INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Like many instructors around the world, I’ve been teaching fully online for the better part of the past two years in response to circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic (ongoing at the time of writing). In light of this shift, teaching online (which can sometimes be seen as a lesser kind of teaching) became the norm for so many educational experiences, for better or for worse. This shift asks us as instructors to reconsider our teaching practices when our normal approaches are no longer possible and all interactions are instead fully mediated in online environments.

In my work as a scholar and as an editor, I’m concerned especially with the way knowledge is created, and how its design and the semiotic channels/affordances it draws upon comprise part of its total meaning-making work (Ball 2004). Design isn’t something ornamental or just added on top of ideas to make them prettier or more palatable—it’s an essential part of the way knowledge is constructed and communicated.

I want to bring this approach to my pedagogy as well—how can the way I design and construct knowledge in my courses not just be incidental, or what’s easiest, or what the university-approved tools allow for me to do, or what’s expected, but rather, how can I as an instructor bring my designerly practice to bear on my pedagogical practices? How can the design of the course (especially in terms of delivery of materials) become a significant facet of the total learning experience and learning objectives/outcomes?

Dialogue

When I say designerly approach to teaching, then, that’s at the heart of the matter—design is not just ornament, but a part of function and problem-solving, and an essential dimension of knowledge construction in all environments (including digital). Learning how to bring critical making and design into my pedagogical delivery practice is a crucial step for me as instructor to most genuinely put my education at the service of my students.

There is a personal dimension to this, too—how do I put my designerly side at the disposal and service of my students? How do I engage them more fully and honestly (and more robustly in terms of my expertise) if I bring my designerly work to bear on my teaching? My university supports the approach of SoTL (scholarship of teaching and learning) and encourages faculty to make all work scholarly work—what does that mean for me as a designer and teacher of professional writing courses? How can I bring my geeky pedagogy approach to share my passions in supporting my students’ learning?

Dialogue

In theorizing and demonstrating a designerly approach to online course design as critical making via an e-literary approach, this project is informed by numerous sources, including Borgman and McArdle’s PARS approach to teaching online; Hanzalik’s approach to studio art in the writing classroom; Shipka on multimodal design in the composition classroom; various sources on DH pedagogy; and Lynda Barry’s approach to teaching creative thought processes in part through comics-designed course delivery materials (among many others).

Borgman and McArdle (2019) outline a user experienced-based approach to teaching writing online based on practices of being personal, accessible, responsive, and strategic. I especially appreciate their approach to online courses as knowledge-making spaces (6) and want to foreground their emphasis on designing for both student and instructor experiences. In particular, I focus on their dimension personal, which for them includes deliberately designing the aesthetic and sensory experience (20) and creating space of dynamic collaboration with students (19) through a sense of multimediated human presence (23).

Borgman and McArdle’s followup (2021) collection invites other online instructors to address how they’ve implemented the PARS approach in their own course design and also takes online teaching in the context of COVID-19 into account. They note the need for online instructors to be both instructors and designers, but who have less training in design (6). In addressing e-lit instructors bringing their critical making practices to bear on their teaching, I ask how we can use our designerly expertise in pedagogical delivery design. In particular, I draw on Snart’s chapter on online instructors as web designers, though with perhaps a different/more digitally attuned initial knowledge base than the author implies for his audience.

Palmeri and Dubisar’s chapter in The Rhetoric of Participation (2019) helps me think through ways to rethink participation and how to assess it in online courses (although the collection itself considers a broader range of teaching contexts). With its attention to disability and feminist approaches especially, this chapter challenges me to build in diverse routes for inviting and assessing participation, and also helps me reconsider and value my own preferred channels of engagement and participation as an instructor likewise involved in creating the course learning experience.

Hanzalik and Virgintino’s (2019) collection helps to activate an approach to writing pedagogy grounded in art and design, as well as interdisciplinary scholarship, in ways that open up writing instruction to more closely connect to e-literary and digital humanities work outside writing studies’ explicit boundaries (123). In particular, Rubino’s chapter offers an approach to designerly thinking in terms of function and as a problem-solving route to respond to audience needs, which helps to ground and ethically attune instructors taking on a designerly approach to be responsive to the needs of their students (134). In particular, I want to extend the flexibility Rubino offers students (via the New London Group) to instructors as well in actively considering the “identity of the maker” (126-127). I will also consider connections between SoTL and designerly approaches to teaching (135) and foreground instructors’ roles as active shapers of knowledge (136)

Comics

Hanzalik’s recent (2021) monograph helps me consider how to use artistic ways of knowing to produce new knowledge along with students; how to invite students into the process of knowledge production/creation; and how to collaborate with students through invention (Loc 196-199). I especially want to wrestle with this passage and the possibilities it offers for designing online courses: Researchers can learn, play, and experiment with new types of composition as they express answers to a research problem. For researchers seeking to collaborate with their students, they can co-write poems, perform a play, or create and curate an art exhibit as ways to explore a research question; they can imagine and invent a vivid world that evokes empathy; they can express themselves in art-based ways that affect an audience and compels them to act, to change their perspectives, to relate, to feel less alone, or to incite new ideas for future research (Loc 468-473). This monograph is especially useful for considering how the relationships between artist, scholar, and teacher blur in their overlapping approaches to knowledge creation and discovery through the arts (Loc 526-532)

Shipka’s (2011) creative, rhetorically grounded approach to multimodality across all channels of communication, not just digital, can help highlight for students how all communication is already multimodal, whether in an online or face-to-face class context, as well as the importance for taking seriously other modes of knowledge creation and communication beyond solely text.

Finally, Spiro’s chapter Opening Up Digital Humanities Education (2012), in the collection Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, situates learning in processes of producing rather than absorbing knowledge (351)—a principle similarly embraced in writing studies, and one that informs the pedagogical approach at the heart of this project.

Comics

Comics as scholarship is a well-established and growing practice in academic knowledge creation, including groundbreaking monographs and theses/dissertations-turned-monographs (Sousanis, Parker, Sohini). Comics are, according to one popular definition (McCloud), juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer (9). This digital essay might not look like a comic in the traditional superhero or graphic novel sense, but its roots are firmly designed in the power of comics as an aesthetic, inventive, and knowledge-creating medium—especially when enhanced with interactive links, which connects them in some ways to the traditions of hypertext scholarship (Rettberg) and/or possibilities for point-and-click games.

Comics are a strong model especially for e-literary invention and adaptation in pedagogical settings. So much of our delivery is already visual-verbal via PowerPoint slides—drawing more explicitly on comics and comics storytelling/information design principles may be a natural step for bringing in more of a designerly approach to the design of pedagogical delivery materials in online and/or in-person contexts.

Lynda Barry is one important model for me here. Her work focuses on invention and interdisciplinary creativity through comics and personal narrative especially as generated through a hand-drawing process. In particular, her Syllabus and Making Comics are not only thoughtfully theorized works on creative pedagogy and beautiful examples of comics form, but a comics-based delivery of teaching materials with clear instructions that demonstrates the work students are asked to do and performs it alongside them. Her designerly approach to the delivery of her teaching materials is an inspiration to me, as is her approach of working alongside students as a fellow designer to demonstrate support, care for them and their work, and a sense of shared vulnerability in the process of making/coming to know.

Emily Carroll is also a key model. Her works are aesthetic rather than pedagogical. However, her webcomics are beautifully crafted nonlinear hyperlinked works. The setup is fairly simple—linked images leading from one to the next—but the images and storytelling are beautiful and compelling, and the invitation to interact and piece together the story a little at a time based on how the reader wants to interact/explore invites a new way of thinking about what webcomics can be and do (compared to a webcomic hosted on a platform like Webtoons or Hiveworks, for example, which offer significant hosting and visibility but limit options for customized interaction).

Approach

Finally, Meghan Parker’s new book highlights comics’ power as tools for pedagogical participation and, in particular, for reflecting on pedagogical practices from a designerly standpoint.

Approach

To demonstrate a designerly approach to teaching through critical making and design, this project presents an interactive webcomic that simulates an interface for an online asynchronous course on professional writing. In particular, I rely on the framing metaphor of the greenhouse, growing plants, and botanical diagrams to create a shared conceptual space between students and instructor. Greenhouses and growing plants make a great metaphor for visually fostering learning and focus (see for example the Forest app). They can be interpreted in many personal and narrative ways, depending on the individual, and there’s a lot of nature-related public domain media available for students to adapt (see for example the links included under the “Resources” section).

Assignment

Using HTML and CSS as your foundation, cultivate a digital garden that suggests a story through images, text, audio, video, and spatial layout.

Framework

This section presents the informing thought behind the project's design. In a course context, it is replaced by the syllabus, policies, and other language required to establish shared working expectations.

Instructions

This section presents the assignment prompt detailing the primary task and learning objectives, along with rubrics, further readings, and any other information needed to complete the assignment.
There are also short-term quests to prep for final assignment. Students can complete these quests asynchronously over the course of the semester as they feel comfortable, and then we’ll celebrate work together at the end with a gallery and storytelling event.

Resources

This section provides media resources (image, audio, video, text, and code) students may use to complete the assignment, as well as links to example projects and further resources they might explore.

Garden

This section will feature student work and responses to the prompt; they upload their digital garden as a web project file to the course server via SFTP, and the instructor maintains the overall gallery space.

(For the purposes of this project’s current iteration, the featured media gardens are instructor-created examples students might use as models for their own work.)

Heuristic

Heuristic

As a proof-of-concept piece for a not-yet-taught course—my dream course and dream approach, prior to concerns of student evaluations and university constraints—this piece is meant as a starting point for a conversation rather than an ending point. There are many things to consider carefully, for example—to what degree are instructors permitted to build outside the course management system at their institution? How to manage a course like this in a way that maximizes accessibility and security of student information, and that fully meets both instructors’ legal and ethical requirements for protecting student information and meeting their access needs? How to make a workflow for a pedagogical approach like this sustainable, so that the ongoing delivery and design tweaks are manageable realistically amidst other professional requirements and pressures? How to make it legible for students who might be expecting another approach altogether or prefer the university’s content management system, and how to demonstrate its value to build student buy-in?

My dream, ultimately, is to find a way to approach my pedagogical work as instructor in a way that reflects my commitment as a scholar to multimodal knowledge creation and to design as a way of knowing—to a pedagogy informed by critical making and critical design on all elements. I want to bring my expertise as a maker of creative digital humanities scholarship to the work I do in the classroom (and online interfaces) so that I’m engaging students as developing professionals and inviting them into this broader conversation. I want to take what I’ve learned in teaching fully online and consider how designerly approaches that foreground online/multimodal delivery might also apply to in-person and hybrid classroom contexts. Most especially, I want my students to know that I care about them and that I take them seriously, and I want them to find joy and delight in the process of learning as I’ve found in my scholarly and editorial work. I hope this might be one additional route to building an accessible online learning experience that facilitates personal engagement for students and instructors alike.

Questions to consider in taking on a designerly approach to pedagogy:
• What media/channels most fundamentally shape your approach to knowledge creation and communication?
• What media/channels are most intrinsically connected to your intellectual life?
• What kinds of media can you craft well, or learn to craft better?
• What kinds of design can you maintain sustainably?
• Who’s in your class and what do they need from your class?
• What technical resources does your university offer for delivery?
• What other support does your university offer?

Sources

• What are your institution’s requirements for delivery?
• How can you best protect student information?
• What are your legal obligations and responsibilities?
• How will a designerly approach help enhance your delivery of course material?
• How will a designerly approach enrich your creation of an engaging, clear learning experience?
• How will you build in feedback loops to invite ongoing response in co-creating the course with your students?
• How will you make your designed materials accessible?

• What’s the scope of your designerly approach? Is it a file, a lesson, a unit, the full course, etc.?
• Is the course fully online, fully in-person, hybrid, or some other mix? How will all channels of delivery cohere for an integrated learning experience?
• What’s the learning curve for you to take on a new approach to teaching?
• What’s the learning curve for your students to adjust to a different mode of teaching, and how can you make it as clear as possible for their success?
• How will you measure success? How will you know where/how to continue improving the course design?

Sources