Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshops

Reordering the Plot of a Humanities Course
Most literature courses follow a similar plot: the instructor introduces important books, students and professor discuss important ideas in the books, and students write about those ideas in essays. I offer this workshop to teachers who want to rethink the plot of humanities classes and  reinvigorate the role of reading in their courses. The focus of the workshop is the semester-long “Plot Project”: students begin by not reading assigned books and instead guess what might be the plots and purposes of those books. Then we read.

Distant Writing to Create a More Connected, Critical Composition Course
This workshop shows how to adapt Franco Moretti’s “Distant Reading” approach for writing courses. Some of this work is documented in the book I am writing.

WAC, or Writing As Conversation, Connection

Digital Pedagogy and Publishing for Faculty and Students

Our writing needs to “going public”--this is true for students and faculty in our age of interactive, digital communication.  But how to you do it? Where to you start to move all that school-and discipline-centered assignments into public and relational, publicly read writing?

1)   Use 10-20 minutes of every day to compose, and then continue a conversation about course readings and issues on a semi-public google docs (for faculty: find a peer group, for students: professor creates writing groups

2)   Curate the googledoc weekly , or every other week(for faculty member: only revise your writing at the end of the week , for students: professor should only curate, add, and revise student writing at the end of every week)

3)   Midterm can be “open google doc” with questions based on the commonly created google doc

4)   Writing assignment questions can be based on issues from google doc and require quoting from google doc

5)   Writing project can be based on google doc:  “go public”—use a public digital platform-- with something from google doc

Writing Across the Curriculum Workshops

Please see the Lehman College WAC website for materials coordinators and I put together over the years for professional development workshops. Some examples include

Guidelines for Creating Engaging Writing Assignments
Using Writing to Promote Critical Reading