Friday, April 20, Jennifer Olive and I made a short presentation on our changes to GSU Lower Division Studies‘ syllabi during Staff Training Day called “Exploring 1101/1102 Composition Proficiencies Through Games from a Variety of Media.” We discussed the changes we’d made to the syllabus and major assignments, how we focused the course around games and gaming, and how, at the end of the semester, the students seem to have benefitted from the narrow focus of the course. Student evals pending, of course.
Jenn and I spent December of last year working up new themes for both 1101 and 1102 English courses based around games and gaming. We wanted to stick to the general tenets of LDS’ curriculum, but tried to mix things up a bit to hopefully make the materials more engaging and accessible. This was my fourth semester working with 1101, so I felt fairly confident I could coerce any less-than-willing students into opening up about the subject. She’d taught both courses before, and with her research into gaming and rhetoric, we had plenty of resources to pull from.
Fundamentally speaking, we didn’t change too much about the assignments themselves. The curriculum is already focused on teaching and molding undergraduates into more effective writers, and there really is no reason to reinvent the wheel. [[Really, the only major change I made in 1101 was to back down the Literacy Narrative project from a 10% high-stakes graded item into two 3-500-word low-stakes journal entries. I’m not a fan of high percentage grading on a personal narrative, and have no problem going three rounds with anyone who says otherwise.]]
Instead, our goal was to make the material more accessible and relatable to students in a cohesive way. In previous semesters, we’d both used various strategies to connect the material – my Fall 2017 focused on the American “Justice” system, for instance – but we would often run into the issue of having to either scavenge for material or struggle to keep the discussions on the topic of writing rather than events and repercussions.
We found, upon reflection and research last year, that there were plenty of articles that utilized specific argumentative strategies LDS supports, a focus on rhetoric in its various forms, and even games that utilized argument and rhetoric in meaningful ways. We built the course around such examples, all of which seemed to catch the attention of our students and drive home how writing, gaming, and current events and tensions all interconnect.
Overall, I’d like to run the course again. By the end of the semester, all my students had opened up to the ideas that writing isn’t so difficult once they understood the basics, that they did actually participate in the wider gaming community, and that not all “gamers” were basement-dwelling mouth breathers.
In my book (and gamer heart), that’s a win!
Here’s the link to the presentation, and this is the link to my syllabus for 1101.
The Crafty Medievalist 