Digital Integration Teaching Initiative

The Digital Integration Teaching Initiative (DITI) is committed to supporting an equitable and inclusive learning and working environment for all of the students we reach, the teaching partners with whom we collaborate, the members of our own team, and the wider communities with whom we connect. Inclusive and equitable pedagogy includes centering practices of anti-racism, anti-ableism, and multiple other anti-oppression strategies within our teaching.

As a team of ever-growing learners and educators, we actively expand our knowledge, materials, and actions for effective, inclusive, and equitable teaching. To this end, we are undertaking reflexive research and identifying action steps to redress past and potential harms perpetuated from non-inclusive teaching. Our current actions focus on expanding the digital accessibility of our materials, examining our positionality as educators with different backgrounds and biases, and identifying subject areas where we need to grow in our understanding and expertise. 

We approach all of our collaborations with respect for the diversity of perspectives, experiences, and identities of both our own team and those with whom we partner—and with the expectation that all of our collaborators will do the same. Our teaching team takes several steps to ensure respectful collaborations; for example, carefully choosing inclusive teaching examples, using intentional language to welcome different levels of learners, emphasizing a growth mindset while teaching, and training our Fellows to be aware of and to de-escalate microaggressions when teaching. 

Our teaching materials aim to encompass a wide variety of digital tools used across humanities and social science disciplines. We promote free-to-use tools and tools free to Northeastern University students, and we provide open-access, asynchronous learning materials on our website. We prioritize digital tools that are accessible to learners of all abilities, and provide students with best practices to improve the accessibility of their own digital publications. We source examples and resources from inclusive digital humanities and computational social science projects, intentionally thinking about who is represented in our materials.

Our actions to redress potential harms, realize respectful collaborations, and advance inclusive teaching practices are by no means exhaustive, and we are using this living document to uncover additional opportunities for growth.

Effective collaborations

At the DITI, we have found that the most fruitful and productive collaborations occur when:

• NULab/DITI Research Fellows and faculty partners collaborate as equals, with respect for mutual expertise on all sides.
• We cultivate spaces where all involved are comfortable expressing the places where they are still learning, where opportunities for growth are valued, and where we work actively against “imposter syndrome.”
• We engage in ongoing self-reflection about our roles as teachers and models for inclusive teaching practices, considering the ways that systematic oppressions and internalized biases may not be visible to us without active listening, recurring and structured self-evaluation, and research.
• In all of our interactions—with faculty partners, with students, and with each other—we expect that collaborators will uphold mutual respect at all times and we cultivate the expectation that any instances of non-inclusive behavior should be challenged. 

We welcome feedback or suggestions on any other ways that the NULab/DITI team can work to support inclusive, respectful, and generative collaborations. 

Land acknowledgement 

• This statement was written in homes and buildings situated on stolen lands of the Massachusetts, Wampanoag, and Pawtucket peoples. 
• We recognize statements acknowledging occupied Indigenous lands are hollow without action and resources to support the LandBack movement and Indigenous issues. We encourage readers to use the following resources to learn more about and support Indigenous peoples in their area and beyond. 
• Here are some links to resources we’ve found helpful:
  • Find out more about the history of Indigenous peoples and occupied land: Native Land
  • Learn more about and support the LandBack Movement
  • Support the Native American Rights Fund
  • Beyond Land Acknowledgements guide

We appreciate any resources and suggestions to help us further support Indigenous sovereignty and land return.

Position statement

The NULab/DITI team acknowledges the impact of our own positionality on the work that we do and the ways we have framed this statement. We are especially attentive to the ways that our work at a private and predominantly white institution has shaped our experiences and our understandings of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We also acknowledge that since DITI is a part of Northeastern University, there are past and potential harms and systemic inequalities stemming from the university’s relationships with its neighboring communities and instances of non-inclusive pedagogy.

The NULab/DITI team comes from different disciplinary backgrounds, learning backgrounds, and experiences with both teaching and technology. Within this diversity, however, we are attentive to the ways in which our epistemological frameworks are predominantly Western and Eurocentric. We align our work with current efforts in both digital humanities and computational social science to disrupt the systematic inequalities that both disciplines have perpetuated. 

Above all, we want to emphasize that our work is ongoing and to express our commitment to our own continued education and growth—the processes of drafting this statement have brought out several key areas where the DITI needs to improve our own teaching, and led us to begin more systematic efforts for ensuring that our teaching practices are not excluding or harming the students in classes we visit. This statement will be a key part of our ongoing work; we will revisit it regularly, include it in our training, and treat it as a living document that drives our efforts to ensure that our teaching collaborations are inclusive and accessible. 

We hope that these ongoing improvements will be part of a dialogue, and we would be grateful for any feedback or suggestions—our Contact page has more information on reaching out to us. 

Our teaching methods

The NULab/DITI team is attentive to the very specific ways that accessibility and inclusivity manifest in digital and computational learning spaces. In all of our partnerships, we maintain a keen awareness that students from all backgrounds may feel alienated or oppressed by technical domains, that students’ past experiences with technologies may have reinforced rather than challenged systematic inequalities, and that there are very visible ways in which technology in the classroom has the potential to perpetuate experiences of exclusion. We understand that some students come from backgrounds where technology operates as a force for oppression, and we recognize that many digital tools are developed with built-in biases and assumptions. 

To help ensure that our own teaching is accessible and inclusive, we adopt the following practices:  

• Recognizing that not all students learn in the same ways, we offer multiple opportunities to understand core concepts and to succeed at accomplishing class goals. In developing workshops, we provide extensive learning scaffolds: handouts that define key terms and provide outlines for technical processes; slides with framing discussions, examples, and annotated screenshots; and in-person instruction that includes discussion of examples, a demonstration of any tools or methods, hands-on opportunities for experimentation, and discussion of best practices. We maintain a repository of slides, handouts, sample data, and code notebooks from all the DITI’s class visits, so that students can return to these at any time. 
• In the classroom, we devote care and attention to ensuring that students are able to participate equitably in our classes, and we communicate with faculty partners on structuring any hands-on activities to allow for active participation regardless of what devices students may have personal access to. In general, we work to include multiple forms of in-class activities (such as hands-on activities, discussions, demonstrations, small group discussions, and pair-and-share activities) as well as multiple forms of resources for asynchronous learning and reinforcement (such as samples and demonstrations, handouts, slides, and code notebooks) to provide as many avenues as possible for students to learn in the ways that best suit their needs. 
• We work to create inclusive teaching environments for students from many backgrounds by establishing classroom norms in which students are comfortable expressing novice-hood and asking questions. For example, we often begin by saying or writing out “it’s okay not to know” and discussing this as a key principle for the class session, we encourage our team to gain comfort with expressing those areas in which they are still building their own expertise, and we review our slides and teaching materials to avoid any language that suggests the tools we are teaching should be obvious or easy (we recognize the desire to make new materials seem approachable but we also know that this kind of language is alienating for those who do not find the material easy).
• As a group, we reflect each week on all class visits, discussing what went well and identifying any areas where individual visits have revealed opportunities for us to improve our practices, examples, or instruction. 
• We choose examples and we create samples with care and attention to diversity, and to reflecting the many communities to which students and Northeastern University members belong. We also are attentive to opportunities to point learners toward existing research on equity and diversity in digital humanities and computational social science.  
• We work to model good practices for accessibility and inclusivity in our own teaching and in the resources we share. For example, we include resources and instruction on web accessibility in all of our modules that involve digital publication and we test our own publications and materials for accessibility, guided by resources such as those published by the Northeastern University Library’s Accessibility Hub. We discuss with students the ethical concerns and implications of using digital tools for humanities and social science research, and we carefully select examples to showcase how such tools can be applied for inclusive and ethical research and community engagement. In addition, we work to guide students toward assistive technology resources, and we share learning materials that are aimed to improve the accessibility of students’ digital work and maintain student data privacy.
• We provide guidance on ways that faculty can make sure their assignments with digital and computational methods are inclusive for all kinds of learners, for example by setting clear expectations; by building in opportunities for feedback and revision; by accompanying technical projects with reflections in which students can express their individual experiences, any technical difficulties they faced, and their larger aspirations for their work; and by designing assignments that value thoughtful and critical use of tools, rather than raw technical proficiency. 
• We strongly prioritize fostering learning opportunities not just for students in the classes we visit but also for the NULab/DITI graduate student team. We have developed extensive resources (including slide sets, templates, teaching demos, and a training curriculum) to help all Fellows, regardless of their previous experience with either technical subjects or classroom teaching, apply the principles above in the workshops they design and teach. 

We welcome feedback to improve our approaches for diverse, inclusive, and equitable collaborations with students and faculty.

Links and resources

The NULab/DITI team wishes to extend our sincere thanks to the many individuals who contributed their labor and expertise to producing these resources. We were grateful to learn from these documents as we prepared this statement and we share these resources below in hopes that others will find them as useful as we did. 

• American Association of Colleges and Universities’ resources on Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Beyond Land Acknowledgements guide
• Decolonizing Digital Humanities (Risam, 2018)
• Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research guide on Diversity and Inclusion
• GW University Elliot School’s Statement on Inclusive Teaching
• Northeastern University Libraries guide on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 
• Northeastern University Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
• Principles of Anti-Oppressive Community Engagement for University Educators and Researchers
• Toward Decolonising Computational Sciences (Birhane and Guest, 2020)

We welcome suggestions for additional resources and literature, especially from historically-marginalized voices, to improve our pedagogical practices. 

Document authorship

This statement was drafted by the 2023–2024 NULab/DITI leadership team, with input from the NULab/DITI Research Fellows, and it will be reviewed and updated each year. DITI Assistant Director Dipa Desai collaborated with NULab Associate Director Sarah Connell to review existing resources and to outline and draft the contents of this statement—the outline and draft were shared with NULab Coordinator Emily Sullivan, DITI Co-Director Lawrence Evalyn, and NULab Assistant Director Sean Rogers over several rounds of feedback. The full NULab/DITI team, including Research Fellows Kasya O’Connor Grant, Hunter Moskowitz, Claire Lavarreda, and Sara Morrell also reviewed and provided input on the draft.