Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Michelle Levy, Department of English

Project team: Kate Moffat, research assistant

Timeframe: November 2019 to July 2021

Funding: $4,964

Courses addressed: 

• ENGL 376 - Special Studies
• ENGL 377 - Field School I 

Final report: View Michelle Levy's final report (PDF) >>

Description: The larger question this project seeks to address is how different strategies can be used to enhance student awareness and understanding of the physical and material properties of the literary works they are reading, as well as to place those works within a larger historical and disciplinary context. Digital resources, because they don’t have the physical limitations of print, and because they can use computational means to store and query complex and large datasets, can help to provide access to this larger context. What is planned are a series of hands-on activities with archival materials (specifically, with rare books held in SFU’s Special Collections) and with digital resources that aim to present information about the wide range of books that circulated, and the physical form these books took.

Questions addressed:

• Does a screen-cast about a digital humanities resource help students learn about the functionality of the site, the data it contains, and how to engage with it productively?
• How does a hands-on bibliographical workshop, designed to teach students to identify and analyze bibliographical features of rare books, allow them to connect to digital humanities resources and tools?
• Is student engagement with bibliographical tools and resources enhanced through hands-on activities with material books?

Knowledge sharing: Opportunities for this kind of informal sharing were limited due to covid. I will continue to experiment with forms of digital pedagogy and these will be the subject of future courses and scholarship.

Keywords: Book history; experiential learning; remote teaching; Romanticism; using digital resources; asynchronous learning