I sit uncomfortably with teaching each time we face each other—quite the predicament for a PhD candidate still considering committing to academic life, I know. It’s taken me years to write this sentence, too, partly because I never imagined myself as a teacher, but also because grad students are strongly advised against prioritizing teaching. Scholars of the tenured kind should be researching, publishing, applying for grants, attending key conferences, serving on committees, planning research trips, and then, yes, teaching. Both the urgency and priority of these activities are not entirely up to individual faculty, always caught between the never-ending list of tasks on their path to tenure, and their own vocational commitments to the profession. Unfortunately, this confusing, deeply individualistic, and oftentimes contradicting working environment is the one inherited by graduate students to parse, survive, and make their own.

Conventionally, doctoral programs include a required pedagogy course all students must take before teaching at the institution and, in many cases, this course constitutes the full extent of the pedagogical training grads will receive. And so, just like that, one day, after completing the course and still grappling with my commitment to pedagogy, I had students calling me professor, asking questions about grading, and textbook alternatives. I struggled to keep the teaching working load under 20 hours per week while also taking courses, researching, putting together exam reading lists, and applying for grants. Something’s got to give. Your mentors, looking out for you as a budding academic, will tell you something like “teaching should never take most of your time,” or “it’s ok if you can’t be the best teacher this semester, focus on your research.” But doesn’t teaching define what a professor is?

It took me some time to become aware of the paradoxical truth: though teaching is the core essence of being a professor, the graduate curriculum is instead training you to be a doctor, a field expert. Who you are as an instructor and the development of your own pedagogy is largely left up to you. Moreover, prioritizing teaching means spending precious time in an activity that won’t weigh nearly as much as robust published peer-reviewed articles for the search committee of a tenure-track job. It’s also difficult to notice the intentional faults in the system since the official discourse on teaching still positions it as an activity central to the identity of the professor despite its institutional devaluation to a kind of burden that comes with the job. Once I did see the cracks, I had to come to terms with the reality that the PhD was not going to naturally train me how to teach, as I’d originally thought, but that pedagogical training was an added extracurricular matter I’d have to pursue for passion—one I didn’t have. Thus, I decided that I hated teaching as a way to avoid it whenever possible. I hated how vulnerable it made me feel, how time consuming the grading and lesson planning was, how meaningless standard exams are, and how little time 50 minutes actually is for connecting with students.

Against all my odds, however, I came to go through two punctual occasions that changed the outlook of teaching for me, and I owe both of them to the folks at the UVA Scholars’ Lab. The first instance it happened was when they had each of us in the Praxis Fellowship design and teach a pencil and paper workshop exercise, which you can read more about in here. The second happened early this summer, in one of the sessions of the Intro to Digital Humanities I led for the Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative Program, which hosts the summer research projects of a small group (4–5) of undergraduates across different fields and institutions. Both times, there was a moment in the middle of the discussion where I forgot I was a teacher, “the person in charge,” and for some blissful moments, I had fun. Rather than focusing on proving that I was capable of providing new knowledge to my audience, the informal and intimate nature of both environments allowed me to relax and concentrate on sharing information about common interests with people similarly invested in them.

It was then that it occurred to me: I don’t want to be a teacher. What I do want, and brings me joy, is discussing what I’m curious about and sharing what I’ve learned with others. I want to organize reading groups and co-create learning activities with people in different spaces, formats, with bespoke outputs that respond to the needs of the group. I want to be another learner joining a conversation in a multitude of small, collective pedagogical encounters.

One of the best decisions I ever made, upon starting my PhD, was probably purchasing a console. The last thing you want to do, coming home after a day spent looking at and talking about books, is probably reading one. In this doctoral journey, playing videogames has been key to preserving my mental health. The Fable saga got me through my coursework. The Witcher 3 got me through my dissertation proposal. Similarly to what Gramond is reflecting on in his most recent post “Praxis is Invading My Life…In A Good Way”, I find myself seeing Praxis everywhere and applying the lessons we collectively learn each week to my personal life. Little did I know, these lessons would also apply to the game I am spending hours on this semester: Baldur’s Gate 3. I realize that Baldur’s Gate 3 is making me a better digital humanist. Just like Praxis is making me a better Baldur’s Gate 3 player.

• “A balanced party makes the journey easier”. I used to be afraid of close combat, hence excluding melee class characters from my party, while cherishing complementarity in AFK life (as Legacy Russell would say). This year, learning with diverse people from entirely different backgrounds has made me realize how true and applicable this BDG3 reminder is. Praxis fellows are just a team of adventurers, and the interdisciplinary nature of our present cohort is our best asset. Don’t get me started on what class each person would be (Brandon is the Scholar’s Lab bard, Amna would be a great cleric, etc)…
• Glitches are possible, but unlikely. In all likehood, there is something wrong with the data you entered. Close the game/VS Code, take a break, and go back to it once you’ve cleared up your mind. You’ll probably notice what the solution is then.
• When in doubt, just look it up online. Or rather: having to find the answer to your problem online is not something to be ashamed of. If you stumble upon a difficulty, chances are you are not the only one – someone probably asked the question online, just like someone probably solved the problem. Let IGN’s BDG3 walkthrough be your CodeNewbie community.
• Saving is a prerequisite and should be like breathing (here, I have a flashback of Brandon looking over my shoulder, whispering “You forgot to save it”). I used to hate having to save the game every minute or so. I remember getting visibly mad at my Divinity 2 coop partner because of his perpetual interruptions to save the game. It is only through Praxis and coding that I learnt that one cannot advance any further if the progress is not saved. Goodbye old me, who would insist on having a single save because it looked more aesthetically pleasing, and less messy. At least, now I don’t have to fight an entire market square just because I desperately wanted to loot a potato.
• Regular expressions are Illithid powers. Can you use it? Of course. Should you use it? Well… Jeremy told me regular expressions were a form of powerful voodoo or witchcraft – something you should not really mess with, especially if you are just learning code. Yes, I want to make coding easier, but turning into a mind flyer is not worth the sacrifice.

Now, is this post an elaborate strategy to have a D&D one-shot at the Scholar’s Lab? Perhaps. Note for the Slab’s Dungeon Master: I hope that the notes above convinced you that Praxis makes perfect. I am learning a lot. No more disgraceful potato looting.

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. So I will tag the posts accordingly to make them easy to connect. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

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“What is digital humanities?”

I was on my way to the annual meeting of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute when the customs officer posed the question to me. DH is a baggy and specialized academic field that suffers from as many competing definitions as it does detractors. I have been asked to define the field more times than I count, but, standing in the immigration line at the Canadian border, I suddenly felt renewed urgency to get my terms straight. To describe my work with precision and clarity for a general audience. The officer ostensibly asked for an explanation, a narrative of my being in this place at this time, but he really just wanted facts. My actual response was unimportant. They just wanted to determine that I had a plausible reason for attending a conference they already knew was taking place (it was a small port of immigration and a large conference). There was a right and a wrong to the exchange. He wanted me to prove that I knew the proper response.

There was a pedagogy to the conversation, even though the officer might never have framed it as such. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire speaks at length of the banking model of education, the sense that typical educational practice sees students as operating at a deficit. The instructor, with their surplus of knowledge, deposits this valuable commodity in their pupils who are asked, in turn, to regurgitate learned facts at a later date. Power exists in the hands of the teacher, whose position of authority structures the economics of the classroom. Even though teaching and learning were far from the arm of the state I encountered at the Canadian border, a similar system of policies, power, and relationships structured our exchange. I was asked to participate in a quiz without being properly coached in the material, but the expected response was clear. “Show me you have the appropriate knowledge to show you are not a threat. Show that you have learned what it means to be a docile traveler,” the officer seemed to say, “and I will let you pass.” Freire’s central metaphor for this kind of encounter was economic: deposits, withdrawals, deficits, and surplus. But my encounter with customs showed that the same pedagogical apparatus operates in many walks of life. In this moment, I felt the pressure to teach this person something about digital humanities. To teach, in the face of an administrative official whose response to that instruction carried real stakes. To teach, while being confronted with an architecture that appeared to force my work to justify itself before knowing anything about it. Teach well, and I could continue to the conference. Teach poorly, and I would be subject to unknown bureaucratic hurdles. I only got so far as “Digital Humanities is…” before the official stamped my passport and let me through.

My encounter with Freire while traveling haunted me even once I returned to the University of Virginia and faced a different kind of border. It was the cusp of a new semester and the end of summer, so I took a few days to scout out the room I would be teaching in for the upcoming term. The space I found was a relic of an older era, before smart boards, inclusive design, or dynamic classrooms. With horror I found rows of old, wooden desks fastened to the ground with a series of bolts that prevented them from moving. The chairs produced an almost visceral response for students: they were physically uncomfortable, designed for normative bodies, and unyielding to whatever adjustments the user might need for their own work. I too had once sat in these very chairs during my undergraduate days at the same institution, and I remembered well the discomfort they caused. With an almost inexorable effect, the sense of being trapped led students to vandalize the chairs, and each chair was scrawled with the ink, carvings, and etchings of graffiti from decades of students. The chaotic, jubilant writings on each desk felt like an explicit act of rebellion against the physical space of the room and the desks themselves. Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair.

A fresh-faced graduate instructor, I viewed these rows of desks from a perspective that was new to me: the front of the room. They might make sense for one kind of classroom, but I was puzzled as to how I would fit them to my needs for literary discussion. After all, they enforced a specific relationship between teacher and student by means of what Jesse Stommel has referred to as the “rhetoric of the room”—“the ways the shape of the room affects the learning we do inside of it.” The bolted chairs demanded the instructor take center stage, whether they wished to or not. While I had observed teachers carry out group work in those spaces, the physically restricted desks required students to turn sideways in their chairs in order to see one another. The room quite literally fought back against the pedagogy of the teacher and tried to enforce its own. Lecture; not discussion. Hierarchy; not democracy. As if aware of the tense dynamic between the instructor and the spaces given to them for teaching and learning, the students found themselves drawn back to carving their own frustrations into the furniture itself.

Still pondering these desks, I made my way over to the Scholars’ Lab, a center for digital research in the University Library where I had recently begun the first in a series of digital humanities fellowships that would lead to my present-day position as digital library professional. As was often the case, I plugged away on a group project with my fellowship cohort while sharing space with the librarians who taught us. I remember well the kinds of staff conversations we would overhear as we worked: endlessly supportive student mentoring, careful guidance in digital humanities project design, and the best instruction I had ever observed in my time as an educator. After one such meeting, as I expressed my frustrations with my role as a graduate instructor, one of these mentors floored me with their response: “I imagine that would be frustrating, but I don’t really teach.” This librarian was one of the best mentors I had ever had, and I regularly saw them shaping not just student research projects, but also providing expert guidance in how to shape a life doing this work.

How could someone so engaged in the act of teaching be so convinced that their work did not count? What was teaching, if not this? And who gets to make such determinations?

The immigration officer. The bolted desk. The university. They each regulate bodies, attitudes, and relationships. They share a crucial connection to my coworker in denial about their own teacherly identity. Our institutions carve out pedagogical relationships using spaces, policies, and actions while at the same time often rendering these dynamics invisible. As Stommel’s rhetoric of the room shows, spaces exert unexpected wills of their own, often over and above those of their inhabitants. But we can take his formulation one step further. The Canadian officer was acting in accordance with a long series of governmental policies enforcing social and legal procedures at the border. And rooms do not exist in isolation. The campus buildings at UVA contained many such rooms with bolted desks. Each of these roles and rooms was designed. Even though the UVA architect might not have thought of themselves as a teacher, their decisions actively shaped the experiences and pedagogies of those who do. Institutions of higher education are comprised of thousands of small decisions like these, innumerable small acts of pedagogy that affect teachers and learners—who we are allowed to be and who counts themselves as part of our number.

When I was 16, I burned my math exams in a bonfire. I remember holding my last ever math exam in front of my friends, on which a 0.25/20 was marked in bright-red ink, and throwing it in the fire. Feeling a rush of excitement, realizing that I will never have to endure math classes ever again. I would never have to be singled-out by my math teacher for being the worst student of the class, probably of the year, potentially of his career, ever again. Now, I look back at my math years with a more acute sense of how coming from an underprivileged background where no one monitors your homework (and checks if you successfully learnt your times table) and how internalizing a gendered form of knowledge from a very early age (you are a girl you will be drawn to humanities) is a recipe – dare I say the components of an algorithm – for mathematical disaster.

When I applied to Praxis, I was fully aware that being awarded the fellowship would be the first step of a healing journey (as dramatic as it might sound), a healing journey in which band-aids have numbers on them, and not just the fathomable computer binary 0 and 1, but also the mean-looking ones, with squared numbers and exponential functions. Praxis would mean confronting myself to coding, which would require confronting myself, to a certain extent, to mathematics. It feels as though Scholar’s Lab people have now become experts in “teaching the math basics you will need to understand for you to engage in coding” to Humanities people with a varying degree of proficiency in arithmetic. From Shane’s goofy-looking dog Rocky on the first slide of the history and genealogy of computing to constant reassurance, we were presented with a progressive complexity which made our first assignment, “write out in plain English an algorithm to sort a deck of cards” a funny and appealing game.

Now, I have to be honest and confess that I cried on my way out of the Scholar’s Lab, after this first “Introduction to Data” session. Not because someone said something wrong or made me feel bad – of course not. But because in front of this whiteboard on which were written so many numbers, I felt myself going back in time ten years earlier, blankly staring at the whiteboard in my math class, not understanding a single thing. Not because I did not want to (or perhaps unconsciously), but because I was utterly unable to comprehend what was going on. As if I was stuck in a fever dream where whatever was written down felt like a language from outer space and where someone would just keep repeating “how can you not understand this?”.

Then, I remembered the “So you want to be a wizard?” zine that Shane handed out and had us read, and its writer Julia Evans’s positive reframing of difficulty. In this programming zine, she presents bugs as learning opportunities. Bob Ross would have added – “happy accidents”. Somehow, crying after this “Introduction to Data” was a personal necessity. I needed to get my math trauma out of the way, and the deep feelings of shame, guilt, and incompetence that have been hindering me for years. I have no illusion as I know I won’t become Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Smith Friedman or Mavis Batey – I will still be bad at math, because my brain must have rewired itself differently. But now that we are being invited to learn, fail and learn from apparent failure, I know that I will hold my head high up and try, fail, learn and try again, differently. Praxis has allowed me to move on and make peace with the teenager in me who still feels the burning shame of being the last at something. Now, I can tell her that a bad math average makes for the best potential for growth. 0.25/20 is not so bad.

My name is Gramond McPherson, I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. I am a late-era millennial which provides me a vantage point of remembering the world before high-speed internet and smartphones while coming of age as these technologies became a normal way of life.

As a kid, I developed and learned technical skills that I have continued to use as an adult. For instance, in middle school, I learned how to type in a computer class. The teacher required the use of an orange keyboard cover that hid the keys from our view. Though difficult at first, this practice helped to develop my muscle memory in learning to type without looking down at the keyboard. Today, I continue to be proficient in typing because of the exercise of the orange keyboard cover. I also remember the pre-digital way of conducting research, relying on encyclopedias and books and using index cards to take notes. As a millennial, while I can find solutions to problems and complete tasks in both digital and non-digital ways, I am grateful for the technologies that exist to make my life easier and less complex. As a graduate student, I am especially grateful for Zotero which I have used for over a decade. This digital tool has made my research and writing process of generating citations and collecting bibliographical material more efficient and seamless.

Beyond technical skills, the non-technical skills that I either inherited or gained through experience have also served me well as I have matured. I have always been somewhat of an introverted person, though I can become more outgoing once I am comfortable within a social space. While some could perceive this as a disadvantage within collaborative spaces like the Praxis Program, I would argue the opposite. For me, being an introvert is less about how much I talk and more about what I choose to say or not say. Through my experiences in school, I sought to make my words count and think critically rather than simply seeking to hear my own voice. I also believe that being an introvert makes me a better listener, which is also a valuable skill for collaborative work. Lastly, being an introvert allows me to have greater attention to detail, including seeing the moods of people. As the Praxis cohorts are generally small, these conditions are perfect for an introvert like me to excel in.

As a humanist, particularly in the field of history, the most important skill I use is critical thinking. In thinking about history, I am not simply seeking to know about notable events or important people in isolation, but to answer the who, what, why, where, and how. These questions help me to gain a greater understanding of a historical period as well as become more conscious of the silences or historical gaps that exist concerning issues like race, gender, and sexuality. I hope to bring my critical thinking skills to engage with the digital humanities. As evident by the readings in Week 2 of Praxis, these debates on hegemony and silences are occurring within the digital humanities as well.

One of my goals for Praxis is to embrace the unknown. Coming into Praxis, I had some prior exposure to digital humanities. During my time at the University of Central Florida, I completed the requirements to earn a certificate in Geographic Information Systems which involved taking four classes, two classes that provided scholarly and theoretical introductions to digital humanities and two classes that introduced me to ArcGIS and allowed me to create a project using the software. Yet, even with this training and certification, there is still a part of me that feels inadequate and on a scale from novice to expert, I feel closer to being a novice than an expert.

Presently, I feel even more inadequate regarding Coding. For instance, in completing the objectives from the Week 1 Code Lab, in preparing my Development Environment, I faced difficulty on the first task in installing Homebrew due to some issues I was having in Terminal. However, in viewing research and problem-solving as valuable skills, I was determined to find a solution. In embracing equal credit from prior Praxis charters, I am thankful to YouTube, particularly the EasyOSX Channel’s video on installing Homebrew for helping me through that task. This semester, I am sure there will be other unknowns that I will encounter, and I hope that I will lean into the resources available, whether my Praxis cohort, the Scholars Lab, or others, to succeed this year.

Lastly, something that I hope to discover during this Praxis year is the technical skills that I already possess but have not been utilizing to my fullest potential. An example of this is using ArcGIS again after a nearly three-year hiatus. By then, the use of ArcGIS had expanded into using ArcGIS Online, which required some further adjustment. Yet, while ArcGIS had evolved, some of the technical skills that had remained dormant during my hiatus came back to me and I was able to succeed in completing various scholarly projects. In embracing the unknown, just as the orange keyboard cover helped develop my muscle memory to become proficient in typing, the setbacks I will face in becoming comfortable with the skills I will learn with the Praxis program will help to develop my muscle memory and with practice, I will become proficient in various technical skills of the digital humanities.