Digital Humanities and Social Sciences for Experiential Learning
Samantha Cutrara, PhD – Curriculum Specialist, Office of the Vice Provost Academic
It is one thing to know the value of experiential learning in your classroom, it is another to effectively incorporate it into your teaching repertoire. Experiential learning can be understood as activating your students’ learning by experiencing the application of content in context. In some programs – such as nursing, business, or biology – these “activations” are second nature because students have to actively demonstrate their learning of new concepts. But in disciplines within the Humanities and Social Sciences – disciplines like history, geography, political science, or anthropology – these activations may seem less natural and even a distraction from students’ learning the content and ideas within a field.
However, as Cathy N. Davison writes in her book The New Education, our disciplinary structure in higher education developed in the late-19th/early-20th century and isn’t the best or only way to learn the key concepts within your fields. In fact, thinking through ways for students to activate or use the knowledge they are learning, may invite new and deeper ways into learning that enhances retention, understanding, and application of content.
This is where the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences can come in.
The Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, or DHSS, is an umbrella of convergent practices that enhances and expands the work of Humanities and/or Social Sciences due to the explicit intersection of research and pedagogy with digital tools and technologies. While DHSS (or DH for Digital Humanities or Digital History) has been around for decades, the early focus on computing – developing code or programming for data analysis – has made it seem that DHSS is only for the few who understand how to program.
However, the ubiquitousness of digital technologies in today’s world makes the meaning making potential for DHSS exciting for those of us who don’t know how to code and who are still interested in exploring the experiential and e-learning opportunities in our courses. Many of us do this without calling it DHSS: When we ask our students to search for a website or an article, to map something on Google, to collaborate on an online document, to participate in a discussion on Facebook – these are all practices that invite students to find, collect, organize, and/or analyze using digital technologies. What makes practices explicitly DHSS practices is when we’re thoughtfully and explicitly using tools and technologies to develop skills of critical thinking, doing, and communicating. Through the explicit combination of digital tools and technologies with course content, students are experientially learning how to develop and communicate their learning in ways that are supported by evidence and presented to a public audience.
To support the exciting experiential possibilities of DHSS, the Office of the Vice Provost Academic at York University (VPA) and the York University Libraries (YUL) received an Academic Innovations Fund (AIF) grant from the Office of the Vice President, Teaching and Learning for the 2017-2018 academic year to develop instructor supports for incorporating DHSS into classrooms. The final product – Doing Digital Humanities and Social Studies in your Classroom – is now live and available as an Open Education Resource published by York University Libraries.
The Guide was developed from the DHSS work that four students – in history, geography, political science, and anthropology, respectively – engaged in during the Winter term of 2018. Each student created a digital online archive, exhibit, and document analysis examples, and we extrapolated best practices from these works to form the basis of the nine Assignment Guides featured in Doing Digital Humanities and Social Studies in your Classroom.
Until the end of 2018, both myself, as the Curriculum Specialist on the project and Anna St. Onge, the Director of Digital Scholarship Infrastructure at York University Libraries, are running workshops and consultations directly related to this Instructor’s Guide. This means that along with the support you receive from Educational Developers and EE Coordinators, we are providing extra support to assist you in strategizing your course outline and/or assignments in ways that can bring in more experiential and e-learning opportunities into the classroom under the umbrella of DHSS.
To book an appointment, email Samantha Cutrara at Cutrara@york.ca until December 15th. You can also visit the Digital Scholarship Centre’s drop-in times on Wednesdays. Specifically, on Wednesday October 24th, both Anna St. Onge and myself will be there discussing this work.
As a final note: I was a novice to DHSS until this project, and it has been so exciting to see the ways in which DHSS invites community-engaged meaning making that can result in greater access to primary documents and data and secondary analysis. I hope this resource will be a helpful tool for you to also see the experiential meaning making opportunities of DHSS. Happy creating!
