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. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

Every institution has embedded pedagogies—tacit structures, policies, and norms that govern the possibilities for teaching and learning. The curriculum is only one place in which teaching happens in higher education: every interaction is also a form of teaching, whether it pertains to a syllabus, a budget, or the use of campus space. In other words, the classroom is inseparable from the infrastructure that supports its work. The teacher struggling to find resources for her students, for example, cannot help but have her work affected by the threat of budget cuts. As sociologist Jessica Calarco and others have argued, students are often subject to a hidden curriculum of expectations and practices that reinforce social inequalities. I build on this work by offering a theory of the embedded pedagogies of institutions, those interrelated sets of strictures that pressure instructors to adopt particular pedagogies regardless of their own personal inclination. The book argues that, while these embedded pedagogies could feasibly support effective teaching, they most often inhibit justice-oriented approaches to education. 

Educators are under threat, struggling with institutional instability, scarcity, and political attacks on their work. This book offers guidance for instructors struggling with how to teach effectively in such uncertain and hostile environments, whether that teaching takes place in the classroom or elsewhere. With digital humanities pedagogy at US-based institutions of higher education as a frame and focus, I argue for an approach to teaching and learning that seeks to build more just and equitable institutions while also offering strategies to endure the negative ways these structures influence our work. This book offers a theory and practice of DH pedagogy by speaking from the position of a practitioner tasked with both teaching and administrating in the context of a public university in crisis. Teaching administrators, as I call people in roles like mine, are uniquely positioned to lay bare the pedagogical implications of infrastructural decisions at the same time that they implement a classroom practice that intervenes in their local institution. However, since many of these positions are institutionally unique, term-limited, or one-off, this unique vantage point has not often been formally explored. By focusing specifically on this intersection of teaching and administration, this book offers as much in the way of day-to-day approaches to the DH classroom as it does a far-reaching vision for how our pedagogies can help to bring about a university that is more stable, more sustainable, and more just.

The institutional structures that impact teaching are especially salient for those instructors who work outside departmental silos. For staff who work across departments, the warp and weft of the institutional pedagogy is particularly noticeable because we so regularly come into contact with patrons from across the university. DH pedagogy serves as a useful object of study in this regard, as so much DH teaching takes place in the cracks of the university. As a librarian, I have taught credit-bearing courses as well as one-off workshops, consulted on a graduate certificate in digital humanities as well as mentored students individually. Teaching in these spaces, I argue, reveals the pedagogies operationalized by our institutions for and against our work as teachers. Furthermore, because of its intensely collaborative and cross-disciplinary work, digital humanities teaching frequently forces encounters—and friction—with the university in ways that more narrowly discipline-specific instruction might not. Any instructor is subject to policy. But the librarian providing instruction in digital technology is especially aware of its impact and the ways in which it can be hostile to learning. 

In meeting the limited knowability of the university, we meet the first of the five characteristics that will give this book its structure:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

These characteristics form the basis of the stories that institutions of higher education typically tell about themselves and who they want to be. They form the basis of the neoliberal university and its mode of describing itself. In each case, these values exert power over the kinds of teaching and learning possible in their spaces, often in ways that instructors would not willingly ascribe to. The body of the book centers on the narratives that universities use to frame themselves as bastions of neutrality, intellectualism, and prestige. In each chapter, I critique the ways in which these values impose themselves as pedagogical forces on DH teachers and offer a pair of action-oriented responses, first as an administrator thinking pedagogically and then as a teacher thinking administratively. The result is one part theory, one part lesson plan. One part discussion, one part assignment template. As educators faced with frustrating circumstances, it can be easy to feel disempowered, as though the institution is too large to change, and to turn inwards, narrowly focusing on the day’s lesson plan in order to carry on. I argue, instead, for a renewed view of higher education institutions in familiar terms for teachers. By demystifying and breaking them down as pedagogical systems, teachers can find opportunities for change and create the conditions for our learning communities to thrive.

The book concludes by meditating on the contested futures at the center of university life. Universities often claim to look towards the future while enshrining hyper-conservative institutional values that favor the past and refuse change. As such, I conclude by questioning the futures towards which universities are working. Who do these futures belong to? Our communities? Or a substratum of donors, politicians, and pundits? We cannot afford to treat the classroom as closed off, separate from the broader administrative context that shapes its spaces. By seeing teaching as an extension of policy—and policy, in turn, as a set of pedagogical interventions—educators can co-create a more hopeful future with their communities. Taken together, the book offers a roadmap for DH educators aiming to push their teaching and their institutions towards more just futures for teachers and learners. By rendering visible the pedagogical structures at the core of the university, I hope to empower educators to develop the tools to change them, in and out of the classroom.

For a first foray into the ways in which the teaching administrator may intervene in their own institution, we can meet the university’s limited knowability with a pedagogy of transparency. The first experiences many members of the university community have of their institutions are heavily manufactured. Whether through mailers to prospective students, new faculty orientations, or ongoing marketing and communication campaigns, universities have a vested interest in the careful articulation of themselves as particular kinds of institutions with specific values, processes, and audiences. Despite these broad campaigns to appear known in the public eye, I argue that this knowability is limited by design: universities deliberately obscure their workings from their community members, a fact that can hide the ways in which institutional policies and choices structure the possibilities for learning available to teachers and students. From an administrative standpoint, I first examine budgets as pedagogical technologies¹ that can offer students a vehicle by which they can better understand the infrastructure of their university. Second, from a classroom perspective, I examine digital humanities student projects that challenge the narratives universities share with the public and that attempt to make known their difficult histories. By questioning the received knowability of our institutions in our teaching we can illuminate their effects on our work. By recognizing administrative decisions as pedagogical ones we can recast them on grounds in which teachers might intervene.

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. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

This is a book about teachers, the labor they take on, and the structures that prevent them doing that work well. Our institutions often define teaching as something that happens in specific spaces, at specific times, and by specific people. In higher education, positions are often described with a common shorthand: “I teach a 2-2” or “I carry a 4-4.” The formulation describes both a calendar distribution as well as the supposed burden of teaching. Once your courses are done—your course load carried—you can get back to work. And the implicit encouragement is to spend less time on teaching and more time on your tenure file. The classroom is a space to be escaped. And when we describe some positions and institutions as teaching-intensive, however true the designation might be, we create boundaries. We suggest that some spaces are for teaching and some not.

Staff positions often distribute identification with the craft of teaching in a similar way. A Teaching and Learning Librarian might explicitly focus on classroom instruction. An Undergraduate Success Librarian might specialize in undergraduate outreach. Some roles might work with patrons directly to answer questions and roles, while others might think of themselves more as back of house and removed from the community. As with faculty positions and their associated teaching responsibilities, the ways we distribute staff labor can suggest separation between those who teach and those who do not. Some are in the classroom, while others might never set foot in it.

But we all teach.

It is understandable that someone without explicit classroom responsibilities might see themselves as disconnected from the act of teaching. But we do ourselves and our students a disservice when we fail to recognize the teaching that takes place across the institution by instructors in a range of different job titles. This book specifically speaks from the point of view of the teaching librarian, in part, because library positions entail a range of types of interaction. In some cases, librarians might design for-credit courses as part of the curriculum. But so much of the work of librarianship takes place in other spaces: reference consultations, collaborations with faculty members, one-on-one mentoring, workshops, one-off instructional sessions, and more. To be a librarian is to dance along the cracks of the institution, engaged in a thousand small teaching acts. Because of this, library perspectives are helpful for illuminating the cross-cutting impact of pedagogical decisions.

In the same way that teaching occurs throughout the university, staff positions like those in the library are useful case studies for discussing the pedagogies of institutions because they are regularly called upon to engage in the infrastructure of the university. Even if their job titles do not contain the word “administrator,” staff positions often make policy decisions that affect others. Digital humanities library positions, in particular, expose the ways in which teaching is an intersection of pedagogy and policy. Throughout this book I use the term teaching administrator to refer to individuals inhabiting such complicated roles in places of higher education. The term refers to those faculty and staff who inhabit administrative roles within their respective institution but also provide instruction in some capacity. I use the term administrator quite liberally here: it refers not only to directors or managers but more broadly to anyone engaged in the inner workings of university infrastructure and making policy decisions for it. Teaching, too, is construed broadly. Teaching takes place throughout the university, in its cracks and its hallways, in all manner of forms. The teaching administrator might direct a center but teach a course periodically. They might be a GIS Specialist who also runs regular workshops. Or they might be a developer engaged in paired programming with a student as part of a project development. Teaching administrators, no matter their specific job title, regularly find themselves implicated in and exerting force upon the various policies and norms that work on the institution and, in so doing, upon their embedded pedagogies.

More specifically, this is a book about all those principles, practices, and structures that intersect in a kind of pedagogy in the institution around them. When a local government reduces its budget, forcing secondary educators to dip into the own bank accounts to pay for classroom supplies—that is an observable act that impacts pedagogy. The material conditions of the classroom are changed based on administrative choices that are removed from the classroom. When the chairs in a public classroom are welded to the floor so as to prevent them from being moved from neatly arranged rows—that is a kind of pedagogy. The decision to bolt chairs to the ground may never have been made with actual instruction in mind, but it nonetheless affects the possibilities for learning in that space. The university encourages the idea that teaching takes place in the classroom, and this mode of thinking is a function of policy, power, and politics. When conversations are not explicitly about teachers and students—a kind of pedagogy is still being enacted. After all, an absence can still be noted and remarked upon. Why aren’t we talking about teaching? What does it say about what we value instead? A pedagogy.

This is a book about administrative choices like these, about the ways in which they help or harm the teachers in their midst. About all the myriad ways in which the work of education is routinely damaged by forces outside the classroom. This book argues that these institutional norms, policies, and structures act as embedded pedagogies that are operationalized for or against teachers and learners. Most often, as in the case of budgets cuts or prescriptive classroom spaces, these institutional pedagogies put teachers on the back foot, forced to teach in ways they might not otherwise do so in part out of a survival instinct. The first step to finding our way to the teaching we want to see in our work is to recognize the obstacles facing that labor, the pedagogies running counter to our own. And it can be especially difficult to notice the things affecting our teaching when they happen far outside the classroom, carried out by those who don’t consider themselves educators. By recasting institutional activities and actors in pedagogical terms, I hope to empower teachers to find their own path to enduring administrative difficulties even as they work to change them. These embedded pedagogies can be especially challenging to work against because the pressures they exert are often invisible to the teachers and learners in their midst. The first tactical decision we can make to counter them is to render them known.

Universities invest vast resources in making themselves known to their students, their communities, and their publics, from marketing to branding, communications to legislative testimony. In the process, though, this knowability is limited by design, as elite universities necessarily want themselves to be only so known, in specific ways, and by particular people. Institutions frequently obscure their actual administration in ways that distance teachers from their core functions. This web of policies, practices, and pressures shape our ability to teach and learn in seen and unseen ways, forming the network of embedded institutional pedagogies. By rendering these opaque practices transparent, we can empower educators to intervene in the forces affecting their ability to do the work of teaching.

In a certain way this book was also my own attempt to chart a pathway to survival in the face of the embedded pedagogies of my own institution. During a period of administrative upheaval at my place of work, blogging became a way for me to vent and reflect about the challenges I found for supporting student work. The audience I found for this writing seemed to be largely people in positions like mine: mid-career digital humanities administrators who had a hand in research, teaching, and administration. Positions like these are sometimes called “alt-ac” for the ways in which they offer a landing for graduate students outside of the traditional faculty path. Alt-ac staff often refer to themselves as scholar practitioners, a phrase that further serves to illuminate the fact that we often see administrative praxis itself as a subject for research and critique in its own right. The term “teaching administrator” is a similar riff, both a description of a hybridized identity and an attempt to instrumentalize it.

In moments of despair I sometimes referred to this manuscript as “the book I’m writing about bullshit and how to deal with it.” Invariably, others would respond with their own, similar frustrations at their own institutions. Embedded pedagogies carry power, in part, because they refuse to be seen for what they are. Writing this text is a first attempt at making legible the relationship between administrative policy and teaching in a way that makes them visible. To describe what I see so others can notice as well. To know and be known. To use the unique position of the teaching administrator to push back on the limited knowability of the institution and render legible its embedded pedagogies.