When my cousin’s first child was young, he told us that he and his wife would raise their children to be involved in what they were doing around the house. Instead of only play acting cooking, they’d give their kids a cutting board and some vegetables to cut to help with dinner. They’d include their kids rather than simply saying that they were too young. Therefore, by the time that they would be expected to do chores, they would know what they were doing, understand that they were helping, and know that they were encouraged to learn more about the practical tasks of the household. It wouldn’t be a chore so much as something that they were used to doing and knew that they could do.

This week’s readings reminded me of how much the typical American educational experience (focusing on K – 12 here) is a chore. Standardized or otherwise, we mostly teach our children to learn to take tests. Memorize this vocabulary, use these words not those, parrot the point of view I’ve given you, remember some dates and the names of a select few “important” people, etc. You can prove your understanding of the material through class discussion sure, but the bulk of your grade (whether you pass or fail) will depend upon tests and essays, in which you must convince me, the teacher, that you have understood what I told you in exactly the right way. Remember – use a number 2 pencil, make your mark heavy and dark, and don’t go outside the lines.

This approach stifles students’ desire to engage with the subject material. As commenter BMBOD annotated in Kalir and Dean’s Hypothes.is experiment: “If you approach knowledge as something coming from an authority, it is very hard to fathom being able to create it yourself, or talk back to it, even if those platforms exist” (25). As DeRosa would say, students become consumers rather than contributors of knowledge. This consumer identity is especially apt since these students are likely consuming this knowledge from the commercially produced textbooks that they are required to buy, in which one particular narrative in a particular field is commodified and proliferated.

Digital Humanities praxis seems to be the antithesis to this rote approach. Working with firsthand sources at their own discretion allows students to come to their own conclusions with history, literature, art, and other humanities. Open educational resources allow educators agency to build their own curricula rather than depend upon a textbook. Social media and blog assignments, as pointed out by Cordell, allow students to hone their writing in formats that they are guaranteed to use after their primary / secondary / higher educational career ends. Injecting these projects into the course plan would allow students to take agency over their own learning and engage more deeply with the subject material. For an ambitious example, DeRosa’s undergraduate Early American Literature class not only developed their own fledgling textbook, but were told that they were ideal candidates because they understood how undergraduates consumed information. Her students were guided and encouraged to produce their own material rather than taught to demur to a higher authority. They were brought into dialogue rather than taught to recite a monologue.

Working on digital humanities projects further breaks this proliferation of a single narrative by exposing students to multiple viewpoints. Instead of reading a synthesized, universal account of a specific time period, for example, students can learn the particular experiences of individuals. the students can be taught to, as Risam describes, “resist the fetishization of the other” and broaden their perspective.

Furthermore, through Digital Humanities projects, teachers can foster more productive dialogue and instill in their students a healthier relationship with failure. In the prominent American educational model, the teacher is the authority, and failure is to be avoided at all costs. However, in Digital Humanities, whether it’s due to technological (first tier) or human (second tier) error, failure is a part of the process. We learn and develop both our software and ourselves through failure, just as we do in life. Learning how to fix flaws in our code as well as in our own logic are essential to success, both in a digital project and in our personal growth. Furthermore, as Craxall and Jakacki point out, teachers cannot wait until they learn everything about Digital Humanities to step in front of a classroom. As DeRosa points out, disciplines have very short shelf lives – by the time you’ve mastered say, a new software, that software will have a new update that you will have to learn. This learning curve for teachers requires teachers and students to learn together to provide a richer experience.

Injecting Digital Humanities projects into primary / secondary education provides students with digital and informational literacy as well as the confidence to engage and effect change in their local communities without fear of failure.