obligatory pedagogical reflection

This term I spent a lot of time reconfiguring one of the broadest facets of my teaching: the epistemological framework that I use to justify my pedagogical practice. This framework relates how people “produce” knowledge and experience learning; it’s what I use to both predict and design appropriate contexts that facilitate specific learning outcomes. As a tool, I use this framework to make assumptions about the most appropriate course of action when I’m performing as a teacher/facilitator/instructor/etc.—in other words, this framework constitutes a facet of my subjectivity. In working with the course material for P155: Public Oral Communication, I’ve come to appreciate an understanding of how students should embody an ethic and model a literacy in the workshop environment. I have yet, though, to refine the techniques I use to specifically shape a subjectivity for my students that provides them with ethical strategies for both answering self-inspired questions and motivating independent learning. Put another way, I would like to develop strategies for strategies because at the moment, it feels as though I have conditioned my students into utilizing me as their primary tool, rather than as a reference to refine their engagement with course texts and other tools.

draft – to proceed: an exploration of games and learning

Abstract

In this paper I develop a methodology for thinking about the relationship between learning and gameplay that challenges popular rhetorical frameworks that situate games as either tools or texts. After making a game and discussing its limitations in this paper, I argue for a way of thinking about game design that centers the way designers construct literacies with which to network ideas together in context.