Video-computer based games emerged as consumer products in the 1970s and now surpass movies, television, and music in terms of worldwide profits. Many of the original text-based games, such as Zork and Deadline had a genre based literary quality to them, and 50 years later we still see literary storytelling in this medium, with both major corporations and independent developers delivering significant texts using varying levels of technology and sophistication.
At the lower level of this, developers often produce low cost material that effectively deals with social and personal issues our students are interested in. Papers Please is a multi-platform game that examines issues around immigration and documentation. One Night, Hot Springs looks at the experience of being trans at a hot spring, while This War of Mine allow us to be a civilian in an urban combat zone (and is a text in Polish history classes). New and exciting games come out frequently, and this is a rich area for texts, which are sophisticated and meet students “where they live.”
We have successfully used video games in the writing classroom, and we are proposing a workshop that presents a number of short low-cost (or free) games to the audience, along with a variety of ways of using them in the classroom. As part of the experience, we would like to engage the participants in an actual lesson in relation to one of the games being presented.
Traditionally, students have demonstrated their understanding and analysis of a text or topic through tests and essays. However, have you seen other teachers’ social media posts about One Pagers or Hexagons and weren’t sure how to introduce them to students? Hexagons and One Pagers can be used for single texts, to connect multiple texts. to explore themes, and across the curriculum. This presentation will share the basics of each activity and then give participants time to practice each one.
Get every student in your class writing and talking about complex, creative, personal and debatable topics. How? Transition from engaging journal prompts to various discourse strategies. Observe the positive difference these activities make in your classroom community and in their extended writing projects. Learn and practice these ideas in an interactive workshop and be inspired!
Human Resources expert Tim Baker, in his 2019 text on performance and development strategies, theorizes 5 “pillars of authentic conversation” that allow colleagues to effectively collaborate and to “keep it real” in their working relationships. By identifying authentic approaches to task-focused conversations and people-focused conversations, Baker lays out a plan for co-workers in any environment to strategize, carry out their plans, address unhelpful behavior, build trust and appreciation, and move into the future. Faced with teaching dual-enrollment speech and composition classes in area high schools, the session presenters (a community college instructor and librarian) discuss their experiences as they formulated a strategy for collaborative teaching. They describe the Embedded Librarian role as it exists at their school and how their approaches to these shared courses have evolved along the way. Weaving in Baker’s terms and definitions of authentic conversation, the presenters share what worked and what didn’t in their collaborative teaching. The session also offers assessment data from when two of the dual-enrollment courses taught by the presenters were offered by high schools without a media center or librarian in their buildings.
