DHSS Assignment Guides
In this section, find nine different Assignment Guides that can support the integration of DHSS assignments into your pedagogical repertoire.
Mark Sample. (2009). “What’s Wrong With Writing Essays.” SampleReality, paras. 6 & 7.
The following Assignment Guides were envisioned to replace traditional writing assignments such as essays. While a DHSS assignment may not seem to do the same work as an essay, Digital Humanitist Mark Sample cautions that “the student essay has come to stand in for all the research, dialogue, revision, and work that professional scholars engage in,” and that this does not encapsulate the full breadth and depth of the work academics can, have, and should be doing. Sample reminds us that “the word text, derives from the Latin textus, meaning that which is woven, strands of different material intertwined together.” In his teaching practice, he states that he is “moving away from asking students to write toward asking them to weave. To build, to fabricate, to design” (Sample, 2009, paras. 6 & 7). This vision for a complex and integrated piece of work is similar to what Ng (2015) has called a “reflexive remix” (p. 221) and what Dr. Amanda Starling Gould called a “(re)mediated element” in a “transmedia essay”.
DHSS assignments are thus not like essays. They can do more. DHSS assignments can develop a range of innovations and explorations with course content that linear essays cannot achieve.
Digital tools and technologies invite a woven remix of students’ ideas in ways that can demonstrate critical and creative learning with materials in ways that experientially activate your students’ learning of content.
See the nine different Assignment Guides below as a way to begin this work.
These Assignment Guides were written in a narrative rather than didactic style in order for you to think about how to blend your pedagogy with the purpose and goal(s) of DHSS. Each Guide is based on work created by our Research Assistants and provides suggestions for how to interpret this work as an assignment for your class.
