Catalyze innovation in the language education of a small and in many ways vulnerable Creole language, Papiamentu
Introduce a basic set of DH teaching tools to new Papiamentu teachers, such as TimelineJS and StoryMapsJS
Observe and analyze readiness of the students to innovate their education by offering a semi-guided approach, leaving choices for selection of tools with students.
Outcomes & Deliverables
Student presentations were planned in March 2020. Given the partial lockdown because of the COVID pandemic, only a few students could finalize and present their work in a physical setting with full interaction and reflection. Nevertheless, rich material has been collected by the teacher that can be used for further analysis and planning of follow-up.
A general observation is that most students were able to complete the assignment with some help. They generally enjoyed working on the assignment. They seemed to embrace using digital material, though primarily as something of added value for them in the role of teachers. Though this is a valid starting point, follow-up needs to be given to building awareness of added value for our language students’ pupils.
Dr. Takkara Brunson (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, California State University, Fresno) describes how her institute experience provided her with digital mapping skills which she has since incorporated into her university courses.
The Caribbean Studies Digital Humanities Institute provided a rigorous introduction to the various digital platforms available for studying the region. Since the institute, I have incorporated map building into my African cultural perspectives course at California State University, Fresno. The course focuses broadly on the histories and cultures of the African Diaspora. We devote substantial attention to examining the Caribbean as part of the diaspora–notably, through units on slavery, cultural formations, and global political movements. During the fall 2019 semester, I incorporated a new assignment in which students were required to build a digital map on a topic of their choice. Students enthusiastically created maps that examined the spread of the Garvey Movement, Black Power in the Caribbean, and reggaeton music, among other topics. Having discussed what such an assignment might look like with other attendees during the institute, I integrated mapping assignments into class exercises throughout the semester; I made sure to allocate class time to building the maps. This resulted in one of the most rewarding experiences that I have had in leading students through research projects.
In addition to meeting scholars from across the U.S. and Caribbean, I appreciated the opportunity to learn about existing projects that demonstrated the potential of the digital humanities for connecting with public audiences. I spent years imagining ways to present my research on Black women in pre-revolutionary Cuba through a publicly accessible digital map. I now have the tools to do so.
Juliet Glenn-Callender (University of The Bahamas)
Assignment Goals
To identify social and economic conditions existing prior to independence
To identify key personnel involved in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
To identify events leading to The Bahamas achieving Majority Rule
To identify what challenges were overcome in achieving independence
To explore major events through the use of StoryMap JS
Outcomes & Deliverables
Identifying how major events, such as the Burma Road Riot, Suffrage Movement, birth of the PLP, General Strike of 1958, Black Tuesday, Majority Rule Day, and Education for all in Nassau, led to Bahamian Independence
Successfully utilize StoryMap JS to create multimedia story of Bahamian Independence
Module 3, Topic 2 focuses on the Bahamas and the Caribbean since the 1950s. Students become familiar with events leading to 1973 Bahamian Independence, and the adjustments and challenges the population experienced after this time.
Resources
Assignment Description
Learn more about this course project, assigned to students in Academic Enhancement History – Topics in 20th Century History. (Shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.)
dLOC holds a wide range of teaching materials for K-12 and college/university-level courses that are primarily in English. Below are a sample of highlighted courses and teaching materials.
Courses & Syllabi
Puerto Rico Syllabus
Yarimar Bonilla, Marisol Lebrón, and Sarah Molinari developed “Puerto Rico Syllabus: Essential tools for critical thinking about the Puerto Rican debt crisis.”
The Caribbean Region of the International Resource Network created “Introduction to Advancing Sexuality Studies: A short course on sexuality theory and research methodologies”
Hyacinth Simpson worked with Olive Senior to create an online edition of her poetry collection “Gardening in the Tropics” that includes text, audio, and author notes.
Our Americas Archive Partnership is “a multi-institutional digital humanities project that aims to develop curricular models and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas.”
This handout includes links to prize winning K-12 lesson plans as well as a series of teaching guides produced for undergraduate teaching, primarily of Caribbean literature.
Afro-Antilleans in the Panama Canal Museum Collection
Margarita Vargas-Betancourt’s presentation “Finding the Silver Voice: Afro-Antilleans in the Panama Canal Museum Collection at the University of Florida”
Isabel Silver compiled a selected bibliography of digitized materials in the Panama and the Canal digital library. It also includes search items for each topic and photos for teaching
Dr. Rhonda Cobham-Sander (Amherst College), Dr. Donette Francis (University of Miami), Dr. Leah Rosenberg (University of Florida)
Students in the course undertake archival research, digital scholarship, and literary studies of the Caribbean through an interdisciplinary lens. Through class assignments, they consider the colonial dimensions of archives, examining how particular facets of identity and subalternity influence Caribbean writers and scholars.
Outcomes & Deliverables
Students examine topics of intersectionality across archival material and produce digital projects using Scalar, Wikipedia, and the Wiki service PBWorks.
Resources
Course Syllabus
The “Panama Silver, Asian Gold” syllabus is included in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, a born-digital, peer-reviewed resource available on Humanities Commons
In a virtual session, Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (Latin American and Caribbean Special Collections Librarian at University of Florida) discussed the importance of increasing bilingual access to Latin American collections found in online exhibits and digital repositories.
Resources
Challenges and Successes of Bilingual Metadata: Online Exhibits at LACC
Margarita Vargas-Betancourt shows us that decolonizing digital collections requires specialized labor. She analyzes three case studies from the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida to illustrate how faculty and staff are implementing bilingual metadata to improve access to Spanish-speaking audiences.
Case Study 1: Florida and Puerto Rico Newspaper Project
Metadata language should match the original source to make content more accessible. FPRNP has worked to include Spanish language assays with collections.
During the development of this exhibit, a Spanish authority file was used to organize bibliographic information of Latin American content to ensure access for Spanish-speaking viewers.
Dr. Margo Groenewoud (University of Curaçao) shares how her experience helped increase her impact as an educator and develop a collaborative oral history project.
At the start of my involvement with the NEH Institute, I observed that the project could not have come at a better moment for my island and my institute, the University of Curaçao. I wrote:
“As one of the leading institutes for higher education in the Dutch Caribbean, it has been a key challenge to balance our target to educate global citizens with specific local and regional educational needs and ambitions. Small scale, limited resources and historical ties to the Netherlands make it hard to decolonize learning material and to optimize the impact of education and research for the future of our communities. With our digital library and our network, we are ready to achieve much more in this area than we had ever envisioned, but we need collaborative action and support in capacity building.”
By participating in the NEH Institute my ambition was to boost my impact as an agent, collaborator and teacher. In particular I expected to further the use of oral history and Caribbean tales, songs and rhythms in education, and to collaborate on innovative ways to involve students in the validation, enrichment and valorization of local data in open spaces.
Three experiences in particular have had a major positive impact on my development in these areas. First and foremost, the in-person session had great added value as a pressure cooker, where tools and insights were not just presented, but practiced and shared in teams of colleagues with similar backgrounds. Second, because the NEH institute made an exceptionally successful effort in bringing together this group of teachers and scholars, every second was worthwhile, and I am still in contact with many of them. Thirdly, being introduced to the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program has been, and will be, of great value to my work as scholar. I have introduced the work of the institute in my research for Traveling Caribbean Heritage, a Dutch NWO-funded research program, and hope to work together with the institute on capacity building and history projects in the future.
In 2019-2020, as part of my learning and teaching agenda for the Institute, I have developed the “Introducing Digital Humanities in creole language teacher education on Curaçao” project in our university. This project is based on an assessment of staff of the Faculty of Humanities, in which we discussed various opportunities and challenges relative to the introduction of Digital Humanities tools in our specific setting. One of the major observations was a ‘fear of the unknown’ in the current generation of Papiamentu teachers & researchers. This challenge could be met by introducing the use of an important Oral History collection, Zikinza, and the user-friendly tools learned at the Institute, to the youngest generation of Papiamentu teachers.
Together with a young Papiamentu language teacher, Rendel Rosalia, I have set up an assignment within the ‘Listening and Speaking’ course for first year Bachelor students training to become Papiamentu teachers. We introduced various DH tools and sources that teachers can work with in the classroom, leaving choices open for them to apply and adjust to their needs. Also, we gave the students a responsibility to share project outcome, such as transcriptions of oral history data, to the university repository. Our overall project goal was to observe and analyse readiness of the students to innovate their education by offering a semi-guided approach leaving choices for selection of tools with students. Unfortunately, given the partial lockdown because of the Covid-pandemic, only a few students could finalize and present their work in a physical setting with full interaction and reflection. Nevertheless, rich material has been collected by the teacher that can be used for further analysis and planning of follow-up. A general observation is that using the digital material seemed to be embraced primarily as something of added value for our students in the role of (future) teachers. Though this is a valid starting point, follow-up needs to be given to building awareness of added value for our language student’s pupils.
PhD candidate in Equity, Bilinguialism and Biliteracy Molly Hamm-Rodríguez (School of Education, University of Colorado Boulder) discusses how the Caribbean Digital Humanities Institute has helped her think about how to integrate digital tools and Caribbean intellectual thought throughout her teaching, research, and professional development work with schools and educators.
My initial application to CDHI was motivated by a desire to integrate digital tools into a collaborative storytelling project with Central Florida high school teachers and Puerto Rican students who had been displaced by Hurricane María. As a graduate student, I have found that culturally and linguistically responsive teaching for bilingual students is often promoted at a level of abstraction that does not support educators in deeply engaging with the transnational intellectual traditions, social movements, and texts that could provide a more critical and compelling learning experience. For this reason, I was excited to learn about the work of dLOC in producing and sharing teaching guides and K-12 lesson plans as well as delivering teacher training to ensure that Caribbean studies would become a more prominent part of classrooms. These materials have inspired the work that I have been planning as a result of my participation in CDHI.
I will use the CDHI experience to begin developing a university-level syllabus that engages with the Caribbean to investigate key issues of language, culture, and identity in the tradition of linguistic anthropology. The course would include the exploration and application of select digital tools, such as StoryMap JS, learned through CDHI. In addition, I plan to develop an outline for a K-12 teacher professional development workshop that would center the needs of emergent bilingual students from the Caribbean. This workshop would enable teachers focusing on language and literacy development to ground their lesson planning and instruction in historically responsive content that centers a range of socio-cultural and linguistic identities connected to the Caribbean.
During the in-person institute, I was inspired by the broad range of digital humanities work (teaching, research, and service) shared by other scholars. Seeing concrete examples of digital tools in action—applied across a variety of contexts—made it more feasible for me to consider implementing the tools in my own teaching and research. During the institute, I appreciated the opportunity to think expansively about digital tools, while also learning technical details so that I walked away with both new ideas and technological skills. I have found myself paying more attention to projects that engage these digital tools in creative ways, and I am especially interested in seeking out (and creating!) examples from my fields of education, anthropology, and linguistics.
Of course, when I participated in CDHI I could not have anticipated how the covid-19 pandemic would bring me face-to-face with an exponential increase in the need to use digital tools in my teaching and research. Not only am I teaching two courses per semester online, but I am also supporting K-12 teachers who are desperate for digital resources to facilitate a positive learning experience for students of all ages and levels of technology literacy. Indeed, my own dissertation research may need to incorporate digital ethnographic methods due to travel restrictions that have significantly delayed my work in the Dominican Republic. I am grateful for the network of support in CDHI participants and facilitators, and know that I have a place to turn to help me think creatively about the role of digital tools in times of great uncertainty and ongoing precarity.
Virtual Exchange is an economical way to collaborate across borders and bring diverse content and practicing experts into the classroom.
Project Goals
Engage group of learners in extended periods of online intercultural interaction and collaboration.
Develop partnerships with other institutions and cultural contexts across a variety of geographic locations with the guidance of educators or professional facilitators.
Outcomes & Deliverables
Virtual Exchange courses provide a feasible stepping stone to study abroad experiences while increasing digital literacy and greater awareness of cultural diversity.
Resources
Mary’s Presentation
View slides from Dr. Risner’s overview of the Virtual Exchange program.
Websites created for courses and student projects provide access to class materials and help disseminate student research. WordPress is a free program for website design with many benefits such as ease of use, privacy protection, and compatibility with other digital platforms.
Presentations
WordPress.com: a pedagogical tool
Debbie McCollin from UWI, Trinidad and Tobago discusses the benefits and limitations of using WordPress in the classroom.
