Blended Engagements with Writing from the Diaspora
Submission Type
75-minute Hands-on Workshop
Abstract
This workshop draws on our experiences designing and teaching a blended interdisciplinary seminar focused on the diverse concerns of contemporary literature, criticism and theory written by a selection of black women throughout the African Diaspora. In this course, students worked with freely-available technologies to curate and present information, organize and contextualize evidence, evaluate data and documents, and establish the main points of the texts under analysis. In this workshop, we will discuss how students used specific tools (e.g., Padlet, Google Maps, and Pinterest) to draw relationships between literary and historical evidence and data, and to engage themes like exile and diaspora, memory as a form of resistance, and the depiction of public and private traumas, in and across course texts. We will share our process of connecting conventional learning goals for literary and historic analysis with accessible tools, and our approach to scaffolding a series of small-stakes assignments over the course of the term. This combination of tools and framework allowed our students to engage creatively, build confidence as digital humanities practitioners, and feel ownership and investment in their learning. In conversation with workshop leaders, participants will explore how they might create (or adapt) a course module using the approach we have taken, linking learning goals, modes of analysis, and accessible tools, and then developing a scaffolded approach for that course module. We encourage participants to bring a text or an assignment to the workshop for the hands-on portion of the session.
Session
Workshop
Start Date
5-18-2016 10:00 AM
End Date
5-18-2016 12:00 PM
Blended Engagements with Writing from the Diaspora
This workshop draws on our experiences designing and teaching a blended interdisciplinary seminar focused on the diverse concerns of contemporary literature, criticism and theory written by a selection of black women throughout the African Diaspora. In this course, students worked with freely-available technologies to curate and present information, organize and contextualize evidence, evaluate data and documents, and establish the main points of the texts under analysis. In this workshop, we will discuss how students used specific tools (e.g., Padlet, Google Maps, and Pinterest) to draw relationships between literary and historical evidence and data, and to engage themes like exile and diaspora, memory as a form of resistance, and the depiction of public and private traumas, in and across course texts. We will share our process of connecting conventional learning goals for literary and historic analysis with accessible tools, and our approach to scaffolding a series of small-stakes assignments over the course of the term. This combination of tools and framework allowed our students to engage creatively, build confidence as digital humanities practitioners, and feel ownership and investment in their learning. In conversation with workshop leaders, participants will explore how they might create (or adapt) a course module using the approach we have taken, linking learning goals, modes of analysis, and accessible tools, and then developing a scaffolded approach for that course module. We encourage participants to bring a text or an assignment to the workshop for the hands-on portion of the session.