This panel addresses the teaching of markup and the XML family of languages as a critical pedagogy that empowers students as decision makers and project managers. The panelists discuss how the exploration, schematization, documentation, transformation, and review of markup interpellates newcomers to digital humanities as thoughtful participants in real textual communities. We find that the practice of sharing markup languages with students counters persistent misconceptions in the DH community about hierarchical data modeling with XML and TEI. Rather than experiencing conceptual limitation in the tree structure, students practicing markup and its transformations engage in a direct confrontation with cultural and computational issues surrounding the crafting, control, and distribution of documents--a confrontation that involves code switching and intervention in controlling discourses.