Inside Digital Dinah Craik: Feminist Pedagogy, Cognitive Apprenticeship, and the TEI

Abstract

In this essay, we describe our collaborative work as students and teachers on a TEI edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s correspondence. Inside Digital Dinah Craik, our pedagogy is collaborative and inclusive, attentive to the material conditions of both the text and our labor, and is reproducible. We follow a cognitive apprenticeship model of education that emphasizes a community of practice where learners become increasingly proficient until, ideally, they are no longer apprentices but genuine collaborators. In this paper, we demonstrate how the five stages of apprenticeship learning—modeling, approximating, fading, self-directed learning, and generalizing (Hansman 2001, 47)—help us to foster what scholars such as Anne Balsamo, Elizabeth Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont, Laura Wexler, and Hong-An Wu call the “foundational ethical principles” (Balsamo 2011, 162–3) and “feminist virtues” (Losh et al. para. 26) of collaboration—confidence, humility, flexibility, integrity, and intellectual generosity.

Keywords

• correspondence
• feminism
• pedagogy
• digital humanities
• student teaching
• cognitive apprenticeship