SLOW DIGITAL PEDAGOGY

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Students in my classes are equipped for the complex demands of modern learning without sacrificing space for slow reflection. When we are reading Dante, students learn the digital tools at the outset. They navigate the 700-year history of Dante commentaries using the Dartmouth Dante Project, and word-search his minor works in the Princeton database to find parallels with their readings of the Comedy. If we are engaging in late medieval visual culture, students are trained to navigate the appropriate museum and library databases at the outset.  

But this digital engagement is always set against a backdrop of contemplative or mindful learning, which nurtures awareness, focus, and deep reflection as a creative response to cultures of anxiety or excessive competition. Students encounter the world of words at their fingertips, engage with it at top speed—and then have space to withdraw into careful reflection. 

My hope is that students in my classes will develop two complementary skills: 1) expert engagement with the best scholarly tools, digital or otherwise; balanced with 2) intentional disengagement for the purposes of slower and deeper learning. Students encounter the balancing of these two modes—both essential for life as a college student or professional—as a vital and learnable craft.  

Regardless of whether I am teaching an introductory composition class or an upper level seminar, I am always a writing teacher. Students (and professors) don’t stop learning how to write. 

I believe that for most students, writing can’t be conceived apart from what the student is writing about. A student’s writing always begins with a spark of interest and passion; only once the spark is ignited does the student begin to unfurl sentences. And only once a student has unfurled the sentence, sparked (hopefully) in genuine interest and passion, can that student start analyzing and improving it. 

I attempt to follow this pattern (spark first, technicals later) in my Introduction to Writing course: “Writing Nature” (most recent syllabus here). Students are asked at the beginning of the class to write a personal essay about an encounter with wilderness in the mode of chosen exemplar: Annie Dillard, or Ursula Le Guin for example. Their next two major assignments will be more technical in nature—literary analysis and science writing. But I encourage students retain the sense of personal discovery and encounter present in their first assignment. Each student comes to their major, and their whole university, shaped by a story: childhood backpacking trips led to a passion for ecology; or a junior high science fair led to a decision to enroll in a Chemistry program. The more these stories can be kept intact when writing, the more human the writing will sound. I believe in the age of generative AI, the authentic writerly persona, whether on or beneath the surface, will become (if it is not already) the most essential aspect of the craft of writing. 

Student Evaluations  for the course as well as my Director's Evaluation were positive (instructor rating of 4.75/5). Comments focused on the course's culture of learning—describing a "supportive environment," and a sense of "fun... with a serious undertone." This is exactly what I had hoped for the class: a culture of free exchange in which students were comfortable to hear their own voices, both in speech and writing. 

Many of the texts I teach are old. They emerged from a culture with different tastes and values from our own. Students who encounter these texts for the first time are (unless they aren’t paying attention) as bewildered as Dante waking in a dark wood. I have two approaches for attempting to overcome the otherness of these books. 

First, I ask every student to bring their own passions to the text. It doesn’t matter if a text was written 800 years ago, there is something in it that can speak to the student’s particular horizon of meaning. One of the central assignments in my Late Medieval Literature and Culture class (syllabus here; evals here) is to write 10 “gobbets.” The word means a bite-sized chunk of something. The idea is for each student to attend in their readings to any one passage that pulls at them, suggesting a deeper meaning beneath the text’s surface. They spend 3-500 words chasing that meaning without worrying about the strictures of literary analysis. What we are after is genuine encounter with something in that old text that might meaningfully fuse with the student’s perspective. If a student has taken the gobbets seriously, they find that when paper season does come around, the most crucial bits are already written. Begin with that spark, then follow the peer-reviewed articles where they lead. 

My second strategy for bridging the time gap is to dispel students of the idea that the Middle Ages occurred entirely in England. My teaching is devoted to the recent global turn in Medieval Studies. Whether studying English texts, or texts in translation, I want students to encounter the Middle Ages as it was: a buzzing, trans-regional network spanning many languages and cultures as well as religious and political sensibilities. I believe encountering that Middle Ages brings it to life for students and helps them see analogues to their own diverse, hyper-connected world. 

I have found that the most effective method for teach the global middle ages is through a comparative approach, juxtaposing texts from different cultures in order to emphasize commonality and difference. Students in this class encounter the religious poetics of Julian of Norwich, written in 14th century York, in lively conversation with the ghazals of Hafez, written in Persia during the same time period.  Similarly, students read Chaucer’s bawdy and brilliant Merchant’s Tale only after spending several days discussing the Italian love poetry of Dante’s youth, La Vita Nova. Only with the context of French and Italian courtly love in place can they understand the genius of Chaucer’s inspired satire.