What intrigued me to join the DH is the Digital Pedagogy study. Needless to say, I was excited about our readings on Pedagogy. What stood out to me the most was our reading “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities“. 

“We pair “digital” with “humanities” and feel we have something revolutionary, but for our undergraduate students the word “digital” is profoundly unimpressive. Their music is digital. Their television is digital. Many of their books and school materials are and have always been digital. To brag that our humanities (or our liberal arts) are digital is to proclaim that we have met a base requirement for modern communication. It would be like your bank crowing that you can check your account online. Of course you can. At this point, you would only notice if you could not do so.” 

This quote stood out to me because it’s true we are living in a world where we have come to expect many if not everything to be digital. When I read about the bank account, I related way too well to this quote. One of my accounts had the app and had Zelle way before the other. By the time my other bank account provided me the app, all I could say to myself is finally! 

However, although we are surrounded by technology it doesn’t mean everyone is tech-savvy. This quickly became obvious during the pandemic when we had to rush to be remote. My program helped both students and teachers get acclimated to their new learning/teaching life. I also had the opportunity to be a part of a research team focused on “lessons learned”. One of those lessons is that both teachers and students had different levels of comfortability with technology. 

I immediately thought about these “lessons learned when reading “The necessity of such scaffolding brings us back to the mistaken notion of the “digital native”—a notion, I would argue, that leads to frustration for both students and teachers. The idea that our students must have innate technological skills because they have grown up in a computer-saturated world is equal, to my mind, with assuming all drivers must be excellent mechanics or auto designers because they have spent so much time behind the wheel or, perhaps more germanely, assuming all students must be innately gifted writers because they have grown up around books and paper.” Both teachers and students play the blame game.  

After this reading and after attending workshops, what I came to realize is that there may already be work implemented that is considered digital pedagogy. As Cordell recommends, the idea is to start small and integrate when possible. Be sure to scaffold, because it’s not evident that all students will comprehend; lastly, think locally. 

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