Pedagogy Readings & Class Discussion

This week’s reading and discussion introduced some interesting thought-starters for me. Highlighting a few to share here:

  1. Per “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities”, DH is not suitable for undergrad students due to the theoretical component. I thought this was interesting and was wondering if I were to take this class in undergrad, what would that be like? I am still navigating my perception of the DH field as this is my first DH class. It is indeed more theoretical, and less technical than I expected. I do enjoy the critical components of it but do crave more resolutions/ applications.
  2. During the last class, it was discussed that “humanities studies don’t solve problems, but rather post questions to those problems”. This jumped out to me and definitely got me thinking. I studied BBA (business) during my undergrad studies and have always been in a “problem-solving” role since I joined the workforce (management consulting, corporate finance, data science, etc). This was definitely a shocking and liberating revelation that I was not expecting. In the professional context, I operate from a problem-driven mindset (as opposed to a solution-driven mindset). While it is still a problem-space operating mindset, the goal is simply to ensure we are working on the right problem before we dive into solution-ing. “Posting/ asking questions without the intent of solving the problem” is definitely something I have never considered before. I am not sure how I feel about it yet, but this is definitely an interesting mental experiment.