Two elements of the scholar–citizen model–(1) the acknowledgement of a student’s “local” identity, and (2) the condensing of academic divisions–frame some of the more concrete examples of how the DHFS’s curriculum development fits this model. First, in line with the first principle of the scholar–citizen model, we draw from students’ “local” identities, be they disciplinary, cultural, or social, and we maintain that these identities should be used as a starting point in the acquisition of DH critical skills. In the context of the Field School, students’ various disciplinary identities have been among the most impactful factors in the classroom. Approximately half of the students in the program came from humanistic disciplines like English and History. Half came from other disciplines not normally understood to be within the purview of DH: Psychology, Politics, Tourism, and Chemistry. In response to this heterogeneity, we endeavoured to create instructional space that recognizes and respects this component of the student’s local disciplinary identity.

More concretely, students in the 2015 Field School prepared a presentation as part of their participation in a one-day symposium with a local charity. Co-organized by the DHFS and the Hastings Pier Charity, the symposium brought together the Field School’s students and the charity’s project developers and engineers to discuss the digital popular memory archive being assembled as part of a government-funded restoration of a Victorian pleasure pier on the Southern English coast. The students’ presentation detailed a range of possible digital projects the charity could undertake using the assembled archival resources in order to provide a public-facing digital presence for the physical site. In doing so, not only did the students draw on class discussions of digital archives, DH project management, metadata, citizen scholarship, and folksonomies, but they also found valuable one student’s previous degree work in Tourism and his experience developing a digital platform for the crowdsourced writing and rewriting of public histories.[8]

This experiential learning activity asked students to apply their classroom knowledge of digital cultural heritage to an on-going cultural preservation project. The activity of drawing on students’ local disciplinary identities distinguishes the specific knowledge base of one student, while promoting the contribution of individual knowledge to the classroom community. The recognition of the students’ local disciplinary identities, then, also contributes to the second principle of the scholar-citizen model, the flattening or condensing of academic hierarchies. This learning opportunity seems to conform in many ways to the definition of high-stakes learning. It is public–facing, and it is tied to a tangible, “real–world” project; it asks that students make concrete suggestions that may change the direction of a project. Notably, it also elicited high–quality suggestions and engagement from the students. However, by our definition, “high stakes” does not accurately describe the complexity demanded of students in this learning opportunity. The learning opportunity was tied to assessment only circuitously, and it required students to draw on their own backgrounds and skill sets. But it does not ask students to display or share a project of their research. The task at hand for students was application rather than the more challenging task of production or creativity.

Other aspects of curriculum development similarly seek to flatten hierarchies and allow students access to scholarly conversations they might otherwise be proscribed from. These more academic-facing learning opportunities also rest on the principles of community engagement that can only be circuitously assessed.[9] In line with the fourth principle of providing students access to their own DH networks and communities, we attempted to challenge academic generational divides by fostering opportunities for scholarly conversation between undergraduate students and established DH and DH-adjacent scholars. Imperative to the successful crossing of generational divides is providing students with the necessary tools and vocabulary to participate as scholars in their own right. In this capacity, the DHFS collaborated with the Digital Curators at the British Library in order to organize a colloquium for students with the staff of the British Library Labs. In addition, we facilitated student participation in more traditional scholarly forms like the recent King’s College London early career research conference, Blue Skies Above, Solid Ground Below (2015). Prior to participation in these events, students were supported in the articulation of their own digitally inflected research interests and questions about the field through one-on-one dialogue with instructors.

The principles of experimentation and community, similarly to the principle of community as citizenry, connote a protection by community for the kinds of experimentation that DH learning and research entail. In other words, learning with community safeguards for failure is low-stakes learning. Indeed, in the examples above, students demonstrated their ability to contribute to scholarly and cultural communities in thoughtful and sophisticated ways in circumstances that were not directly tied to assessment. The scholar-citizen principles of recognizing students’ local identities, facilitating students’ participation across hierarchical and generational academic divides, and providing them with the opportunities to forge their own scholarly communities can be said to be a successful pedagogical model in light of the quality of student engagement. But it also sits uncomfortably with the necessity for evaluation in the classroom. For both students and instructors, the reality of evaluation necessitates the possibility of failure. Failure is the denial of community belonging.

Following from this principle, we attempted to mitigate the risk of failure–to offer low–stakes learning opportunities–in work completed for assessment.[10] For example, the students’ major project drew from a partnership with the Amelia Alderson Opie Project, a SSHRC–funded archival project housed in the Department of English at Queen’s University. The Project and the DHFS teaching team provided the primary source materials, namely letters written by Opie and her close circle of friends, from which students selected an object to become the centre of an individual DH markup microproject. Students were provided with a robust framework of digital editorial theory and were expected to gain familiarity with TEI in an oXygen editing environment, a technology that we chose as it lays bare minute encoding decisions but remains relatively accessible. The end product entailed an .xml representation of the students’ chosen object, an optional customized schema (created in Roma), and a prose editorial statement on the student’s theoretical and practical editorial decisions. We attempted to retain student ownership over their own work in line with the third principle of the scholar–citizen model. Distinct from student work that is contributed to a larger project with or without attribution, the micro–projects are designed as stand–alone entities, complete with an account of how the student understands her intervention into a single object. The markup project is then the subject of individual student presentations to their peers and the broader community on the satellite campus.

The major assignment was neither designed as a high–stakes learning opportunity in the same sense promoted by Research Based Learning, nor as a low-stakes opportunity like the ones discussed above. Instead, the assignment may be read as medium stakes: each student’s markup and presentation is assessed on a traditional grade scale and the project is presented to a small, controlled public of peers. Students were provided with large amounts of individual attention from the instructors, and supported in developing presentation skills. Nevertheless, this small increase in the stakes of the learning opportunity had perhaps a paradoxical effect: students felt a great deal of anxiety about the assignment, as though it were a high-stakes situation; in contrast to the students’ impressive engagement in community and scholarly settings, student performance on assignments was good but not overwhelmingly so. One trend is that students are able to reiterate, synthesize, and analyze theories of digital editing, but they are not able to apply those theories in the detailed work of encoding. While they have the skills for argumentation in prose, they did not necessarily gain competency in some primary DH critical mechanics. Some of this failure we may attribute to the short, six-week term. And some of it we may attribute to a natural variation in student aptitudes. It seems, furthermore, that the introduction of assessment correlates with increased levels of student anxiety and has little positive correlation with increased quality of work.

The practical application of the scholar–citizen model in the Field School portion of the DHFS exposes some of the complexities of DH ideas of belonging, the risks of failure, and the stakes of learning. No students received a failing grade in the Field School–the small class sizes and our ability to respond with agility to student needs have been a great help in this respect. However, the varied responses among student participants in the program to low– and medium–stakes learning opportunities prompts us to critically question the often powerful claims the scholar–citizen model makes for inclusion and autonomy. If academic failure is a possibility–as it becomes with the introduction of traditional assessment methods–then community membership is not always guaranteed.

To our knowledge, the Assistantship is unique as a pedagogical project that financially rewards the on-going pedagogy of undergraduate students outside of the classroom and outside of the professor-directed research project. The Assistantship has run for two academic years as a paid position open to Queen’s students who attended the Field School. It is offered in partnership with Special Collections at the W.D. Jordan Library at Queen’s, co-supervised by the Curator of Special Collections and the members of the DHFS teaching team with support from subject-matter specialists and some technical support from the IT department of Queen’s University libraries. Students digitized priority, underutilized collections at Jordan Library and designed and implemented a small-scale digital exhibition in line with their own research interests and in keeping with Queen’s Libraries’ aim to increase public access to their holdings. Tiffany Chan worked on a collection of nineteenth-century stereoscopic photographs, producing an exhibition that took advantage of contemporary animation techniques to visualize the three-dimensional photographic mode. Jenna Mlynaryk worked on a unique collection of nineteenth-century women’s magazines that prominently features unused, full-color fashion plates. Her exhibition attended to the material histories of both the Victorian fashion industry and Victorian magazine culture. As a condition of the Assistantship, students were expected to present their work in an on-campus undergraduate colloquium and to blog about their research process in online fora like HASTAC. The design of the Assistantship attempts to apply the pedagogical principles of the scholar-citizen model: (3) students are given ownership over their own work, and (5) labour that contributes to the research needs of Queen’s University or a broader project is explicitly valued in a paid position. While the Assistantship may count as Research Based Learning, it does not conform entirely to the power dynamics of the apprentice-research assistant model. Students were not assessed and they did not provide assistance for a project under a professor’s direction.

The low– to medium–stakes learning opportunities offered in the Field School portion of the DHFS complicate some existing research on student engagement, quality of work, and assessment. The Student Assistantship portion offers a counter–example of high-stakes learning, but one that is nevertheless not assessed. The public–facing, high–stakes aspects of the Assistantship appear to have produced in students a desire to contribute their best work. The quality of student work provides some evidence of this desire. For example, Chan produced an extremely thorough online exhibit. She has provided links to materials available in the W.D. Jordan library that support her research claims. The flipping animation and the 3–D animation–a technique known as tweening–curate the photographs as three-dimensional objects, communicating their materiality and the manner in which they would be viewed by contemporary audiences [Chan 2015a]. Mlynaryk produced a dynamic timeline to demonstrate changes in fashion trends across the 1870s as reflected in unique holdings of the Young Ladies’ Journal Canadian edition [Mlynaryk 2016b]. In addition, students performed complex, synthetic, and creative research. Both projects are thoroughly and carefully researched and thoughtfully presented. Both rely on an impressive depth and breadth of research, in addition to demonstrating a keen eye for effective presentation of humanistic research in a digital environment.

The Assistantship fits more closely with existing definitions of high–stakes learning than the Field School portion of the DHFS. Public–facing dissemination is built into the requirements of the Assistantship. Students are explicitly expected to situate their work on widely disseminated platforms, and to perform complex, original research tasks. The high–stakes, public nature of the digital exhibit may result in the high quality of work in the students’ projects in line with the causal arguments of Research Based Learning. However, Mlynaryk suggests in a blog post that the Assistantship–ostensibly a higher-stakes learning opportunity–paradoxically mitigated the risk of failure. Mlynaryk writes that she relies on the idea of “working failures” in her DH research:

Being able to work with a tangible set of mistakes, as discouraging as it can initially be, has taught me to take better pride in my ideas and objectives. Accepting my failures as part of both an immediate and grander solution is the best way that I've learned to keep moving forward. So many of my traditional humanities courses would benefit from promoting working failures as a part of student success, and I hope to one day see failure embraced in all classrooms.  [Mlynaryk 2016a]

In Mlynaryk’s articulation, the learning environment developed by the Assistantship helped her develop the metacognitive skill of managing her on–going learning, perhaps especially when that learning is experienced as failure. Mlynaryk notes that, in the assessed classroom learning environment, “traditional humanities courses often lack a good model for analyzing failure”  [Mlynaryk 2016a], as correction and criticism rarely accompanies the offer to improve on the work at hand. Mlynaryk’s reflections on her changing relationship to failure, and her assertion that space for failure would benefit all classrooms seems at first to be contradictory in the context of “high-stakes learning opportunities,” in which the consequences of failure may be more deeply felt. However, Mlynaryk also lights upon the central digital humanities values of experimentation and its concomitant potential for failure.

Mlynaryk’s insights are also valuable for the way that she perceives a “good model for analyzing failure”–an aspect of the kind of learning that she did outside of the classroom–to be a valuable corrective to the classroom experience. This tension between modes of learning in inside and outside the classroom space permeates pedagogical design and student experience in the DHFS. The classroom space and the realities of assessment–the possibility of failure in terms of grade point and financial loss and the attendant increase in student anxiety–go together. What Mlynaryk calls for may be extended to entail a thoughtful re-evaluation of what “a good model for analyzing failure” may be within the classroom, including a re-evaluation of how it is tied to assessment. As our experiences with both the Field School and the Assistantship have suggested, the relationships between the “stakes” of learning and the anxiety-producing effects of assessment is one that would benefit from further study and experimentation.

Perhaps the most palpable ways in which students embody the principles of the scholar-citizen model is in public reflections on the nature of belonging and on the communities that they found through their research. These reflections are part of blog posts required by the Assistantship, but their topics and content were entirely student produced. These reflections are public-facing, but their purpose is to be exploratory and to allow students a way to refine discrete aspects of their projects. The reflections, again, expose some of the ironies of DH pedagogy: they were purposefully designed as low-stakes learning opportunities not tied to assessment, but students produced sophisticated accounts of their place within DH and the nature of their work, performing the kind of synthetic work that we would expect from high-stakes learning opportunities. Thematically, the posts claimed that community and autonomy were centrally important to the students’ scholarly development.

For example, in a blog post for HASTAC Tiffany Chan details the way undergraduate students who are integrated into the Queen’s DH community develop “‘hard’ skills like metadata/archival work and web development,” at the same time that they are given an opportunity to apply “‘soft’ skills in a context outside of class [so as to] better understand how they transfer”  [Chan 2015b]. Perhaps most importantly, however, she also discusses the way in which involvement in this aspect of the Field School and the accompanying Assistantship helped her to cultivate a critical perspective on the DH field and her own place in it. Chan writes, “The traces of my intersecting communities are everywhere–all over my project, in and between every line of this blog post, and churning in the back of my mind...Because DH favours openness…and because my educators and mentors have been frank about them, I am aware of discussions about critical pedagogy, contingent academic labour, the ‘corporatization’ of post–secondary education, etc. that I would likely never have discovered otherwise”  [Chan 2015b]. Chan, unprompted by either of her instructors, articulates her role in the digital humanities, and in her education more generally, as one of awareness and knowledge, of critical perspectives, of a specific local subject position, all aspects of the scholar–citizen model on which we had attempted to shape the pedagogical approach of the Field School.

Chan’s continuation of what may be read as the scholar–citizen model into her developing career speaks to some of the ways that this model can facilitate an expansion of the role of the undergraduate beyond the classroom and even beyond the limited–term research project. Outside of the paid assistantship position, Chan has also contributed to the on–going DH project of demystifying such DH work and democratizing DH skills. Chan has independently produced a project resource for undergraduate students entitled “How Did They Make That? For Undergraduate Projects,” modelled after Miriam Posner’s own “How Did They Make That?” This project includes screencasts of undergraduate projects, listing the technologies used to make the featured projects, resources for using those technologies, and alternative technologies that could accomplish similar tasks. Chan’s goal is to showcase undergraduate projects to undergraduates, but she has incidentally produced an extremely useful teaching resource, demonstrating to instructors what engaged undergraduates can reasonably be expected to accomplish for a university project. Her contribution has the potential to shape the projects by which students may be evaluated and to encourage instructors who may not otherwise have chosen to allow digital projects in their classrooms. As a result of Chan’s work in this area one of the DHFS instructors has successfully petitioned for the inclusion of digital microprojects as a form of assessment at other courses on the BISC’s satellite campus. If a student project may offer an articulation of belonging and citizenship in a scholarly discipline, this is precisely what Chan has produced; she has drawn on her specialized, local knowledge, and contributed it to the scholarly community at large.

The students in the Assistantship seem to have developed a scholarly community and a scholarly identity. But it would be too easy to claim that the scholar–citizen pedagogical model directly produced the students’ sense of belonging and elicited their best work. Freire instructs us to be vigilant of the power dynamics of pedagogical spaces, and as such we believe that credit is due more to the students than to our pedagogical efforts. Both Chan and Mlynaryk are strong, imaginative students, in whom it is easy to recognize a great deal of the positive qualities that DH wishes to claim for its own and which it actively seeks to cultivate. Each has flourished within the scholar–citizen framework that the DHFS modelled itself on, but their successes are their own. The DHFS cannot yet claim that it has found a model that can make a consistent impact on its students or that has affected systemic change in the way that undergraduate students are taught and encouraged to participate in DH research. We simply don’t have a large enough sample set, and these students may well just be exceptional.