In the last decade, debates over the role digital methods may play in the humanities classroom have grown increasingly robust, motivating many higher education institutions to introduce into the curriculum a course of study in the Digital Humanities and to establish centers to help integrate digital methods into course curricula for faculty, graduate instructors, and students. The place of pedagogy in DH scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon, since initially digital methods were reserved for the scholar who made use of them in research that other scholars would debate. After the legitimate place of DH pedagogy was advanced by Hirsch in Digital Humanities Pedagogy (2012), Battershill and Ross in Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (2017) interrogated the role of technology in the classroom and offered a schema of practical applications for course planning that served as a blueprint for future course development. Since then, in Teaching with Digital Humanities (2018), Travis and DeSpain have shifted the focus from digital humanities writ large to how methods and practices can be applied at the field-specific level with case studies in 19th-century American literature. And, more recently, in the pioneering New Digital Worlds (2019), Risam has advocated for a DH approach to pedagogy which unveils and intervenes in the disruptions of the digital cultural record that has been produced by colonial and postcolonial regimes. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced higher education instructors to move their physical classrooms to virtual learning environments, this discussion about technology and pedagogical practice in the humanities ebulliated overnight, as faculty and graduate students – including hardened DH skeptics – suddenly found themselves compelled to teach online. This crisis in the humanities has elicited a radical reevaluation of digital methods and their integration in higher education pedagogy.

This panel aims to bring forth and debate transformational challenges that instructors have faced in virtual learning environments, affordances/hazards of specific methods in online humanities learning experiences, field-specific case studies that highlight the application of methods to materials, socio-political conflicts produced by the ecology of the “virtual environment,” and strategies for cultivating academic community in a networked society. Panelists will limit their presentations to a maximum of 15 minutes, reserving the final 15 minutes of the session for open discussion moderated by the Presider.

For his part, David Dulceany suggests that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and rush to online learning revealed that digital learning platforms are deceivingly more taxing on our ability to process and share information online than previously presumed. Beyond the learning goals of students, the learning objectives of courses, and the limitations of online learning, he asks how we manage human bandwidth in our course designs. What are the physical and mental limitations for engaging in online learning? Do all our digital pedagogical tools effectively serve their purpose without overburdening instructors or students? Do our courses consider the needs of all students including those with disabilities, those facing issues with accessing technology, or that may encounter financial or familial struggles?

Elia Romera-Figueroa, in turn, describes the challenges of incorporating digital methods into a technology-laden semester. Whereas prior to the pandemic, digital methods enjoyed a luxury status among pedagogical strategies – a methodological holiday from typical reading assignments – after the online fatigue that students experienced in virtual learning environments, introducing digital methods to the classroom has challenged instructors to create significant learning experiences. Romera-Figueroa will discuss how DH methods may serve the cultural studies classroom, where students do not only access and consume content from a digital repository; indeed, they make a critical contribution to it, reflecting on the social implications of collaboratively creating open-source cultural goods. How might this new focus on critical creation transform desired learning outcomes and what kind of skills become necessary to meet the needs of this paradigm shift?

Finally, Joseph Mulligan describes a critical commonplace that over the last decade amplified its skepticism toward the digital humanities’ ability to promote intellectual reflection. This attitude could not survive the mass transition to online learning environment during the pandemic. Mulligan argues that this fissured skepticism, however, must not be relegated to history, if the transition to online learning is to receive truly critical attention. That is, if the pandemic made believers out of many DH skeptics, what pedagogical methods have proven to promote intellectual reflection on primary source materials? Focusing on the cultural studies classroom, Mulligan asks how methods like teaching with digital archives and web maps may promote reflection, support collaborative inquiry, and achieve such desired learning outcomes as intercultural sensitivity.