The New Itinerancy: Digital Pedagogy and the Adjunct Instructor in the Modern Academy

In the Fall of 2015, I was hired as contract academic staff at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Department of English and Film Studies to teach the foundation course EN245 The English Literary Tradition (Beginnings to 1660) for the first time as a course with a heavy DH component. My paper is a case study investigating the challenges of creating and delivering a partially online course in a university environment where the majority of teaching is done by sessional instructors whose labour is systemically marginalized by administration. Sessional instructors (or educational entrepreneurs) have even more limited resources (in terms of time, access to technical support, and access to administration) than tenure track faculty; however, open-access educational tools aren’t serving merely to level the playing field, but reshape it altogether as technical support and access to administrative support cease to matter in the delivery of an educational product. Today, many of the tools that are sufficient for the creation of a successful online or partially online course, whether generalist - iTunesU, Zotero, YouTube - or specialist - Google NGram, the University of Victoria`s Map of Early Modern London, Internet Shakespeare Editions - are freely available to instructors. Such freely available tools problematize the relationship between the instructor and the university insofar as universities tend to use proprietary systems (e.g. Desire2Learn) for everything, including data management, presentation, communication, and gradebook integration with the registrar’s office. Universities, in insisting on using these universal proprietary systems for every aspect of course delivery, exacerbate the disenfranchisement of sessional instructors, as access to the support required to become experts in these tools is limited and taken on at the instructor’s cost. A sessional instructor can create an entire course using freely available online tools, at minimal cost and reaching a tremendously large and diverse audience, yet cannot then market that course to any university that has a similar course as an educational product. At the present moment, the sessional instructor and the course are both subject to the curriculum of an individual university and department, despite the fact that courses with a heavy DH component tend towards portability, interoperability, and modularity that renders such boundaries largely incoherent. Though there are attempts to provide funding for courses that will bridge interuniversity boundaries such as the $4.5 million put forward by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities as a part of the eCampus Ontario initiative, such funding models largely exclude the sessional instructor, who cannot apply for funding as an educational entrepreneur. My paper will tell the story of how I tried to navigate a university system that tried to keep me from using free tools, while at the same time promoting my course as a part of the eCampus Ontario initiative.

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