Using innovative teaching practices to inspire critically engaged reading and writing in a neoliberal university environment

This article presents the authors’ successful experiences with Cirrus, a purpose-built Digital Humanities teaching and learning platform developed at The University of Queensland between 2016 and 2018. Our case studies in teaching the crafts of close reading, critical analysis, and writing show that Cirrus’s annotation tools enable teachers to push students towards close critical engagements with the material they are studying–across textual, image, audio, and video formats–while the exhibition-building software allows for the transformation of the classic essay into a multi-faceted online presentation combining words, images, and other resources. However, we problematise our own involvement in the development of the platform by considering the ways such tools may become implicated in the negative impacts of neoliberalisation on the university sector in Australia and internationally. We are concerned that universities are using digital tools and innovative teaching practices to further reduce their investment in teaching.