplay between technology and pedagogy in the knowledge production process and address institutional limitations, research and academic norms, and the specific educational contexts of their communities.
In “Doing County-Level Digital History at a Regional University: Reflecting on Ten Years of the Madison Historical Project,” Nichol Allen, Angela Little, Jeffrey T. Manuel, Ben Ostermeier, and Jason Stacy introduce the Madison Historical Project, a community-engaged digital history project developed by the Department of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The article describes the project’s online encyclopedia, a digital archive, and lesson plans for k-12 teachers and details how regional universities can use collaborative digital humanities projects to build community, provide pedagogical materials and guidance, and preserve local history. The authors discuss the project's development, affordances, and constraints, and highlight how collaboration between universities and local communities can produce knowledge and resources that benefit all.
In “OER Research by Podcast: A Conceptual Study Design,” Lauren Halcomb-Smith, Angie Williamson, and Danielle Johnson introduce a conceptual research study design that investigates the impact of Open Educational Resources on teaching and learning at a mid-size university in Australia. The study design proposes the use of podcasting methods to enable OER creators to share testimonies and insights into their work. By publishing the design for their forthcoming study, the authors aim to enact methods of open education by sharing and soliciting feedback from a wider community of scholars interested in open education.
In "Empowering Newly Qualified Teachers through Short Filmmaking: A Collaborative Workshop Inquiry," Wendy Smidt and Yohana William share findings from a professional teacher development program for Newly Qualified Teachers in Cape Town, South Africa. The program sought to address systemic constraints of technology integration in under-resourced educational contexts by offering a Short Filmmaking workshop to support educators’ development of multimodal teaching skills. Their programming reveals how meaningful technology integration and development of pedagogical skills requires fostering educators’ internal readiness and encouraging collaboration and peer learning.
The articles in Issue 28 demonstrate how knowledge is produced by and emerges from communities of practice, including authors, research and programming participants, and wider publics. The articles’ focus on curation of digital resources, engaging the principles of open education through all phases of research, and leveraging collaboration for multimodal skill development highlight how pedagogy is not limited to classroom instruction, but includes the many ways knowledge is produced, structured, shared, and circulated. These articles provide insight into the multiple ways our work can foster collaboration, involve and sustain community, and establish foundations upon which others can continue building knowledge collectively.
We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions and continuous engagement with the journal. Above all, we extend our deepest gratitude to the reviewers of this issue, whose invisible and uncompensated labor make this publication possible. At a time when academic workloads continue to intensify, their willingness to dedicate time, attention, and care to this process reflects the collaborative spirit that sustains scholarly communities and reiterates the value of open and communal knowledge work.
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