Draft: Project Organizing Principles
Below are our working organizing principles for this project. This is a living document and will be revised as we learn how to refine and improve teaching about fresh water history.
Pedagogical Principles
- An “estuarial pedagogy,” recognizing the strengths and contributions of students along with the need to blend their realities with the realities of digital humanities, academic, and vocational expectations.
- Ethics of care
- Actively pro-student and therefore anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic
- 50/50 skills to content orientation
- Transparent in pedagogical tools: students can see the layers of the tools and can understand how it operates and shapes the intellectual work and outcomes
- Built to incorporate SOTL
- Include wrap-around services: built-in support from experts specific to the project
- Fully web accessible
- Open access and OER
- Participating in the project does not require additional funds from students.
- Project supplies the necessary hardware and software for students to succeed.
- Public history oriented
- Collect only as much information as necessary to facilitate learning.
- The project will embrace a collaborative ethos. So, collaboration with outside partners will be modelled on a non-hierarchical and reciprocal model.
Technology (Privacy, Maintenance, Security)
- OER and Open Access
- FERPA compliant
- Attentive to Normandale policies
- Uses lowest technological denominator
- Students contract with project at the beginning of semester.
- Collect only as much information as necessary to facilitate learning.
- The project will privilege durable data forms, such as txt and csv formats over proprietary formats.
- Students control their exposure to public facing online environments
- The project will be oriented towards an extensible and sustainable infrastructure. [Sustainability and maintenance windows — will need to revisit]
- Student learning is more important than the generation of scholarship or the sustainability of the technology and project outcomes.
What is the Fresh Water History Project
- Teaching project
- Fresh water
- Starting at the assignment level
- Access
- Use
- Make meaning
- Department initiative but not exclusive
- Privilege open pedagogy
- Platform for experimentation is Reclaim- we can add anyone who wants, offer training on tools- we are not tool prescriptive
- FERPA informed and attentive to history discipline standards for public history.
- Public history
- Prioritizing lowest common technology denominator
