How do we share and sustain the courses and materials we build? This week explores open-access publishing, curricular sustainability, and the rapidly evolving AI landscape. As you finalize your teaching statement, consider how your course materials might be shared via GitHub or Humanities Commons as part of the NEH project’s open-access mission.

NEH Workshop 6: Agentic Futures, Curricular Sustainability (July 22, 10 AM - noon, CHDR) — The final workshop looks ahead at agentic AI tools and considers how to build courses that can adapt as the technology changes. Students are encouraged to attend and reflect on how their materials might contribute to a shared digital humanities teaching community.

No discussion post this week. Focus on completing your Teaching Statement.

Assignments

• Teaching Statement (150 points) — A 1-2 page teaching philosophy for job applications reflecting your approach to AI and the humanities. Due July 26.

Teaching Statement Guidelines

As we’ve progressed through this semester, you’ve been exposed to a number of different scholars and their approaches to teaching. Keeping in mind both those frameworks and the sample teaching statements we reviewed, develop your own 1-2 page teaching statement for potential use in future job applications. If you have experience in the classroom, please use specific examples from your own courses to anchor the statement; if you are not currently an educator, think about how you would like to approach the classroom in the future.

Your statement should address:

• Your teaching philosophy, anchored in specifics. A strong statement is a narrative, not a list of techniques. What do you believe about how students learn, and what does that look like in practice? Ground your claims in concrete examples: an assignment that worked (or didn’t), a moment of student engagement, or the signature assignment and syllabus you developed this semester. If you haven’t yet taught, draw on your designed course materials as evidence of how you plan to teach.
• Digital humanities frameworks and positioning. Consider how your approaches align with the methods we’ve reviewed throughout the semester, and think about how you can best fit that expertise into the context of your discipline. How do you articulate the value of interdisciplinary, digitally-inflected teaching to a hiring committee that may sit squarely within a traditional department? Recall our week ten readings on the value of digital humanities credentials as you position yourself.
• Your approach to AI. Hiring committees increasingly want to know how candidates handle generative AI in the classroom, and vague reassurance won’t distinguish you. Be specific: How has your firsthand experimentation this semester shaped your policies and assignment design? Where do you invite AI into student work, where do you draw boundaries, and why? Your stance should feel considered and grounded in pedagogy rather than reactive.
• Attention to audience and polish. This is a professional document: 1-2 pages, clearly written, and free of jargon that wouldn’t translate across a search committee. Revisit the sample statements and the Inside Higher Ed guidance from week ten, and write for a reader who will spend two minutes deciding whether to keep reading.

Your teaching statement will be evaluated on:

• A clear, personal teaching philosophy grounded in concrete examples (50 points)
• Meaningful engagement with digital humanities frameworks and positioning within your discipline (40 points)
• A specific, pedagogically grounded approach to AI (40 points)
• Professional polish and audience awareness appropriate for a job application dossier (20 points)

Remember that this statement will join your syllabus, signature assignment, and AI exercise in your final portfolio — and, in the spirit of this week’s focus on sharing and sustaining, consider whether your statement (like your course materials) might eventually live publicly on a professional site or Humanities Commons profile.

Readings

• Cohen, Dan. “The Reboot of Digital Humanities Now.” Humane Ingenuity.
• Cohen, Dan. “Books, AI, and the Public Good.” Humane Ingenuity.
• Willison, Simon. “2025: The Year in LLMs.” simonwillison.net. December 31, 2025.