As an interdisciplinary educator with expertise in digital humanities and rhetorical historiography, I draw on these fields to engage students in local histories through collaborative multimodal projects. I foster inclusive, dynamic classrooms where students contribute diverse experiences and actively interpret, test, and critique ideas. To support an inclusive classroom, I emphasize structure, process, and transparency—core principles of inclusive teaching (Hogan and Sathy, 2022), while making room for experimentation, failure, and play. I extend this approach to graduate mentorship as Director of the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab and the Critical Game Studies (CGS) Program and in my role as dissertation advisor. Below I highlight this my approach to teaching data literacy, digital humanities methods, and critical game studies.
Data Literacies
When teaching data literacy, I focus on the rhetoric of data: what is chosen to constitute to data, what is left out, how it is represented and organized in data sets, how it is analyzed through selected computational programs, and how results are presented and visualized. Because students in my classes come from varied disciplinary backgrounds (about half from data science and half from humanities), I ground our analysis of data in projects that document local histories so students can see the impact of data on their communities. For example,
This course combines rhetorical theory and digital humanities to examine how data influences contemporary life. Students investigate key concepts in data studies and rhetorical theory, then apply them in a hands-on project with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center, documenting local African American history in Chapel Hill. Students contribute to From the Rock Wall by creating Wikipedia and Wikidata entries for historical sites, improving visibility and analyzing Wikipedia’s power structures through data analytics. This course is ideal for students in the Writing, Editing and Digital Publishing (WEDP) concentration, and those interested in data science, digital media, or the data science minor.
Digital Humanities Methods
When teaching DH methods, I emphasize experimentation and cultivate a collaborative, supportive environment that encourages students—many of whom are new to computational approaches—to take risks, ask questions, and view failure as a vital part of the learning process.
ENGL 482: Rhetoric and Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities represent a new, interdisciplinary field that brings new digital modalities and methods to the study of traditional objects of analysis in the humanities, such as texts, artifacts, and archival material. The upper level undergraduate class explores DH methods with attention to the rhetoric of archives – how the content, organization, access to archives make arguments about the past. Students partner with UNC’s Southern Historical Collection to analyze “life histories” from the Federal Writers’ Project, documenting the lives of everyday people during the Great Depression. Through this hands-on project, students turn archival materials into data, create metadata, and use visualization and text mining to explore the collection in new ways. The course builds skills in project management, metadata construction, and data visualization. It is designated as a CURE (course-based undergraduate research experience) and emphasizes transferable, real-world skills.
ENGL 709: Digital Humanities Methods
This graduate course surveys digital humanities history, theories, tools, and methods with a focus on humanities data. While humanists have often distanced their work from notions of data, instead seeing their research as involving texts, objects, performance, and archives, these materials are increasingly being conceived as humanities data. Conceiving of this material as data opens new methodologies, forms of scholarship, and collaborative possibilities, though each is not without problematic aspects that demand attention. Students explore the benefits and challenges of this shift through hands-on work in metadata, text analysis, data visualization, mapping, and game studies. Each area combines theory with practice to support the development of a digital humanities seminar paper. This class is designed for graduate students who are tech-curious but not yet experienced with coding or working with data.
Critical Game Studies
Studying games fosters multimodal literacies and compositional practices including critical awareness of their persuasive power to combine embodied, immersive, and procedural rhetorics. Central to my approach to teaching with games is a collaborative close play pedagogy. Collaborative close play pedagogy attends to the tension presented by playing games in the classroom – games invite immersion, which often prevents the critical distance needed for critique. To balance this tension, the analytical workload is distributed across student groups, who rotate between distinct roles as players, researchers, advisors, and notetakers, aided by worksheet that asks students to attend to key elements in their gameplay including narrative, mise en scène, mechanics, and impact of/on culture and society. This approach enacted most easily in the Greenlaw Gameroom, a one-of-a-kind interactive classroom I designed and developed, that allows for simultaneous game play of an entire class.
ENGL 113: Introduction to Critical Game Studies
This large lecture course with recitation sections introduces students to important theories and topics in the evolving, interdisciplinary field of game studies by centering issues of identity and representation. Students examine how race, gender, and sexuality intersect and inform conceptions of gamer culture, play, rules and mechanics, emotions and empathy, community formation, and labor practices. The course includes readings from contemporary game studies scholarship and gameplay of a diverse range of titles—from indie to AAA—such as The Walking Dead, The Sims, Gone Home, and Octodad. Gameplay primarily takes place during recitations in the Greenlaw Gameroom, so no prior gaming experience or personal equipment is necessary.
ENGL 118: Storytelling and Game Development
This course explores video games as narrative texts through gameplay and design. Students study key concepts—such as narrative, ludology, agency, and repetition—by reading game studies texts, playing selected games, and participating in workshops. In the second half, students work in groups to design an original interactive narrative game using the open-source software Twine. No prior experience with games is required.
Courtney Rivard 