How the Rhetorical Choices of Syllabi Can Enact Black DH Pedagogy

The recent publication of books such as Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality by Steele et al. signals a growing concern with teaching DH in thoughtful, student-empowering ways. One easily-overlooked element of pedagogical design is the rhetoric used in syllabi. My research addresses this gap by taking a deep dive into a corpus of DH syllabi: Specifically, I examine their structure and components, as well as sentence-level rhetorical choices to determine how "student-oriented" versus "instructor-oriented" or "content-oriented" these documents are. I unpack how students are discursively constructed in these texts through the nouns and verbs associated with them and discuss the bearing these constructions may have on their perceptions of their own abilities and agency. My corpus contains two sets of syllabi: three from generic "Intro to DH" courses and three from race-focused or Black DH courses. Across all six syllabi, I found examples of the myriad ways that Black DH pedagogies can be enacted (or not) through seemingly simple, even sentence-level decisions. My talk concludes with practical tips and considerations for instructors to implement in their own syllabi. After all, the way we compose our syllabi offers a unique opportunity to begin empowering students before they even set foot in the classroom. Laura Joy Clarke is pursuing a master's degree in English as well as a certificate in the Digital Humanities at Northeastern University. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, rhetorical analysis, and educational policy. In her spare time, she also moonlights as a technical writer, a writing tutor, and a book editor.