Engaging the convention theme of emancipatory narratives, the panel reframes a familiar classroom concern as a question of agency: how can students think and act independently in environments shaped by high-tech mediation? As students increasingly turn to digital tools to summarize texts or generate responses, instructors across fields confront a shared challenge—moving students from passive consumption toward active, accountable learning.
The panel proposes emancipatory constraint as a framework for meeting this challenge: the intentional limitation of technology in specific contexts to create better conditions for learning. Rather than treating such limitations as barriers, this approach treats them as conditions that make agency possible. By removing or delaying access to certain technologies, instructors create space for students to practice attention and interpretation for themselves. Low-tech pedagogy, in this sense, is not a retreat but a recalibration. It also parallels a broader resurgence of slow, analog practices that counterbalance the speed and fragmentation of digital life (grandma hobbies, anyone?).
This panel builds on and recontextualizes contemporary pedagogical and critical frameworks, drawing on Safiya Noble’s work on algorithmic bias, Mike Caulfield’s approaches to critical digital literacy, Tricia Hersey’s advocacy for rest as resistance, and José Antonio Bowen’s work on teaching with and around digital technologies. Together, these perspectives provide a foundation for rethinking how—and when—technology should be integrated in contemporary classrooms, particularly in response to emerging AI tools. By foregrounding emancipatory constraint, the panel adapts these approaches to classroom practice, restoring attention to the core practices of humanities learning: attentive reading, purposeful writing, and sustained critical thought.
The three presenters offer classroom-based case studies that demonstrate how emancipatory constraint operates across complementary contexts. The first examines analog, screen-free journaling practices that integrate rest and reflection into the writing process, showing how limiting digital access fosters creativity, risk-taking, and authorial agency. The second turns to scaffolded engagements with generative AI, demonstrating how structured digital literacy practices can slow students’ interactions with high-tech tools and reposition them as active evaluators of knowledge. The third focuses on low-tech reading strategies, including print annotation and handwritten journals, that rebuild students’ capacity for sustained attention while fostering accountability to both text and learning community.
Taken together, these presentations show how emancipatory constraint can reshape classroom dynamics by disrupting habitual reliance on digital tools and redirecting attention toward process and engagement. Rather than avoiding difficulty, students are asked to work through it—developing persistence, interpretive confidence, and a stronger sense of responsibility to their own learning.
The panel will consist of three 18-minute presentations, followed by open discussion. This discussion will invite participants to consider how these strategies can be adapted across disciplines and institutional contexts, and how instructors can balance technological integration with pedagogical intention.
The panel brings together graduate and early-career instructors from different institutional contexts, whose work spans writing studies, literary studies, and interdisciplinary humanities. This range of perspectives reflects a diversity of pedagogical experiences and approaches, enriching the conversation and ensuring that the session speaks to a wide range of teaching contexts.
Ultimately, the session asks what it would mean to design classrooms that do not simply accommodate digital habits, but transform them—helping students reclaim the capacity to read, write, and think with independence, care, and purpose.