The project team behind ENTICING has been working with secondary school principals and teachers in Greece, Cyprus, Ireland and North Macedonia to plan and implement the first pilot training sessions of the Digital Humanities Crowdsourcing course curriculum.
It represents the first major opportunity for the project to share this new comprehensive curriculum with teachers in the partner countries in order to enhance their skills and competencies in the field of digital humanities. By digital humanities, we mean the interdisciplinary field that combines traditional humanities subjects such as literature, history, and philosophy with digital technologies. The aim of the ENTICING curriculum is to support the digital literacy skills and digital pedagogy of secondary school teachers to use digital tools and methods to analyze, interpret, and communicate humanities-related data and research to their students. However, the real innovation of the curriculum lies in the use of crowdsourcing as an approach to digital humanities teaching and learning.
When we talk about crowdsourcing in the ENTICING project we are referring to the practice of obtaining ideas, content, and input from a wide range of people via digital methods. The goal of crowdsourcing is to leverage the collective intelligence, skills, and resources of the “crowd” to accomplish a task or solve a problem. Unpacking this approach to digital humanities teaching is at the heart of the ENTICING piloting sessions and as there is no such teaching endeavor for secondary school teachers in all partner countries, the proposed training represents a significant innovation.
To allow sufficient time to explore the project topics and the curriculum itself, the pilot training sessions comprise up to 15 hours of face-to-face learning addressing the CPD needs and interests of teachers. In Greece and Cyprus training was successfully delivered face-to-face and online with 63 teachers in April. Local pilots in Ireland and North Macedonia will occur this month before the end of the school year. With an original target of 80 teachers across all four countries; the overwhelming response to date from teachers bodes well for the final training sessions in May.
The ENTICING Digital Humanities curriculum has a range of modules related to humanities including innovative content and a variety of crowdsourcing methods, which can be useful for all members of the school community, addressing issues such as interdisciplinarity and digital literacy. Overall, the curriculum comprises 100 hours of learning for teachers broken down across 10 modules with a mix of masterclasses, activities for experimentation, multimedia resources, and a robust repository of relevant case studies and eLaboratory Digital Humanities Tools applications.
To find out more about the ENTICING Project and to access the Digital Humanities Crowdsourcing course curriculum, please visit the project website: https://www.enticing-project.eu/
The organisations working together on the ENTICING project are the University of the Peloponnese (Greece), KMOP Policy Centre (Belgium), Institouto Ekpedeftikis Politikis (Institut of Educational Policy, Greece), KMOP Skopje (Republic of North Macedonia), CARDET (Cyprus) and Spectrum Research Centre (Ireland).