Over the past decade, digital humanities (DH) scholarship has substantially deepened its engagement with questions of pedagogy, training, and student labor. Foundational interventions by Brier and Burdick challenged the field’s early emphasis on tools and outputs by foregrounding teaching, learning, collaboration, and method as central to DH practice. Subsequent work has extended these conversations, articulating frameworks for DH pedagogy as liberal education (Locke 2017), examining internships and engaged scholarship as sites of skill development (Hswe et al. 2017), sustained undergraduate collaboration as place-based pedagogy (Faull / Jakacki 2015), and interrogating the role of student labor and training within DH ecosystems (Anderson et al. 2016). Yet despite this growing body of work, the theorization of DH pedagogy and labor remains overwhelmingly curricular in orientation, centered on courses, assignments, and degree programs. Co-curricular and extracurricular learning—and the pedagogical structures that support it—where a significant portion of DH skill formation and student labor now occurs, remain comparatively underexamined.

This paper argues that co-curricular DH programs constitute a critical, parallel site of DH pedagogy and labor, one that complements but is not reducible to course-based models. Drawing on Paul Fyfe’s (2018) work on critical making and transfer-oriented DH pedagogy, as well as broader conversations around making as a mode of inquiry (Sayers 2017), we situate co-curricular practice within the same epistemic space as course-based DH teaching while emphasizing its distinct affordances. Like critical making in the classroom, co-curricular DH foregrounds iterative practice, reflection, and metacognition as conditions for learning that travels beyond a single context. However, co-curricular work relocates these processes into labor-bearing, time-bounded, and institutionally embedded environments, where learning is mediated not by assessment but by responsibility, collaboration, and use. While curricular approaches to DH provide students with a structured approach to accessing tools and assessing knowledge, co-curricular programs offer engagement that allows for less structured pathways and emphasizes self-directed learning.

This analysis draws on several years of co-curricular programming at Colgate University’s Digital Learning and Media Center (DLMC). To make this argument concrete, the paper analyzes three co-curricular program types—Digital Design Daze, Jam Sessions, and Tools for Tasks—as a layered ecosystem of DH engagement, skill formation, and practice. Each program supports a distinct mode of participation while collectively scaffolding pathways into more sustained DH labor. Design Daze serves as an exploratory entry point, combining low barriers to participation with tangible skill outcomes through short, intensive engagements. Participants encounter DH-adjacent practices through hands-on making, gaining initial exposure that emphasizes experimentation while producing concrete artifacts or techniques that can be carried forward. A recent Design Daze, “Mapped Memories: Digital Storytelling with StoryMap JS,” guided participants in building map-based multimedia narratives that blend text, images, and location data. Jam Sessions, by contrast, emphasize community exploration and creative play. These sessions foreground peer learning, collective problem-solving, and improvisation, cultivating tacit knowledge and shared practice in ways that mirror DH’s collaborative epistemology. A recent Jam Session, “Prompt to Print,” invited participants to experiment with generative AI tools that turn text prompts into 3D-printable models. Tools for Tasks operates as a form of situated, just-in-time learning, where students engage DH tools and methods in response to immediate, real-world needs. Rather than abstract training, participants learn under institutional constraints, making visible the social, technical, and interpretive labor required to deploy tools meaningfully.

Taken together, these programs reveal co-curricular DH as more than a collection of workshops or services. They function as an ecosystem that supports movement from exploration to practice to contribution, while accommodating diverse temporal commitments and levels of engagement. This layered structure responds directly to long-standing concerns about access, participation, and sustainability in DH pedagogy, particularly for students who may not encounter DH through formal coursework or who engage with DH intermittently alongside other fields of study.

The paper further argues that this ecosystem depends on a stabilizing layer of student labor embodied in the Media Mentors program and its associated Media Mentor Personal Projects (M2P2). The program currently employs fifteen paid undergraduate Media Mentors from a variety of academic backgrounds each semester, a cohort size that has remained stable across several years of operation. Media Mentors function as embedded DH practitioners rather than service providers, participating in peer-to-peer mentoring, knowledge translation, and co-authorship. Their labor enables continuity across co-curricular programs, supports institutional memory, and creates conditions for sustained learning over time. In contrast to traditional internship or assistantship models, this embedded structure foregrounds mentorship, reflective practice, and visible authorship, aligning with calls to better recognize and structure student labor in DH (Anderson et al. 2016; Hswe et al. 2017). Media Mentors do not merely support DH activity; they actively shape it, negotiating boundaries between learning, labor, and contribution in ways that reflect broader tensions within the field.

By reframing co-curricular DH as a pedagogically and intellectually meaningful site of practice, this paper contributes to ongoing debates about where and how DH learning happens. It extends work on critical making and transfer by demonstrating how similar goals—metacognition, adaptability, and durable learning—can be pursued outside the classroom through co-curricular design. It also responds to critiques of DH’s reliance on invisible or under-theorized student labor by presenting a model that integrates training, recognition, and authorship into everyday practice. More broadly, the paper invites DH scholars and practitioners to reconsider the boundaries of DH pedagogy and infrastructure, recognizing co-curricular spaces as essential to the field’s educational mission and to the diverse ways students come to do DH work.