Welcome to DigDiscourse Collaborative

We are teachers who really dig digital discourse!

Listservs, chat groups, discussion threads, digital annotation, podcasts and short videos: these are all great ways to talk about literature, the arts, primary sources, and all the other things we love to 'discourse about' in our humanities classrooms. If these kinds of "talking" about literature and the arts interest you, we invite you to join us for a summer inquiry into digital discourse.

The DigDiscourse Collaborative is an open online collaboration that invites humanities educators to explore, experience, learn, and create together in the  summer of 2023. Together we hope to have fun learning together and exploring the role of digital discourse in relation to literary texts through interest-driven exploration, making and inquiry.

The DigDiscourse Collaborative is designed by teachers for teachers and welcomes flexible participation. Jump in as much as you can and participate in your own way. Designed and facilitated by teachers from the Denver Area Writing Project and the Philadelphia Writing Project,  who are members of the Digital Discourse Research Project , a research initiative funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania and the National Writing Project.

We get it; it's summer. We want to learn and play too.

The DigDiscourse Collaborative is a free summer experience designed by teachers for how we want to learn in the summer. Follow your interests and jump in and out at any point. 

The summer is organized around 3 two-week "Make Cycles," each exploring a different aspect of using digital discourse to enjoy and explore the literature, art, and materials we love for ourselves and our students. Each cycle invites you to engage in a creative curricular challenges while tinkering with a range of digital tools and and share your results. Facilitators will share examples of student work and classroom inquiries to encourage exploration and reflection, and collectively we will build a repository of great stuff for our teaching.

The DigDiscourse Collaborative runs throughout the summer. We will kick off June 3rd with an orientation session and building our learning community. We begin the first of three two-week Make Cycles on June 26th, the end August 6-7 reflections about our learning and implications for the year ahead. Participate in the collaborative as a whole or engage in sections. Resources and synchronous events will be recorded and shared here in the DigDiscourse collaborative space.

The DigDiscourse Collaborative takes place right here in this forum as well as across social media spaces using the hashtag #digdiscourse. 

Sign up to join the fun!

The DigDiscourse Collaborative is part of the Digital Discourse Research initiative funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania and the National Writing Project. Our work together seeks to better understand how secondary ELA teachers learn to facilitate digital discourse in online discussion with students? Together, we analyze how students and teachers learn to use digital discourse to engage with humanities learning. We aim to develop frameworks and resources for facilitating generative digital discussion that connects us to literature and to each other.

Learn more about the research project here.

Do you have questions or need to contact us? Email us at [email protected]