Copyright

Brandon Walsh

Published On

2026-09-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

38 pages

THEMA

  • JNM
  • JBCT1
  • JNF
  • JP

BISAC

  • EDU015000
  • EDU001030
  • EDU040000
  • SOC052000
  • LAN009000

Keywords

  • Digital Humanities
  • Digital Pedagogy
  • Education
  • Social Justice

4. Future-oriented

Chapter of: Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change

Universities claim to prepare their communities for the future, but they set strict parameters around the voices allowed to shape visions of tomorrow. The final chapter of this book argues that no one has the right to define the future for a teaching and learning community besides that group itself. Imaginative work can feel abstract, however, and this chapter aims to offer concrete ways in which teaching administrators can understand and deploy the stakes of future-oriented work in the classroom. First, I discuss professional development activities that help students connect their own imagined futures to their present lives. Second, I examine Stanford 2025 as a case study both in the radical possibility for students to image the future of higher education as well as an illustration of how more work is to be done to help students see how they might shape alternative visions not influenced by technocratic power and influence. Throughout, I argue we can best shape our educational practices around the future by centering student voices and helping them to think critically about the limits of their own imagination.

Contributors

Brandon Walsh

(author)
Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at University of Virginia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2785-3519
https://walshbr.com/

Brandon Walsh is Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, a digital humanities and experimental research center in the University of Virginia libraries. He has published numerous pieces that build toward the ideas in this book concerning how digital humanities pedagogy can reflect and enact infrastructural change in higher education. With over two decades teaching experience in a variety of environments, he currently oversees the fellowship programs in the Scholars’ Lab. In this context, he teaches and works directly with dozens of students each year on a range of professional development, design, and digital humanities activities. His chapter in Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities entitled “The Futures of Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Times of Crisis” argues for the urgent need for educators to direct their work towards the social and political crises of the present. In addition, Walsh values working in public in order to spark conversation and share process-oriented work as evidenced by his published pieces and editorial work with The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Programming Historian, and the #DLFteach Digital Library Pedagogy Cookbook. He blogs regularly at walshbr.com.