Inhabit the New Learning Ecosystem

Graduate education must be re-imagined in the context of the emergent learning ecosystem, which involves not only digital technologies as tools but, rather, constitutes a fundamental shift toward learner-centered, active approaches to curriculum design, study methods, curation of knowledge, and research protocols.

• What are the appropriate learning environments and delivery formats to meet the SLOs?
• How will we ensure that a new model makes the doctoral candidate the active center of all learning?
• What “classroom” formats will be most appropriate?
• What pedagogies should be explored, deployed, and taught?
• How will the design of new Ph.D. programs facilitate new learning and new knowledge discovery?
• How will a new model facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary thinking, collaborative research, and collaborative writing? How will a new model respond to the dominance of the “solitary scholar” paradigm in the traditional humanities?
• How will a new model prepare students to engage with digital methods of scholarship, communication, and pedagogy?

Key Readings

• Alonso, Carlos J., Russell A. Berman, Sylvie Debevec Henning, Lanisa Kitchener, Bethany Nowviskie, Elizabeth Schwartz Crane, Sidonie Smith, and Kathleen Woodward. Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Modern Language Association, May 2014. [especially the section on recommendations, pp. 12-19]
• Bass, Randy. "Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education," EduCause Review, March 21, 2012.
• Cohen, Daniel J. and Tom Scheinfeldt, eds. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
• Grossman, James and Emily Swafford. “Graduate Education Reconsidered.” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, April 2016.
• Lippincott, Joan K. and Diane Goldenberg-Hart. Digital Scholarship Centers: Trends & Good Practice. Coalition for Networked Information, 2014.
• Smith, Sidonie. “Part 2: The Everyday Life of the Humanities Now,” in Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
• Davidson, Cathy. “Introduction,” Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
• Klost, Peter H., Debra Rudder Lohe, and Chuck Sweetman. “Rethinking and Unthinking the Graduate Seminar.” Pedagogy 15, no. 1 (2015): 19–30.