Thursday 4 November 2010

New job, old mess

It does not seem I took my blog too seriously so far, as I have not posted a thing! Oh dear! It is just that I got a new job which has taken most of my time and most of my energies. I teach now, teach, teach and teach DH to MA (mostly) and BA students. I'm also coordinating the teaching in my Department. I spent some of my past weeks putting order in the Entropy of the Universe (a.k.a teaching business at CCH), but I'm starting to see the light now: most of the skeletons in the cupboard have been dealt with and I can start to look forward a time in which I can reflect on what I'm doing (that sounds familiar: I have been saying it for four years while at CCH and never achieved that, will CCH be stronger than me once again?).

In the mean time  the CCH "DH Work in Progress" blog has been created and we have started to discuss. Gabby's post on teaching DH made me think a lot on what the hell we are doing when we teach DH, what we hope to achieve by doing it.

It makes me quite nervous seeing that everybody (and at CCH even more so) think in term of research: as we do DH-based research we have to teach how to do research. But how many of our students will actually do research? Ho many will do a PhD, leave it alone a future academic career (these days!! ah!)?Shouldn't we start to be more realist and less snob-nosed when it gets to teaching DH?

With a group of colleagues we are trying to re-think and re-design our MA in DH, and for the moment we are following 2 main directories:

  1. the professional DH-er (i.e. someone that can actually fund a job where what she has learned at Uni is useful!)
  2. the discipline declined DH (is there a DH that is not connected to a Hum discipline? and if so, are MA students able to understand it?)
I will discuss the above ideas in future posts.

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