Digital Pedagogy is about Breaking Stuff: Toward a Critical Digital Humanities Pedagogy Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) Photo by Jacson Querubin

Photo by ickr user Theen Moy Pedagogy is not just a delivery device for the digital humanities. It should be at the core of what the digital humanities is as an academic discipline.

Praxis Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet. Photo by ickr user henry grey

Photo by ickr user kevin dooley I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative. ! ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

Photo by ickr user jared The critical in critical pedagogy functions in several registers: ! 1. Critical, as in mission-critical, essential; 2. Critical, as in literary criticism and critique, providing denitions and interpretation; 3. Critical, as in a reective and nuanced approach to a thing; 4. Critical, as in criticizing institutional or corporate impediments to learning; 5. Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inects (and is inected by) each of these other meanings.

Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing. John Dewey, Schools ofTo-Morrow Photo by ickr user Thomas Hawk

We need to handle our technologies roughly -- to think critically about our tools, how we use them, and who has access to them.

The best digital tools inspire us, often to use them in ways the designer couldnt anticipate.The worst digital tools attempt to dictate our pedagogies, determining what we can do with them and for whom.The digital pedagogue teaches her tools, doesnt let them teach her. Photo by ickr user mugfaker

Digital pedagogy is the use of electronic elements to enhance or to change the experience of education. ~ Brian Croxall and Adeline Koh Photo by ickr user Darwin Bell collaboration, playfulness/tinkering, focus on process, and building (very broadly dened). ~ Katherine D. Harris

Photo by ickr user Jos Manuel RosValiente The new learning is ancient. ~ Kathi Inman Berens

Photo by ickr user Dirigentens It doesnt matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are rectangles; rectangles are portals.We walk through. ~ Kathi Inman Berens,The New Learning is Ancient A course today is an act of composition. ~ Sean Michael Morris,Courses, Composition, Hybridity

Photo by ickr user Caleb Roenigk The keenest analysis in the digital humanities is born of distraction and revels in tangents.The holy grail of this work is not the thesis but the ssure.The digital humanities is about breaking stuff.

Photo by EmreAyar What is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge.The Deformed Humanities is an origami crane a piece of paper contorted into an object of startling insight and beauty. ! ~ Mark Sample,Notes towards a Deformed Humanities

There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes. ! Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can nd no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings are. ! None may teach it anything, 'Tis the seal, despair,- An imperial afiction Sent us of the air. ! When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath; When it goes, 't is like the distance On the look of death. ! ~ Emily Dickinson The digital humanities course I teach for undergraduates has as its rst assignment the breaking of something as an act of literary criticism. [slide] Specically, I ask students to take the words of a poem by Emily Dickinson, Theres a certain slant of light, and rearrange them into something else.They use any or all of the words that appear in the poem as many or as few times as they want.What they build takes any shape: text, image, video, a poem, a pile, sense- making or otherwise. Breaking Stuff as an Act of Literary Criticism

Deconstructing Digital Literature by Timothy Merritt

Winter Oppresses Shadows the landscape like death Tis heavenly when it goes Haiku by Rachel Blume

"A Certain Slant of Light,Typographically Speaking" by Lans Pacico

Viscera by Rachel Blume

Photo by ickr user Holger H. The world is vast.Art is long.What else can we do but survey the eld, introduce a topic, plant a seed. ! ~ Stephen Ramsay,The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or WhatYou Do with a Million Books

A critical digital pedagogy must be less about knowing and more about a voracious not knowing. Photo by ickr user seier+seier

Photo by ickr user jared Critical Digital Pedagogy: ! 1. centers its practice on community and collaboration; 2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries; 3. will not, cannot, be dened by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices; 4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.

bit.ly/breakingDH Photo by anieto2k

i Additional Material Jesse Stommel,Toward a Zombie Pedagogy in Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education ! Jesse Stommel,Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain ! Jesse Stommel,The Digital Humanities is about Breaking Stuff ! Jesse Stommel,The Decay of the Digital Human ! Leeann Hunter, Pete Rorabaugh, Jesse Stommel, Robin Wharton, and Roger Whitson, Digital Humanities Made Me a Better Pedagogue: a Crowdsourced Article ! Mark Sample,Notes towards a Deformed Humanities ! Sean Michael Morris,Courses, Composition, Hybridity ! Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel,CFP: Critical Digital Pedagogy ! Kathi Inman Berens,The New Learning is Ancient @Jessifer