In our digitally evolving world, educators of history face the challenge of preparing
students for an unpredictable future of rich and overwhelming data amidst a society of
rapidly evolving technologies. This panel advocates for incorporating advanced tools at
early educational levels to meet contemporary undergraduate teaching challenges and
promote historical thinking. It is divided into three papers, each dedicated to a specific
digital tool: Omeka S, Tropy, and GenAI. We argue that these tools provide invaluable
support for teaching critical historical thinking and analytical skills to undergraduate
students, while also facilitating and sparking collaboration. By reporting on student
engagement, use, and playful exploration of these tools when working with digitized
historical sources, we will discuss the lessons learned from our teaching community to
inform an updated curriculum that ensures the introduction of digital historical literacy to undergraduate students.
The discussion is framed around three key reflections: (1) how these tools support both
synchronous and asynchronous collaboration; (2) the contributions these tools can make
to teaching history, and digital history pedagogy in today's education for undergraduates;
and (3) why incorporating advanced tools at an early educational level is not only
desirable for promoting historical thinking but a demand of contemporary undergraduate
teaching challenges. These challenges include integrating technology into curriculum
design and rethinking didactic strategies for new learning outcomes. This panel's
contribution lies in providing insights from the classroom level, eschewing a top-down
approach in favor of the practical, ground-level perspective from the micro-universe of a
classroom.
We will discuss our experience coordinating two international digital history courses at
George Mason University and the University of Luxembourg for a class project in the
spring of 2024, focusing on the project management, communication, and pedagogical
skills we gained from this collaboration. Our case study is a firsthand account, drawing
on auto-ethnographic reflection and ethnographic observation of the classroom. In this
context, Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ and bell hooks' ‘teaching
community’ are instrumental to our reflections on the exchange with this specific trans-
national class. Education here is seen as a holistic, communal activity involving shared
knowledge and experiences, not only through substantive content but also through
behavioral and procedural teaching contents.
The papers call for the integration of 'hack and yack' in the teaching community as an
alternative pedagogical route, drawing on ongoing discussions about the experimental
ethos within Digital Humanities. This practice has been profusely discussed as 'doing as
thinking', ‘thinkering’, or building as a ‘form of scholarship’, however its pedagogical value
has been largely overlooked at the undergraduate level. While most educators
incorporate hands-on work to advanced-level students, we argue for the pedagogical
potential of introducing digital tools at earlier stages, highlighting how the selected tools
can foster historical digital literacy. By doing so, we offer an in-depth look at using these
tools in the classroom and provide insights into their educational benefits, particularly in
teaching digital data stewardship, a crucial aspect for the future of the historical profession and key for the next generation of digitally literate historians.
Show this publication on our institutional repository (orbi.lu).
