MLA 18: Feminist Pedagogy in Digital Spaces

Presider

• • Duke U

Speakers

• • Lehman C, City U of New York

News Blogs and the 2016 Election

In the Fall of 2016, concurrent with the actual Presidential Elections, my English Composition class held their own elections. This election was to determine the next President of the United Students of America. The election process included creating parties, establishing party platforms, holding primaries, and eventually electing our President. In an effort to hold ourselves accountable for the news we receive on each candidate and on every step of the election process, I moderated a “news blog” that posted various updates on their campaigns and platforms. The information came directly from the students. The intention in designing this blog and in designing this curriculum was to avoid talking about a real election season that focused too much on unproven facts and maligning. What I realized though is the news blog became a safe space for students to access information. I’m interested in showing the way a collaborative website such as ours can empower students during their research process.

• • Washington State U, Vancouver

Teaching about Violence Against Women through the Lens of Video Games

DTC 475 Digital Diversity has been a foundational course of the Digital Technology and Culture degree at Washington State University Vancouver since the major was established in 2003. The WSU catalog describes it as “the cultural impact of electronic media, especially the World Wide Web; issues of race, class, gender, and sexually online.” Due to the popularity of video games among my students and because we have just introduced a Games Studies & Design certificate in the program, I have for the last
three years taught this course through the lens of video games. This proposal addresses the category listed in the Call for Proposals, “Successful (and unsuccessful!) uses of technology in literature and writing curriculum,“ by focusing on one of the course’s modules relating to sexism––Module Six––entitled “Violence against Women,” that I
designed for the course. My presentation provides an overview involving the theories explored in the module and a demonstration of some of the games used to drive home the topic.

• • Ashford U

Teaching Activism from Afar: Feminist Pedagogy in the Online Literature Classroom

Feminist pedagogy involves disturbing patriarchal structures of power. Online learning presents unique opportunities for applying feminist pedagogical practices, allowing us to empower students in ways unavailable in a traditional classroom. This session will discuss practical application of feminist pedagogy in the online literature classroom and will explore
how such applications can foster a learning environment that produces critically thinking, engaged world citizens. Historically, patriarchal structures have disenfranchised certain groups of people in all areas of society, including in the classroom. Feminist pedagogy is a method of disrupting patriarchal structures of power in an effort to more equally distribute power among all groups of people, including women and members of other disenfranchised groups.

• • St. John’s U, NY

Back Talk or Talking Back: Behind the Wikipedia Page

When Wikipedia editors removed women authors from Wikipedia’s list of American Writers and reassigned them to the subcategory American Women Writers, it generated a firestorm of commentary. Andrew Leonard of Salon asked, “Is Wikipedia sexist? Or is it merely an unreliable mess of angry, ax-wielding psychos engaged in agenda-driven editing?” Despite more than 4 million articles in English and hundreds of thousands of volunteer contributors, less than 15 percent of those writing and editing the wiki are women. The gender disparity of its contributors results in vast discrepancies in the topics and subjects the encyclopedia covers. Edit-a-thons followed with feminist editors trying to correct imbalances in representation on the site. For close to ten years, my students and I have been editing Wikipedia in a course devoted to nineteenth-century American women writers. At the start of every class, I have ask students if they use Wikipedia (yes, 100%) and if they have ever edited Wikipedia (no, 100%). The course not only aims to correct imbalances in representation on the site (for example, when we started, Harriet Wilson, long credited as the first black women novelist in the United States, did not have a page), but also to encourage my students, largely women, to overcome their reticence as makers and builders of Web knowledge. I wanted to know how their digital authorship in the twenty-first century might influence their thinking about women’s authorship in the nineteenth. But first they had to overcome the harassment and chastisement by other Wikipedians that often took place on the talk pages. While it has become quite common to use Wikipedia in the classroom, my roundtable talk will address what happens behind the scenes on the site and how to manage the hostility that students may encounter as new editors of underrepresented topics.

• • Georgetown U

Finding Our Voices: Diversity and Inclusion in the Online Writing Classroom

How can writing instructors practice feminist pedagogy in the online classroom? The online classroom can be a marginalizing place where academic English is prioritized in discussion board threads; undergraduate students approach online peer review much more with attitude of “correction;” and diversity and inclusion can be easily occluded in a space where “identity politics” are both hyper-visible via student names (and other identity markers) and at once obscured through digital avatars and other means of gathering information about students. How can writing instructors actively include English language learners, include all students, and support diverse voices in the digital space?

• • York C, City U of New York

Making Critics: Small-Scale and Small-Budget DH as Feminist Practice

Digital scholarship can be alienating to undergraduates, as databases and digital repositories typically cater to experienced, rather than novice researchers. Although digital humanities projects aim to expand access to information, the majority of students are not aware of their existence. This presentation highlights the importance of small-scale and small-budget digital humanities work for feminist practice. I use as an example a series of assignments in an “Introduction to DH” course designed to introduce students to open-access digital resources and teach them to identify, evaluate, and use them productively.

• • U of Mary Washington

• • U of New Hampshire, Durham

“My Body: a Wunderkammer” to “The Lovely Bodies”: Inspiration and Outcomes in the Digital Writing Classroom

In my digital creative writing course, readings are an intrinsic part of the composition process, emphasizing the how and why of “digital born” (Hayles) texts while providing inspiration for students’ digital essays. We read video essays such as “That Kind of Daughter” by Kristen Radtke and “Baptism” by Marilyn Freeman, expressing female identity through essential audio and video components; we also read electronic literature by authors such as Shelley Jackson, JR Carpenter, and Christine Wilks, elegantly melding feminist memoir with visuals and interactivity. Reflecting on the themes in these inspirational works, as well as their multimodal affordances, transfers into the composition process for students’ video, Google Map, and hypertext essays. Software options like iMovie and Google Maps provide accessible tools for multimodal composition newcomers; they also allow writers the multimodal affordances, while introducing digital and nonlinear composition.