Digital Humanities Pedagogy as Essential Liberal Education: A Framework for Curriculum Development
Digital humanities projects and methods are becoming increasingly common in undergraduate humanities classrooms. Digital projects and exercises allow students to engage with new technology, collaborate with peers, graduate students, and faculty, and produce tangible scholarship that is publicly visible. The Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR), a new student-focused digital humanities initiative at Michigan State University, has introduced digital components into large numbers of of History and Anthropology courses. Through two years of courses, it has proven fruitful to frame these not as “Digital Humanities projects,” but as part of a digital liberal arts curriculum that seeks to teach students not only about the domain-specific content, but also essential skills for information retrieval and analysis, media literacy, and communication in the digital age. This framework places these skills as extensions of longstanding skills, literacies, and knowledges that humanities and social sciences have contributed towards liberal arts education. Read More
