Stephanie Schlitz's Blog

have the pleasure today of working with nearly 40 future teachers (and some amazing experienced teachers and colleagues) as part of a workshop for English/Language Arts Education majors at Bloomsburg University. one-word summary of session one with freshmen and sophomore (and junior and senior) preservice teachers: inspiring.

listening to a small group of future educators describe their passion for teaching and learning, their commitment to shaping the lives of their future students through exposure to language and literature, and the amazing stories which explain how they chose the path to teaching – a very good morning!

possibly the most marked part of any classroom based discussion on language variation, perhaps especially ethnically-based dialectal variation, is the pronounced use of the pronoun forms they  and them (wish i could do a frequency count in class and measure the percentage of they/them). but that’s okay. i can see how it’s difficult not to focus on difference, difficult not to assume that “we’re not the ones who are speaking a different variety: they are.” refining our understanding of stigmatized dialects takes study, maybe even practice, and very often the first discussions are the most challenging, entailing radical re-evaluation of perspective. but even with difference as a point of departure, okay,  there are enough common threads eventually to weave a richly textured, more unified understanding. but when i hear future teachers disparaging vernacular/stigmatized varieties after a linguistics class themed around dialectal diversity: a difficult, disappointing day.

my husband just pointed out a fascinating little piece in the Jan 2012 issue of Smithsonian (and this in response to my announcing amazement at finding reference to Google’s Ngram Viewer in National Geographic’s December 2011 piece on the King James Bible; more on that below) – the article describes the making of Jefferson’s Bible, which is (more accurately) an 84-page biography of Jesus of Nazareth, noteworthy for its Greek and Latin verso pages and French and English recto pages constructed entirely (I think) by – literally - cutting and pasting (Jeffersonially: ‘extract[ing] textually from the Gospels’) select ‘historical’ (i.e. stripped of miracles and mysticism) verses into the codex. More than just a foray into the original meaning of cut and paste, very much  worth checking out:

now back to google Ngrams: the print version of the National Geographic piece on the King James Bible  devotes three pages to a word cloud depicting the relative frequency of 18 ‘classic phrases’ in the English language which derive from the King James. Generated from Ngram Viewer data, the visual makes a striking statement about the bible’s influence on English and will be interesting to revisit spring term in my History of English class, where our discussions of the Reformation and biblical translations will find new intersections with our discussions of Google’s Ngram Viewer.

(apologies for the quality of the image below, which is a very hasty scan of p. 50 from the print Dec 2011 National Geographic issue).

Good news: A new LSA publication, the journal Teaching Linguistics, is to be launched formally at the LSA meeting in January (congratulations to the founding Editor, Kazuko Hiramatsu!). This innovative, open access e-journal is adopting a cc licensing model (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), with options for authors to choose more or less restrictive licenses, and is responding to a critical, longstanding need in the linguistics community by focusing on pedagogy and by defining its scope to include, among other areas, interdisciplinary, undergraduate, and graduate teaching and learning; qualitative and quantitative approaches; professional development for graduate students; and linguistics in higher education. I’ve committed to supporting the endeavor as an Editorial Board member and look forward to the first issue with much anticipation!

Why subsume transcription and textual study within a History of the English Language course? Because close textual study cultivates an understanding of the intimate link between historical language change, the human (i.e. social, political, economic, migratory…) forces responsible for it, and the speakers and writers (dead though they may be) whose texts we use for evidence.

Sometimes historical linguistics excises writers and textual context from study of language change (and sometimes this even makes a degree of sense, e.g. Grimm’s Law). But more often, yoking textual analysis to study of diachronic language change lays the groundwork for deeper, sociohistorical understanding of change, change which occurs neither immediately nor spontaneously, and certainly not independent of the speakers and writers of a language.

and maybe i should take a stronger cue from one of my favorite aspects of education: the part where we all (students and teachers) get to participate in the practice of learning, in the tasks that apply our knowledge and skill, in the activities – individual and collaborative – that test our insights in context… because i was looking for insights in what i now see must to students have seemed like a blasé set of reflection questions — when i really should have been looking directly at the experiential-based activity these questions were asking students to describe.

when my students recently participated in editing and transcribing documents from the Martha Berry Digital Archive, among the assignment guidelines was a set of reflection questions which i’d hoped would elicit thoughtful responses about the historical context of the letters, the distinctive writing styles of the authors, the challenges of transcribing an unfamiliar hand — and…

and i was wrong. the reflections were not exactly an edge-of-your-seat read…

the transcriptions, on the other hand, told an entirely different story – they expressed an arduous attention to textual preservation and a palpable sensitivity to authorial fidelity. learning that was by no means evident in a set of i-am-doing-this-because-you-are-making-me reflections leapt from the pages of transcriptions, where efforts to preserve every dot of punctuation, each and every majuscule and minuscule, barely visible indentations and hyphens, and spellings such as thot for thought were evident and fresh and inspiring.

peer exchange and review (much like code review) perhaps contributed to the high quality transcriptions, whether because of the pressure inherent in sharing work among peers, because of the substantive feedback such a process can and often does produce, or because of the two-heads dimension of collaboration. the in-class discussion was excellent as well. like the transcription activity, discussion was context-bound, so immediate and direct reference to the texts being discussed defined the dialogue.

so what if i was disappointed by the utterly glitter-less & hereafter divorced-from-the-assignment reflections. the transcriptions and discussion told me what i really needed to know.

Why am I not present and carefully monitoring the final exam I am ‘giving’ right now (from 8:00 am – 10:00 am)? Because my fourteen DH students don’t need me there. They’ve designed the final; they’re completing it collaboratively; and, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s the best exam I’ve ever given.

To be fair, this class was a little different (read that as an instance of litotes).  By design different. I was wholly uninterested in grades in this class. Rather, I emphatically wanted to impress upon my students the importance of learning; the importance of caring about what and how and why they learned; and the importance of contributing to scholarship and pedagogy. So I adopted a modified version of Cathy Davidson’s crowdsourced grading model. Instead of asking the students to evaluate one another, I asked that all work be posted openly on our course blog, and I defined nearly all of it as pass / fail (exceptions: major project & final exam, but even these were/are collaborative and open).

Students posted their assignments (and quite a lot of unsolicited yet relevant and worthwhile content as well), and read and responded to one another’s work. I commented in response to some posts, and around the mid-point I wrote individual evaluative summaries confirming very strong contributions and encouraging less committed contributors. (Some reported feeling more compelled – because of the openness of the class – to perform at a very high level. After all, they told me, their peers were paying attention.)

The course focused quite a lot on various DH methods (text encoding, transcription, visualizations, text analysis, etc.), the effects of technology on our culture, and students did DH (e.g. participated in Transcribe Bentham and developed their own DH proposals, which were presented and reviewed conference style). We also examined some of the practices underlying the best work in DH, like collaboration and crowdsourcing, for example. And because we had closed the semester by discussing selections from Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age and Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (together, powerful reading in the hands of undergraduates), it seemed patently indefensible to ask students to complete a traditional, individual final exam. (really, I could in no way imagine these individuals, whom I’ve encouraged to stand in front of the (metaphorical) room and who have taken the lead in this course, sitting in their desks playing some pedestrian student role)

So I didn’t. I shared that while I was willing to give a traditional final exam, I didn’t think that doing so was commensurate with the spirit or the aim of the course. Instead, I suggested my students might collaborate on the final exam and, in doing so, use the opportunity to illustrate – in theory and in practice – what they’d really learned.

And I was genuinely willing to leave it at that. These undergraduates took the challenges of the course seriously and were craving an opportunity to express themselves meaningfully and collaboratively – in short, they were craving an opportunity to say something important to the humanities community.

Their work began unfolding on our course blog well in advance of this morning’s scheduled exam (where, as of right now — 8:51 am — they still don’t need me). And although it felt somewhat, hmm, pedagogically risky (?) to restrain myself from weighing in every time the blog discussion surrounding how they would approach the final flared up in a not-so-promising way, I did indeed refrain from weighing in. And the students did indeed nudge each other back on track, and they did indeed define their own topic, guidelines, and deadlines. (remaining in the role of observer, it turns out, wasn’t risky at all)

That the exam must be collaborative (i.e. involve and engage all fourteen of them) and that it must be a reflection of their learning in some way were my only two conditions. For inspiration, I encouraged the class to envision the 4Humanities Student Voices section as a publication venue for their work self-designated “manifesto.”

Of course their contributions this semester – and even on the final exam – vary in quality and fervor, and of course their ideas diverge. But both of these points of divergence are consistent with any honest evaluation of virtually any work. And in the end, in the aggregate, their collective intelligence is pretty damn impressive.

Ten reasons why we should teach DH to undergraduate students:

This is the first draft of a larger summary of my thoughts in response to teaching DH to a group of fourteen undergraduate students this semester.

1) Because these students will very likely determine the future of DH, we urgently need to illustrate to them how and why it matters, and we need to ensure their ability to distinguish between deceptively flashy surfaces (e.g. Unsworth’s charlatans) and critical, humanities-driven methodologies.

2) They are far more creative, clever, and capable than often estimated.

3) Many crave an opportunity to do and to understand significant work; given the necessary theoretical background, models, and methodological exposure, not only can they do such work, they can design and lead it.

4) Their ideas are un-tethered by overly pragmatic and pedantic considerations. Their ability to envision extraordinarily innovative projects, therefore, is boundless.

5) Digital natives may not be as technically astute as their aggregate use of technology would imply, but they can be fearless learners who bring spiritedness, insight, and energy to ostensibly stodgy endeavors like transcription and text encoding.

6) Undergraduates enjoy a vastly more flexible playing field and correspondingly different game stakes. Academics, on the other hand, are often (not always) constrained by academic survival, the demand to publish, and competing priorities such as teaching and service. Undergraduates are burdened by no such constraints and enjoy a politics-less zest for innovation; they’re free to think epically, to critique honestly, and to redefine existing boundaries.

7) Overwhelmingly, they are collaborative and open, and they enjoy using digital technologies to express themselves and their collaborative endeavors.

8) Undergraduates are poised to experience the “primary moments” in Liu’s new media life cycle: enchantment/colonization, media disenchantment, and media surmise, again and again, and they have the ability to do so with resilience and without cynicism.

9) They are, in many, many, many cases, our ultimate audience and our progeny, and they are situated to serve as critical assayers of – and partners in - DH successes and failures.

10) Because we can, whether we integrate DH within another course (e.g. literature, linguistics) or treat it as a stand-alone course comprising distinct subject-matter, and because (see 1-9 above) it matters that we do so.

[11) They continue to marvel - even while they levy pithy critique - an impressive, critical yet optimistic stance.]