Writing Community College Students Into the Digital Landscape

In this third session hosted by the Indian River State College, Dr. Anne McGrail, Lane Community College, will explore how she has adapted and used digital humanities methods, and the importance of digital humanities work in a community college setting. Beginning with the role that precarity plays in students’ lives, she will outline how she teaches digital humanities and is influenced by community college contexts. The frame she uses has evolved from several sources over several years: a learning theory approach informed by David Perkins; an equity lens informed by scholars examining privilege and middle-class assumptions about learning; an approach to helping students cope with cognitive dissonance and threshold concepts; and a way of teaching in a room (including a Zoom room) with varying preparation and “college knowledge.” The result is that students apply principles of data visualization, crowdsourced annotation; they develop ethical principles for representing themselves and others online, and they create “synthetic selfies” that help them to see the gaze through non-human eyes.

This program is funded in part by a Florida Humanities Community Project Grant in partnership with the Indian River State College.