We’re pleased to announce that the DEFCon Speaker Series is back for 2022-2023! Please join us for our kickoff talk, “Teaching DH on a Shoestring,” by Dr. Danica Savonick. Dr. Savonick is a leader in digital pedagogy and served as a DEFCon Mentor for 2021-2022. We’re thrilled that she’ll be sharing her pedagogical insights with more of our community!
Teaching DH on a Shoestring
This talk explores minimalist digital humanities pedagogy: strategies for teaching DH at schools that don’t have many resources for doing so. Today, the vast majority (roughly 87%) of the schools that offer DH programs are research-focused universities and private universities. Yet if digital humanities is taught primarily in elite and exclusive institutions, it can actually reproduce, or even exacerbate, existing inequities by equipping more affluent students with extensive digital skills, while students at under-resourced institutions fall farther behind. This talk highlights approaches to digital ethnic studies that maximize learning while minimizing barriers of access, cost, and time (for both instructors and students). I explore how we can use free, low-cost, and open-source tools to help students increase their digital literacy, including their awareness of the ways technologies reproduce and challenge inequality, and to create public projects that can impact audiences beyond the classroom. It is my hope that this talk will inform a broader discussion about how we can help students develop digital skills that will enable them both to navigate the world and to change it.
Bio
Danica Savonick is an ACLS Fellow and an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. literature, feminist pedagogy, and social justice. She is currently completing a book manuscript, “Insurgent Knowledge: the Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions” (under contract with Duke University Press). Her work has appeared in American Literature, MELUS, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle. She is an editor of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and a member of the HASTAC.org Steering Committee. You can find her on Twitter @danicasavonick.
