A Twitter Essay for the #Pandemic Methodologies Conference
by: Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Ph.D.
June 24, 2021
Tweet #1: Presentation Slide (280)
“Using Collaborative Research and Open-Source Methods to Promote Feminist Pedagogy During a Pandemic,” A Twitter Essay by @thonihoward w/ @NCITU of @Tulane and a co-curator of @FemTeachOnline and part of the #PandemicMethodologies conference sponsored by @CndHistAssoc (#CdnHist).
Tweet #2: Argument /What is FPTO (280) [1]
The collaborative project “Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online” (@FemTeachOnline) assists educators in applying feminist praxis to the online modality (as well as traditional/hybrid) and is especially relevant for Historians. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #3: Editors and Road map (276)
The @FemTeachOnline Guide, curated by @claremdaniel, @eromerohall, @niyamirandabond, @thonihoward, and Liv Newman, includes literature, assignment examples, and teaching tools relating to feminist pedagogy in online courses. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #4 – How can historians use the strategies in the classroom (250) [2]
Take a look at the feminist pedagogy tenets at https://feminists-teach-online.tulane.edu/ and the annotated assignments tab. Which tenets do you already use or could use in your history classrooms? #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #5 – Collaboration as Research (276) [3]
Feminist scholars identify collaboration as an essential research method & strategy to challenge patriarchal systems in academia/publishing. Pressures & inequalities that COVID-19 has intensified in aclife. #PandemicMethodologies @FemTeachOnline #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #6 – FPTO and Collaboration (277) [4]
Collaboration is a central value of @FemTeachOnline 1) with an interdisciplinary curator team 2) involving paid undergraduate research / web assistants, 3) inviting the public to contribute sources 4) asking educators to showcase assignment examples. #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #7 – Collaboration and Historical Associations (279) [5]
The rise of dh projects and #altac needs suggests that some historians view collaboration as an important medium. Both the @CndHistAssoc and @AHAhistorians have communicated to their graduate audiences about the importance of collaboration. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @NCITU
Tweet #8 – Open-Source as a Feminist Method (267) [6]
@FemTeachOnline also views the use of open-source materials as a feminist practice. Many sources about this topic are behind publishing paywalls. On the guide, the digital content created by the curators is open source. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #9 – Collaboration / Open-Source Methods and Historians (278) [7]
Yet, it seems that collaborative and open-source digital projects are infrequently seen as academic currency when hiring and promoting scholars, especially historians. These projects are seen as lagniappe or service projects. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #10 – Future of the Guide (268)
The curators plan to expand @FemTeachOnline so that it will continue to support educators beyond COVID-19 to include more open source & interactive components (podcasts, videos, assignments) and also a book project. #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #11 – Get involved (280)
Join the conversation! Submit a chapter proposal. Contribute an assignment or helpful source for the guide. Follow the guide @FemTeachOnline & curators @claremdaniel, @eromerohall, @niyamirandabond, @thonihoward, and Liv Newman #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist @CndHistAssoc @NCITU
Tweet #12: Notes and Further Reading (240)
Thank you #PandemicMethodologies and @CndHistAssoc for giving space to @FemTeachOnline in today’s Twitter conference. See http://feminists-teach-online.tulane.edu/pandemicmethodologies for this Twitter essay’s notes and further reading. #CdnHist @NCITU
Footnotes
[1] Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Enilda Romero-Hall, Clare Daniel, Niya Bond, and Liv Newman, eds., “Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online,” https://feminists-teach-online.tulane.edu/.
[2] History educators can use all of the feminist pedagogy tenets listed on the guide in online, traditional, and hybrid history classrooms. Some of the tenets directly align with communicating historical content and practice, while others support the building of equitable and caring learning communities that centers students’ voices and needs, especially in online spaces. Historical Knowledge Production and Practice: Tenets such as “presenting knowledge as constructed,” connecting to the personal and to communities outside of academia,” “considering alternative histories and narratives,” and “examining how gender, intersecting with other social categories, structures our lives, learning, and knowledge production, access to resources and information,” involve examining how we present historical content such as our course readings, historiography, and primary source analysis. History educators can bring historiography and primary source analysis into all history courses, provide opportunities for thoughtful and reciprocal service-learning projects and [virtual] field trips, offer a variety of conflicting points of view from diverse players, decolonize the syllabus, examine cultural and social aspects of history (including gender, race, and sexuality) next to political and economic narratives, and create opportunities to explore narratives about intersectional identities. Student-Centered Learning: Other tenets on the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online Guide refer to measures educators can take regardless of the content that they teach to create learning communities that revolve around the student’s learning needs. Many of the racial and gender inequities and hierarchies that students face on campus and in society are performed in the classroom. Educators including Historians can structure their syllabi and classroom activities to “promote reflexivity,” “treat students as co-agentic educators,” “promote cooperative learning,” “Uncovering the causes of inequality and leveraging resources toward undoing power structures” and “cultivate self-care and boundaries.” In a [online] classroom, History instructors can build in safe and intentional reflection activities about content and learning, provide students an opportunity to teach their classmates and lead discussion, provide an opportunity to students to learn and engage with each other, assign open-access sources as readings and course materials, practice a form of ungrading or contract grading, and reconsider strict late work policies. Valuing Digital Spaces for Active History Work: When Centers for Engaged Teaching and Learning started to provide resources to educators regarding teaching in online modalities, many of the solutions entrenched top-down learning approaches that did not reflect decades of work towards online learning theories by online educators. As the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online guide indicates, online courses should “Humanizing online teaching/learning,” “Create cultures of care in online classrooms,” “Examine (dis)embodiment in virtual teaching/learning,” and “Use technology intentionally to build communities and enhance learning.” History educators, in particular, can move away from recording long lectures in history courses and use tools such as social annotations (see Clare Daniel’s social annotation assignment) to analyze readings and primary sources asynchronously and easy recording tools such as Adobe Spark to incorporate student embodiment and voices as well as their perspective. With this work comes additional ADA considerations that must be prioritized as important work.
[3] “Coauthorship and Collaboration: Resources for Feminist Scholars,” Center for the Study of Women, accessed 15 June 2021, https://csw.ucla.edu/gender-equity-ucla/co-authorship-and-collaboration-resources-for-feminist-scholars/; Melissa Cheyney, Marit L. Bovbjerg, and Holly Horan, “Collaborative Research as Resistance: Successful Collaboration Across Disciplines,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 6 February 2021, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/collaborative-research-as-resistance-successful-collaboration-across-disciplines; Lise Bird Claiborne, Sue Cornforth, Andrea Milligan & Jayne White, “Collaborative Research to Support Reflexive Feminist Professional Work,” Open Review of Educational Research 2 no. 1 (2015): 267-281, https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2015.1103663; Janice Monk, Patricia Manning, Catalina Denman, “Working Together: Feminist Perspectives on Collaborative Research and Action,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2 no. 1 (2003), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.6865&rep=rep1&type=pdf; Mounia El Kotni, Lydia Z. Dixon, and Veronica Miranda, “Introduction. Co-authorship as Feminist Writing Practice,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 6 February 2020, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-co-authorship-as-feminist-writing-and-practice; Colleen Flaherty, “Where Caregiving and Gender Intersect,” Inside Higher Education, 31 March 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/31/where-and-how-gender-and-caregiving-intersect-professors-during-covid-19; T. Murat Yidirim and Hande Eslen-Ziya, “The Differential Impact of COVID-19 on the Work Conditions of Women and Men Academics during the Lockdown,” Feminist Frontiers, 19 August, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12529.
[4]The founding curators of the “Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online” guide, Clare Daniel, Ph.D. and Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Ph.D created the resource in the summer of 2020, initially as an internal tool when they were asked to help faculty of Newcomb Institute transition to online/hybrid teaching due to COVID-19. Other departments such as Tulane’s CELT and the Innovative Learning Lab provided training and help on online teaching, making Daniel and Howard consider what did their colleagues need and what new information could provide to their colleagues. Newcomb Institute is an academic research center that focuses on feminist research, teaching, and literature. After the guide was shared online and gained popularity, they decided to give the guide a permanent digital platform and invite three additional scholars to help curate and sustain the long-term project centering an array of interdisciplinary and collaborative voices.
[5] Jenny Ellison, “Sharing Your Work,” Canadian Historical Association, accessed 15 June 2021, https://cha-shc.ca/english/publications/cha-publications.html/employing-history-a-guide-to-graduate-school-and-navigating-the-job-market/sharing-your-work; “Collaborating – Five Skills,” The American Historical Association, accessed 15 June 2021, https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-resources/five-skills/collaboration.
[6] The editors are working on a book project titled Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online and have prioritized publishers that utilize open-source materials. See the call for proposals at https://airtable.com/shrcir8baciAeEmGT.
[7] This devaluing occurs even though digital projects often reach more audiences than traditional academic books and journals. See Colleen Flaherty, “Is Collaboration Worth It?,” Inside Higher Ed, 6 January 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/06/historians-push-more-collaboration-field-traditionally-has-snubbed-group-efforts; Adam Chapnick, “History and Interdisciplinarity,” Active History: History Matters, 5 September 2018, https://activehistory.ca/2018/09/history-and-interdisciplinarity/.
Works Cited
Chapnick, Adam. “History and Interdisciplinarity,” Active History: History Matters, 5 September 2018, https://activehistory.ca/2018/09/history-and-interdisciplinarity/.
Claiborne, Lise Bird, and Sue Cornforth, Andrea Milligan & Jayne White, “Collaborative Research to Support Reflexive Feminist Professional Work,” Open Review of Educational Research 2 no. 1 (2015): 267-281, https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2015.1103663.
“Coauthorship and Collaboration: Resources for Feminist Scholars,” Center for the Study of Women, accessed 15 June 2021, https://csw.ucla.edu/gender-equity-ucla/co-authorship-and-collaboration-resources-for-feminist-scholars/.
“Collaborating – Five Skills,” The American Historical Association, accessed 15 June 2021, https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-resources/five-skills/collaboration.
Cheyney, Melissa and Marit L. Bovbjerg, and Holly Horan, “Collaborative Research as Resistance: Successful Collaboration Across Disciplines,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 6 February 2021, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/collaborative-research-as-resistance-successful-collaboration-across-disciplines.
El Kotni, Mounia and Lydia Z. Dixon, and Veronica Miranda, “Introduction. Co-authorship as Feminist Writing Practice,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 6 February 2020, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-co-authorship-as-feminist-writing-and-practice.
Ellison, Jenny. “Sharing Your Work,” Canadian Historical Association, accessed 15 June 2021, https://cha-shc.ca/english/publications/cha-publications.html/employing-history-a-guide-to-graduate-school-and-navigating-the-job-market/sharing-your-work.
Flaherty, Colleen. “Is Collaboration Worth It?,” Inside Higher Ed, 6 January 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/06/historians-push-more-collaboration-field-traditionally-has-snubbed-group-efforts.
Flaherty, Colleen. “Where Caregiving and Gender Intersect,” Inside Higher Education, 31 March 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/31/where-and-how-gender-and-caregiving-intersect-professors-during-covid-19.
Howard, Jacquelyne, and Enilda Romero-Hall, Clare Daniel, Niya Bond and Liv Newman, eds., “Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online,” https://feminists-teach-online.tulane.edu/.
Monk, Janice and Patricia Manning, Catalina Denman, “Working Together: Feminist Perspectives on Collaborative Research and Action,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2 no. 1 (2003), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.6865&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Yidirim, T. Murat and Hande Eslen-Ziya, “The Differential Impact of COVID-19 on the Work Conditions of Women and Men Academics during the Lockdown,” Feminist Frontiers, 19 August 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12529.