Praxis Curriculum
Praxis fellows actively participate in the program for a single academic year. Each year of the program requires different lessons, workshops, and experiences dependent on the nature of the group’s collective activities and as the staff responds to lessons from the previous year. The current arc of the year contains two parallel tracks:
- PraxisGeneral contains three units: Communities of DH, DH Teaching and Learning, and DH Research and Administration.
- CodeLab runs yearlong and consists of an introduction to humanities programming by way of Python and a DesignLab focused on the fundamentals of humanities design.
Each of these tracks contains a variety of deliverables:
- A group charter, a statement of values and practices we will adhere to as a community
- A personalized plan for self-study throughout the year meant to take advantage of the resources in the lab
- An individual teaching plan for a DH workshop based around the students’ interests
- A DH teaching statement
- A speculative personal project proposal for what comes next for them to be workshopped by the group
- Activities meant to exercise technical and design thinking as they relate to humanities problems
- Spring Hackathon as a group
- Final presentation to a local audience
- Two blog posts
These discussions and outcomes encompass a variety of different definitions of what it means to “do DH.” DH is capacious enough that it is quite difficult to design a program that can both introduce a broad range of approaches but also engage individual paths. Accordingly, the outcomes and units offer a mix of individual and group activities, but each student will need to supplement this work with self-study around their particular interests. We frame the year with twin sessions directed at this: in the fall, we spend time with each student design jamming their interests to help design a plan for the year and, in the spring, each student shares back where their interests have developed and next steps for them.
By the end of the year, students will have a portfolio of experiences and work directed towards the following goals. Students will:
- Practice DH in the following areas using appropriate technologies, methods, and activities:
- Community building
- Teaching
- Research and project design
- Administration
- Programming
- Design
- become capable of pursuing their own interests in the above areas moving forward;
- see digital humanities as a field and career path available to them regardless of their background;
- come to see themselves as experts in digital research with experiences worthy of sharing with others as scholars and teachers;
- and prepare themselves to pay it forward, early and often.