“I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.“
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
Out of all of the articles that we have read that have attempted to define Digital Humanities, this is the quote that stuck with me the most. Both of my parents are educators, both having been professors for most of their professional careers, and my mom, a Library Sciences professor, has been an advocate for Digital Humanities in both libraries and classrooms, especially those in minority communities. As she’s reaching the end of her teaching career, she has begun to use digital methods to teach more and more, especially during and after COVID. Her work helping schools and communities be better equipped to educate and become a safe space, especially for kids, is what has inspired me to take a Digital Humanities course. I would like to be an educator at some point after college, partially to follow in my parents footsteps, but also to correct some of the mistakes my teachers have made in the past.
In my opinion, the educator is the most important part of a student’s development as a learner but also as an innovator. There have been multiple times where I have seen my fellow classmates, especially in high school, simply get turned off of the material because the way we were approaching it was from a place of inflexible lecturing, where the students rarely ever got to create something that wasn’t a paper. Ways to make learning simply more interesting, and to get the next generation of students to be passionate about learning, is the most important part of digital humanities. It also helps make the student body larger in general, as having access to digital textbooks and forms of learning can help communities that cannot afford them. Creating new works is important, but what is the point of having a vast amount of knowledge is it is not available to the people, especially those who will use it throughout their whole lives.