Collaborative Teaching
- Hannah L. Jacobs
Combining technologies and humanities in teaching requires knowledge from a variety of disciplines. Our first course, the 2009 Wired! New Representation Technologies for Historical Materials, brought together five faculty representing that necessary range of expertise from the historical to the computational, with ten undergraduate and graduate students. Working in an experimental learning environment, students engaged with primary source materials and explored the possibilities that technologies offer for advancing humanistic interpretations of these materials. The faculty’s various expertise enabled students to consider objects’ original contexts and select digital methods appropriate for reconsidering their composition, methods of making, and possible roles in larger built environments. This first collaboration formed a model on which Wired! courses have since been taught in which the inclusion of multiple instructional expertise form an integrated, creative, and active learning experience.
This first collaboration formed a model on which Wired! courses have since been taught in which the inclusion of multiple instructional expertise form an integrated, creative, and active learning experience.
Notably, our teaching model has since expanded to also include the expertise of staff, librarians, and graduate students. These contributors are not simply offering technical instruction: they work with instructors of record to design and implement digital project assignments and with students to develop and critique those assignments. A quintessential example can be found in the Spring 2015 iteration of ARTHIST 101 Introduction to Art History in which Professor Caroline Bruzelius worked closely with Librarian Lee Sorensen, Graduate Teaching Assistant Joseph C. Williams, and Digital Humanities Specialist Hannah L. Jacobs to develop both a digital assignment and an interactive syllabus.
Implemented as an integrated map and timeline with embedded visual media and course materials, the interactive syllabus proved a creative way for students to build conceptual connections across vast time periods, spaces, and cultures. Sorensen and Williams identified appropriate research materials for the interactive syllabus. Jacobs brought these contents together in Omeka with Neatline to create an alternative, non-linear interface for navigating course content. For the digital assignment, Sorensen offered information literacy instruction critical to Humanities research, and Jacobs taught the students principles of data management in Omeka and visual storytelling through Neatline, which they used together with critical research skills to create digital projects that explored the movements of materials and culturally significant objects across the pre-modern world. This syllabus also served as a foundational example for the students’ semester-long research project.
The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab now regularly offers a teaching assistantship to a PhD student in Art History for the purpose of providing Digital Humanities training and instructional experience that extends our collaborative model.
Williams provided one-on-one Omeka and Neatline support for students, a key instructional training opportunity that has become a core part of the Wired! Lab’s contributions to graduate education. The Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab now regularly offers a teaching assistantship to a PhD student in Art History for the purpose of providing Digital Humanities training and instructional experience that extends our collaborative model. Through mentorship from, and collaboration with, Jacobs and other instructors, these teaching assistants learn how to create instructional materials and lead technical instruction, consult on and troubleshoot digital methods, and evaluate digital assignments based on both humanistic and technical rubrics.
This kind of collaborative teaching has formed the basis for courses that explore the visual culture of Venice, historical experiences of Durham, the construction of medieval castles, the archaeology of Athens, and much more. As we have applied our teaching model in different courses, we have found that the balance between digital and humanistic learning goals varies depending on course level, digital method, and historical content. The extent to which digital methods are engaged in a course impacts the overall shape of our collaborative teaching: a course with a small digital intervention, such as the creation of a timeline, requires a modular approach to technical instruction involving the Digital Humanities Specialist and a Graduate Teaching Assistant.
These begin at the early design phase of the assignment and then continue for several class meetings focused on skill-based workshops, troubleshooting, and assignment critiques. Meanwhile, some courses are centered on semester-length projects, such as those in which students use 3D modeling software to reconstruct a historical building. Instructors often use this method to teach visual analysis skills: to create their models, students must closely analyze visual materials and develop a detailed understanding of architecture and its environment.
The technical skills required to complete these kinds of analyses in the context of a one-semester course are extensive and require modular instruction spanning the entire semester. In some cases, continuous interaction with the lab’s Digital Humanities Specialist and/or a Graduate Teaching Assistant is required to ensure that students gain a foundational understanding of a digital method and are able to apply it critically to their research questions.
Still other courses take a further step toward the technological and require a deeper collaboration that directly involves students in teaching. These courses are also project-based, center on questions of applying digital technologies to humanities research questions, and produce a single, experimental outcome. Examples have included a close analysis of scant historical materials to digitally construct a destroyed Venetian palazzo and the design of a narrative and augmented reality application to engage museum goers with objects in the Nasher Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Multiple faculty, staff, graduate teaching assistants, and/or librarians are embedded in these courses to guide a learning experience that draws on a range of disciplinary expertise, while advanced undergraduate and graduate students actively participate in the project’s shaping and may contribute their own technical skills to instruction.
The flexibility in the level of engagement and range of expertise involved in our collaborative teaching model promotes active learning and innovative thinking for all involved. Our teaching practices creatively combine multiple knowledge domains to provide students with distinctive learning experiences that ask them to engage critically with both historical content and digital methods.
Banner Image: Model of the destroyed Palazzo Nani in Venice, created by students in Kristin L. Huffman’s 2015 Visualizing Venetian Art and completed by Julia Huang (Duke ‘16) in 2016. Image Credit: Julia Huang