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HomeBiz Tech2 Years to Get a Humanities Essay Published? Not Anymore

2 Years to Get a Humanities Essay Published? Not Anymore

536393 autodidact back to school with the digital pedagogy lab

Last week, a colleague received the printer’s proofs for an article that she submitted two years ago. You read that correctly. In the time that it takes to earn a master’s degree, she managed to navigate the labyrinth of academic peer review in order to publish one essay. It’s a success story, if you can maintain your sense of humor.


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OpinionsJournal publishing in the humanities is slow, even by academic standards. Writers often wait several months to hear that an essay has been rejected. In the instance of a “revise and resubmit,” the rosier scenario, the writer must intuit what two or three anonymous readers meant with (oftentimes conflicting) end comments and, after they resubmit the article, they’ll wait some more.


As a platonic ideal, peer review produces rigorous, thoroughly vetted research that can change the shape of fields. In reality, most journal articles aren’t even cited, and the process is stressful and onerous, especially for junior scholars for whom peer-reviewed publications serve as the lingua franca.


It doesn’t have to be this way. In the sciences, time from acceptance to publication is less than a month and the entire publication process hovers around 100 days, according to the journal Nature. And many scientists think even that is too long. The sciences have rapidly embraced something called open peer review, which Scientific American succinctly defines as “a process in which the names of the authors and reviewers are known to one another.”

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While open peer review isn’t a silver bullet, there’s no reason that humanists can’t use it to make journal publishing faster, friendlier, less fussy.


The Digital Pedagogy Lab (DPL) offers one such alternative. Its 6-year-old online journal, Hybrid Pedagogy, boasts stratospheric acceptance rates, a collaborative open-peer-review process, and readership unfathomable at a traditional journal. But make no mistake, DPL doesn’t just challenge writing and editorial conventions; it asks readers to reevaluate what an academic journal should do. Nested within a collection of other outreach efforts—online courses, podcasts, a peripatetic summer institute—DPL strives to transform the academic journal from a repository of knowledge to a community of inquiry.


Back to School


When I spoke with Jesse Stommel, co-founder and executive director of the project, he said that the editors always envisioned Hybrid Pedagogy less as a journal than a school.


“I don’t love the idea of journal articles as static receptacles of content that sit on a page and are delivered to an audience,” Stommel explained. “Instead what we’re always trying to do is create conversations. The articles become a mechanism for creating conversations and building relationships.”


In the first several years, those conversations occurred through the journal. (It’s no coincidence that the project is registered as a nonprofit under the name Hybrid Pedagogy Inc.) However, as the leadership began performing public outreach, especially through the DPL’s summer institutes, the balance shifted.


“When we did the first DPL institute in 2015, it was an offshoot of the journal,” explained current editor Chris Friend. “At this point, however, we’ve realized the on-ground institute is the heart and soul of what we want to be doing with critical digital pedagogy, and the journal becomes the offshoot of DPL.”


Today, critical digital pedagogyis all over the site—to a greater degree than the journal’s original namesake. I asked Friend, an assistant professor of English at Saint Leo University, to parse the two terms. Hybrid pedagogy holds that because we learn in both digital and analog environments, we need a teaching practice (pedagogy is the fancy term) that works at the intersection of the virtual and the real. Critical digital pedagogy, meanwhile, supplies the theory of that practice: it puts critical pedagogy—reference, for example, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—into conversation with the internet.


“Our work is all about praxis, and you can’t have philosophy and practice too far removed from one another,” explained Stommel. “We’ve brought them under the same domain so when you’re reading a Hybrid Pedagogy article you’re seeing news about the next event, and when you’re reading about an event, you’re seeing our latest articles. There’s a constant sense of connection: these are the ideas that bring these events to life.”


The journal Hybrid Pedagogy is central to both the mission and practice of the DPL.


Where Conversations Begin


The journal uses an open peer-review process that does more than identify the writer and reviewers. At Hybrid Pedagogy, the editor chooses the reviewers they think will best serve revision, after which the writer and reviewers engage directly.


Their meeting space is the text, which they discuss in real time using Google Docs’s threaded marginal comments. When the piece runs, the author, reviewers, and photographer are credited in the byline, elevating the otherwise anonymous work of scholarly production and allowing the reader to identify everyone involved in the process.


The result is a peer review that’s faster and friendlier than that of traditional academic journals. Critics have charged Hybrid Pedagogy with being overly cozy: the acceptance rate of about 70 percent is far more generous than other journals, and the boundaries between author and reviewer have been historically porous (less so now that the journal relies upon thematic calls for papers).


I share some of those concerns, if only because I believe journals need those boundaries to ensure their own sustainability. But I also believe that those critiques miss the point: Hybrid Pedagogy isn’t a traditional academic journal. Essays look more like extended blog posts than journal articles: they’re short (typically about the length of this column), personal, and political.


“We’re constantly telling writers, no, really, say what you mean here, don’t hedge,” explained Friend.


The current call for papers invites papers that politicize pedagogy. Recent publications have critiqued market-driven education and present critical digital literacy as a corrective to misinformation.


Stephen Brookfield, author of Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher and the John Ireland Endowed Chair at the University of St. Thomas, welcomed the journal’s partisanship. “I like that it’s completely upfront about stating that this it’s a partisan site designed to help teachers work with students to uncover ideological manipulation,” he said.


“Hybrid pedagogy does an excellent job asserting the value of critical digital pedagogy and recognizing the fact that neither education nor technology may be as neutral as proponents claim it to be,” added Liz Losh, associate professor at the College of William & Mary and author of The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University.


The journal’s partisanship poses challenges for its own academic credentialing. While Hybrid Pedagogy is registered with the Library of Congress as a peer-reviewed journal—a quick search on Google Scholar returns dozens of articles—many institutions are reluctant to accept the publications toward tenure review. Resistance often has as much to do with the journal’s digital form as its partisanship. The project’s co-founder, Jesse Stommel, wrote that he left the University of Wisconsin-Madison after he was advised to “focus on traditionally peer-reviewed publications for academic audiences” instead of the public-facing digital scholarship. Today, he serves as executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington.


What the journal loses in academic cred it gains in public visibility. Friend said that the site averages 10,000 to 15,000 readers per month, not an insignificant number for a journal about critical digital pedagogy.


Cheryl Ball, editor of the web-text journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and an associate professor at West Virginia University, described the journal’s niche:


“I go to Hybrid Pedagogy when I want to publish something that will have a much wider reach than it will in any of the other online open-access journals, when I have something to say that that’s researched, but when the lit review isn’t the point.”


Where Conversations Continue


The Digital Pedagogy Lab extends the reach of that journal through a series of outreach efforts. Early in the project, the leaders experimented with massive open online courses (MOOCs), which they initially delivered through Instructure Canvas, and later through Twitter. Unlike many MOOCS, which pursue scale for the sake of scale, DPL’s open course was meta-critical.


“My thought was that if we were going to do a MOOC, it had to be a MOOC about MOOCs. Hence the name, MOOC MOOC,” explained Sean Michael Morris, DPL director and instructional designer at Middlebury College. “The whole point was to inspect what a MOOC is. What is this thing that people are lauding as the next evolution of education? What does it feel like to be in one?”


In addition to serving as a pedagogical exercise, MOOC-making also attracted new talent into the DPL orbit. Friend said that he got involved through MOOC MOOC, while many others got involved through the #digped chats on Twitter.


Meanwhile, Friend uses the podcast to extend the conversations that begin in the journal, Hybrid Pedagogy. Now in its twelfth episode, the podcast is more narrative and conversational than pieces than run in the journal. “We realized that we could use podcasts to create a conversation around articles,” explained Friend.


“Too often academics write articles, publish them, and move on to do other work, rather than thinking about what’s the story, what’s the narrative, what’s the breadcrumb trail between this article and the next one,” observed Stommel. “These podcasts become part of that breadcrumb trail.”


Perhaps the most important conversation space is the in-person, on-ground Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute. Offered in locations as differing as Cairo and Prince Edward Island, these five-day institutes offer an opportunity for participants to network, discuss teaching methods, and experiment with new tools and methods. If the journal is the school of critical digital pedagogy, then the institute is summer camp. But that’s not to suggest it’s all fun and games.


“A lot of people in academia aren’t used to talking about pedagogy, and they’re not used to thinking about their own teaching in a critical way,” explained Morris, the institute’s current director. “So much of teaching is autonomous, which is very different than a community like this, where everyone is laying it all out on the table.”


Despite those challenges, the institute continues to grow. The first, offered in 2015, attracted 75 participants. This summer, organizers expect more than a hundred to attend an institute at the University of Mary Washington, plus another 75 at a second institute that will be offered in Vancouver (to accommodate those affected by the U.S. immigration ban).


Towards Sustainability


To date, the institute has been funded through registration fees and partnerships with universities. (DPL typically receives complementary meeting space and discounted catering.) In some instances, institute leaders forego honoraria in order to provide scholarships for participants. But that’s just the institute. When you consider all of the labor it takes to edit articles, produce podcasts, and maintain a social media ecosystem, you realize that the institute cannot subsidize the rest of the DPL. Rather, the directors do this work alongside their other academic responsibilities, which, unfortunately, isn’t uncommon at universities.


The DPL differs from many other academic startups in the sense that it isn’t institutionally affiliated. At first that choice was strategic, but today that lack of affiliation presents a challenge to the expansion of the institute.


“Educational technologies – even free and open source resources – require labor, the time of skilled people, and programming staff,” observed Losh. “The University of Mary Washington – which was a leader with Domain of One’s Own – has continued to punch above their weight by hosting many of the Digital Pedagogy Lab events, but they might not have the resources needed to continue to expand internationally.”


The lab’s leadership understands that challenge. “We chose not to be institutionally affiliated for a reason, so only a very special institution can have a relationship with the Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy,” explained Stommel. “I want the Digital Pedagogy Lab to get out of the house and go to college.”

(via PCMag)

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