Teaching with DHRIFT#

Pedagogical Philosophy#

DHRIFT is designed with a learner-focused pedagogical philosophy that emphasizes accessibility, interactivity, and engagement. The platform has been developed in conversation with an extensive community of DH graduate students, faculty, administrators, librarians, curators, and independent scholars, and our advisory board is drawn from a cross section of DH practitioners at institutional types such as community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional colleges, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). By engaging with this diverse community, we have been able to develop a platform that meets the needs of a wide range of learners and instructors.

Additionally, DHRIFT values the principles of open education and open access. All workshop content on the platform is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it, and all workshops are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means that you are free to use, share, and adapt the content for non-commercial purposes, as long as you provide attribution to the original authors and share any derivative works under the same license.

Workshop Philosophy#

Our curricula reflect the pedagogical values of humanities instruction, drawing from years of feedback and iteration. Both textual and visual in design, workshops attempt to accommodate different learning styles. By embedding a technical interface in the curricula, DHRIFT streamlines the learning environment for both instructors and learners and reduces confusion caused by context switching. DHRIFT workshops emphasize practical coding through a humanities lens, providing learners tools to extend their skills into new domains relevant to their research.

DHRIFT workshops are also designed to be accessible to learners with disabilities. The platform is built with accessibility in mind, following best practices for web accessibility and usability. DHRIFT workshops are designed to be screen reader-friendly, keyboard navigable, and color contrast compliant.

Let's look at some best practices for teaching with DHRIFT.

Best Practices#

When teaching with DHRIFT, there are a few best practices you can follow to ensure a positive and engaging learning experience for your students. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

  • Identify Clear Learning Objectives: Clearly present the learning objectives for each workshop and communicate them to your students at the outset. This will help students understand what they will be learning and why it is important.
  • Provide Context: Provide context for the material you are teaching and explain how it relates to the broader areas of research students might be interested in. Additionally, consider ethical considerations and implications of the material you are teaching.
  • Engage With the Platform's Features: Encourage students to actively engage with the material by attempting challenges, answering quizzes, or taking some time to write code on their own.
  • Use a Variety of Teaching Methods: Use a variety of teaching methods to keep students engaged and accommodate different learning styles. This could include different forms of group work in which students attempt to solve a problem together, or individual work in which students complete a task on their own.
  • Encourage Student's Autonomous Learning: Recommend not only that students revisit a workshop on their own after completion, but also to apply their newly acquired skills in a different domain. Give them some project ideas or tasks that they can try.

While DHRIFT tries to accommodate these best practices in terms of its design and content, it is, as always, up to the instructor to ensure that these practices are implemented effectively in the classroom.

Using a Pre-Existing Resource#

Although you can create your own workshops from scratch, we also encourage you to explore and utilize the existing DHRIFT workshops available on the platform. These workshops have been developed and tested by experienced DH practitioners and educators and cover a wide range of topics and skill levels. By using these pre-existing resources, you can save time and effort in developing your own workshops and benefit from the expertise of the wider DH community.

Depending on your needs and your students' experience, it is generally a good idea to start with the basics and build up to more advanced topics. Looking at the "Prerequisites" section of a workshop can help you determine if the workshop is appropriate for your students' skill level. For example, you might wish to have students work through the Command Line workshop before moving on to the Python workshop, as the former provides a foundation for the latter.

If you are teaching a live session using a workshop from the platform, you might also suggest that students work through the workshop on their own before the session, so that they can come prepared with questions and be ready to engage with the material in a more meaningful way.

Scaffolding a Workshop#

When teaching with DHRIFT, you may want to scaffold your session to guide students through the material in a structured and logical way. Scaffolding involves breaking down the material into manageable chunks and providing support and guidance to help students progress through the material.

The platform itself is designed to scaffold the learning experience, with workshops divided into sections and subsections that guide students through the material step by step. Still, it is a good idea as an instructor to work through the material yourself and identify which sections might be more challenging for students and where additional support might be needed.

Teaching and Community Engagement#

Additionally, DHRIFT is committed to fostering a community of practice around digital humanities pedagogy. We encourage instructors, learners, and developers to engage with the platform, share their experiences, and contribute to the ongoing development of the platform. We welcome feedback, suggestions, and contributions from the community and are always looking for ways to improve the platform and make it more useful for our users.

Furthermore, we invite users to create and share with us their own workshops, curricula, and institutes. By contributing to the wider curricula available to learners, you can help build a rich and diverse collection of resources that benefit the wider DH community.