What is Digital Pedagogy?
A Short Answer
Digital pedagogy is the philosophy and practice of meaningful teaching and learning in the digital age. Education has shaped the creation of digital tools and spaces, and those tools and spaces have shaped us in turn. Just like non-digital pedagogy, digital pedagogy focuses on questions of why first, and it evolves in response to research, experience, and innovation.
How does digital pedagogy differ from instructional technology or tech integration? As a grammar lover, I look to the nouns in those phrases to differentiate them. Instructional technology focuses on the technology we can use to teach. Tech integration focuses on the process of layering or weaving technology into our learning experiences. But digital pedagogy is centered on teaching philosophy and the way technology can change it—the opportunities and potential pitfalls. Digital pedagogy is, in other words, centered on what matters most: our teaching.
Some subtopics of digital pedagogy that we’ll explore on this site include open pedagogy (a step beyond student-centered learning), text analysis, universal design for learning, remixing, real-world digital audiences, co-creating with our students, asynchronous learning, anti-bias computing, thinking critically about opportunities and pitfalls in learning management systems, community-driven research, and data ethics and visualization. Sounds exciting, yes?
A Longer, More Scholarly Answer
Scholars would contextualize digital pedagogy within the field of digital humanities—a field that’s been growing on college campuses particularly over the last 20 years. Digital humanities explores the ways that our digital lives, skills, and tools can change how we ask and answer humanistic questions. For some great background knowledge on the field, feel free to browse any of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series also published on Manifold. From within that field, digital pedagogy then explores the ways that our digital lives, skills, and tools can change how we teach and learn. And while digital pedagogy, like non-digital pedagogy, is constantly evolving, most scholars agree that it is, at the very least, barrier breaking.
One broken barrier is that of the traditional hierarchical relationship between the teacher as expert and the student as inexpert. In a book chapter entitled “Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” Leigh Bonds points to an early giant in the field, Alan Liu, explaining the shift. Liu says that what we now call digital pedagogy “supplements the usual closed discursive circuit of the instructor-talking-to-the-student (and vice versa) with an open circuit of the instructor-and-student talking to others.” Bonds goes on to explain, “Even in this “co-developing model, students learn how to produce knowledge by collaborating with the teacher on project development, exemplifying the key components of DH: ‘practice, discovery, community’” (150). In this aspect of digital pedagogy, K-12 teachers have a historical advantage in that student-centered and active learning have been informing teaching practice for decades. Digital pedagogy takes that student-centeredness a few steps further, with an understanding that the teacher and student will learn and create knowledge together. Such co-creating may take the form of inviting students to increase their digital literacy with you by collaborating on a rubric for a multimedia assignment or it might mean creating with them open educational resources, like a shareable lesson or textbook, or having students use text analysis tools, like word clouds or Voyant, to generate questions and potential answers that even a teacher who’s read and taught a book a hundred times couldn’t come up with.
Another set of boundaries broken by digital pedagogy is that of disciplinary walls. Students may take a quantitative approach to a novella, analyzing, for example, at all of the instances of the pronoun “she” in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Or, high school math students may gather data about lottery ticket purchases in their neighborhoods, use geospatial mapping to pinpoint locations for an anti-lottery awareness campaign.
Digital pedagogy also pushes against the distinctions between product and process. Describing the creation of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab at Michigan State University, Philips et al explain, “One of the real strengths of an interdisciplinary and comparatively young field like digital humanities is the sheer amount of experimentation and invention that digital humanists engage in on a daily basis. We have to, because the work we do is often the first of its kind.” While much modern K-12 pedagogy values process in addition to or over product, digital pedagogy can allow process to be product, even when that process-product is public. Take, for example, the #PRSyllabus—a living, communal syllabus on the economic crisis in Puerto Rico. Like its predecessor #FergusonSyllabus and others that follow, the Puerto Rico syllabus was born in response to a crisis—2017’s devastating double hurricanes Irma and Maria—in order to provide quick guidance to those seeking to understand the effects of the natural disasters within a larger historical context. Pressing need prioritized the collections availability over a perfect product, and that remains its strength to this day. According to a review of the project at the journal Small Axe, “As a collaborative work-in-process, there is a degree of unevenness in the topics selected for inclusion as well as in the amount of materials available under each topic. This is natural in an organically developing collaboration, and the site will find its balance as the project develops.” This understanding of digital pedagogy—that process can be the product—is one that can empower students to turn their academic work into meaningful activism in the moment, and it is one that can empower teachers who may feel hampered by perfection.
Digital pedagogy often strives to break down other walls as well: those constructed to marginalize some learners while preserving power for others. Scholars in feminist, anti-racist, queer, anti-colonial, disability, and accessibility fields (to name just a few) often find a natural affinity with such a barrier-breaking approach in the classroom.
While this project hopes to explore many of these barrier-breaking approaches in the K-12 classroom, exploring what they look like in college settings may help us see where our students are heading. Take a look at the keywords in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities on the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Commons to get a taste.
Bonds, E. Leigh. “Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital Humanities
Pedagogy.” CEA Critic, vol. 76, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 147–57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44378544.
Philips, Natalie, et al. “Creating Spaces for Interdisciplinary Research across Literature,
Neuroscience, and DH: A Case Study of The Digital Humanities and Literary
Cognition Lab (DHLC).” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 014, no. 3, Sept. 2020.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000478/000478.html.