What brings you to the Programs in Digital Humanities?

The students! One aspect of the Digital Humanities Lab that I was really excited about is how central hands-on projects are. Making space for authentic, relevant, real-world experiences is something I’ve really strived to incorporate in traditional classes, but in the DH Lab, that’s already the core of what students are doing every day! So far, it’s been a treat to work with students and to learn more about the CS side of digital humanities.

For most of my career, I’ve been a researcher and practitioner in the field of education. I'm trained as a historian and history teacher, and I come to the Programs in Digital Humanities with a background in classroom teaching, historical research, and pedagogy. While I was in graduate school, I started working to develop interdisciplinary academic programs in addition to teaching and doing research. I enjoy figuring out how to translate big-picture goals into action, whether that’s by designing syllabi or planning out program logistics, and my job here involves a lot of that!

How does your background in teaching and research impact your work?

My historical research focuses on education, particularly on the role that different stakeholders like parents have played in shaping public school systems. I’m interested how to promote equity across K-12 and higher education, not only in terms of big-picture policies but also on a day-to-day level. That definitely impacts how I think about educational environments, including at MIT.

In terms of research methods, as a historian, I’ve worked mostly with archival records and some oral histories. That combination always has me thinking about what makes it into archives, and which archives, and who do those sources exclude? So it’s been interesting to continue those conversations with our staff and through the DH Workshop series–and now, given the content of the Spring 2022 Faculty Fellowship project, to support those conversations with UROPs, too!

I’m also trained in participatory action research, back from when I was teaching high school. That framework can be so helpful for thinking about ongoing program assessment. One of the things that I was trained to do is think about triangulating evidence–how are you taking multiple sources of evidence then seeing what picture emerges at the center? How are you trusting your own reactions as someone who is participating in the educational environment? How are you surveying students, formally or informally? How are you evaluating the work that they produce to see what the outcomes are? And then how are you taking all of those pieces to figure something out and then use it to move toward a goal? I’m excited to apply that approach to understand and improve our programs.

What’s something that you hope DH Lab students gain from the lab?

I want our students to feel like their curiosity and contributions matter, because they do! And I want students to have room to develop the skills to ask and answer questions that are meaningful to them. I hope that we can help students shift away from approaching challenges as though there’s one right answer that already exists and is just waiting for them to follow the right steps to find it. I really hope the lab is a place where students are doing more of the exploring, more of the work, and getting more comfortable with the ambiguity of the process.