Tag: workshop

Game On: Three Board Games to Bring into Your Classroom

ewprog on

By Sara Lovett

On April 5 2019, the UW Libraries and CIC co-sponsored an event on teaching with board games, facilitated by then CIC AD Sara Lovett. In this post, she shares takeaways from the event and thoughts for how you might bring three example boardgames into your classroom!

Why Teach with Board Games?: Event Takeaways

  • Games are ideologically-rich, and they are an excellent site for critical analysis. Dominion and Settlers of Catan, for example, replicate a settler-colonialism narrative whereas Pandemic offers up a narrative of consent and transnational, interdisciplinary collaboration.
  • One attendee, Dorian, drew upon scholarship from comic studies to point out that games are easier to analyze than books or movies because of distance from the material.
  • Though it is not usually possible for all students to play a game at the same time, we came up with several solutions: 1) students can check out and play the game as homework, a task that would also orient them to the library’s space reservation and course reserves systems, 2) instructors can use a “fishbowl” structure, in which students alternate between playing the game and analyzing play while observing their peers, writing reflections and engaging in discussions on both experiences 3) students can use free online clients such as Dominion Online (https://dominion.games/) to play some games, and 4) for some of the games, instructors can request additional copies via interlibrary loan.
  • Games offer a site for students to engage with multiple modes (e.g. tactile, visual, spatial) and reflect on the literacy skills they used to learn and play the game.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill and Genre

A figurine resting on variously arranged card pieces from the game.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill (click the link for a playthrough video from Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series) is a narrative game in which players explore a house. Players explore a house by flipping over tiles and moving figures representing their characters from room to room. Characters’ traits change through items and rooms they encounter (e.g., a book might cause your character to gain knowledge). Though players begin on the same team, the “haunt” occurs partway through the game, and one or more players may turn traitor. The traitor(s) and the heroes (the remaining players) each read a separate set of new rules and story elements that affect the rest of gameplay. The game contains 50 haunts, so the gameplay experience varies with each new playthrough.

Betrayal lends itself to analyses of narrative construction and performance as well as genre analysis and production. As students play multiple Betrayal scenarios and/or peruse the game manual, they can take notes on the conventions of the genre of these scenarios. Then, individually or in groups, they can create their own scenario to be playtested by their peers. This activity can generate conversation on the topics of genre, uptake (i.e., do the rules in the scenario “work?” What kind of play is taken up by the playtesters?). Students could even create scenarios that teach particular course concepts (e.g., players need to construct a complex claim in order to successfully leave the house).

Pandemic and Remix

A board game assembled on a table with various game pieces and figurines.

Pandemic is a cooperative game in which 1-4 players act as the world’s top public health specialists collaborating to stop four pandemics. We noticed as we were discussing this game that it facilitates narratives about cross-national collaboration–the players can travel easily between cities, and though there are four regions, there are no explicit borders between nations–and about consent: the dispatcher role card states that this player must gain “consent” before moving another player on the game map. This game offers opportunities for discourse analysis and remix. Specifically, we thought about how students might revise Pandemic to reflect real-world conditions such as unequal resources privileging the global North over the global South, international borders hindering collaboration, and separate research agendas and incentives for each player (think culture jamming for the classroom).

Dominion and Visual Analysis

Various cards from the game Dominion.

Dominion is a deck-builder (i.e., a game in which each player acquires, draws, and plays cards throughout the game). The rules of the game are simple: players play cards, take actions (denoted on individual cards), and buy cards.

We spent most of our time at this table discussing the theme, which is best summarized by the game’s creator, Donald X. Vaccarino:

You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner.

But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn’t be proud, but your grandparents, on your mother’s side, would be delighted (Dominion game manual).

There is much to analyze in the opening text alone, and the cards offer even more material to unpack. We noticed, for instance, that most of the cards are gendered and raced in ways that uphold stereotypes. We wondered how the game itself would change if the images on the cards were replaced and nothing else were changed. Students could undergo this project as part of a visual analysis or a word inquiry project, investigating the origins of words like “witch” and “bureaucrat” and interrogating the relationship between card names, images, and game mechanics.

Links to check out the games in the library are below:

Playtesting the Curriculum

Certainly, there are many more ways to use these games in the classroom. What are your ideas? Feel free to share in the comments!

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the attendees of this event for collectively generating knowledge. I am especially grateful to Elliott Stevens for his continued support in facilitating this partnership with the libraries and to Holly Shelton and Ahmed Al Awadhi for serving as roundtable leaders (as well as photographers and editors).

 

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

Canvas Building Session: Tips for a Flexible and Accessible Canvas Infrastructure

ewprog on

By Alycia Gilbert

A well-built and easy to navigate course Canvas can be an extremely useful tool for your composition class. Especially if you’re teaching a hybrid course or navigating a pivot to online teaching, having a solid Canvas site can support your students—particularly in finding materials, assignments, and deadlines. In March 2022, we held a Canvas building session to share models and advice for effective Canvas design.

Here are some tips and frameworks for building out your own course Canvas!

Beginning to Build

Your Canvas site should be developed in service to your pedagogical goals for the course; from what tools you choose to integrate to the way you organize your materials, it’s always helpful to start building your site based around your learning goals for the class. Do you want to use out-of-class time to scaffold toward group discussion, for example? Then students could find Canvas discussion posts useful ways to brainstorm prepared thoughts. Do you need students to analyze images or film clips? Then you might integrate YouTube or an annotation tool like Harmonize or Hypothesis into your Canvas site.

Here are some other key components to consider while you begin to build your site:

Navigation

When it comes to navigating your Canvas site, always consider the user-experience from the student perspective. Good navigation considers the way students move through your site and how you can make that movement intuitive and clear. You should definitely account for:

  • Where do you want students to go first?

    Setting your homepage to the location students will access most; for a long time, I set my homepage to the syllabus, but found that students weren’t scrolling down through all of the syllabus materials to reach the course calendar easily. Now my homepage is set to my course modules, where students can more easily find what they’re meant to be doing that day. If you’re an active Canvas Announcements user, then the Announcements section might be a good choice for you!
  • How will students find materials they need?

    Hosting materials in your course files without linking to these files elsewhere can be confusing for students to navigate or remember. Think strategically about organizing your files into easy to understand folders and subfolders and linking to specific files in your syllabus or course announcements. You might also share materials through your modules based on the week or day they’re assigned.
  • Guiding Documents

    Especially when using modules, guiding documents laying out the week or providing a course overview can be useful tools to help students navigate your course materials, assignments, and more. Below, I’ve included a few screenshots of how I use guiding documents for my course modules.
  • Navigation Menu – Tailor it to your course!

    Pro-tip: the navigation sidebar for your Canvas course can be edited to only include the tools and sections that you want to use in your course.

    To remove sections:

    Go to Canvas Settings (located at the bottom of your course’s navigation sidebar), then to the “Navigation” setting.

    To add additional tools or pages:

    Check out the removed sections list at the bottom of this page, or by clicking on the “Apps” tab in Settings and checking out the apps listed there. For more experimental tools, check out the Canvas App Center by clicking “See some LTI tools that work great with Canvas” in the page’s description.
Image of a Canvas site's setting page on the navigation tab.
Image of Canvas App Center.

Modules

If you organize your course through modules, our two most important tips are parallelism and consistency—make sure that you have a structure for your modules that you follow through with for each section.

For example, I organize my modules by week, including any assignments or tasks that have Canvas submissions for clear access. I also begin with a “Start Here!” module with a Course Overview and guiding documents:

Image of course overview page, which includes an image of a cassette tape and a brief course description.

Each Week then has an Overview page and is organized by class meeting. For each class meeting, I always include In-Class Materials and Course Tasks (homework) so that students know where to go to find readings and assignments:

Image of a Week One Overview, which includes an image of an old polaroid, a brief description of the week, and links to assignments students will be working on this week.
Image of a a daily page in the module, which includes an In-Class Materials section with links, as well as a Course Tasks section that links to readings and a YouTube video. At the bottom of the page is a link to the course assignment due at the end of the week.

How you organize your modules is up to you, but it’s best to go in with a clear plan that’s cohesive across your course!

Accessibility

Don’t forget throughout to do accessibility checks throughout your building process with Canvas’s Accessibility Checker, especially for your course materials and any images used. The library offers a Conversion Service That makes PDFs accessible for screen readers!

If you need help building out your Canvas site, please don’t hesitate to contact an AD on staff! We’d love to collaborate with you to design a site that suits your teaching style and pedagogical goals. And for further help, check out the recording of our CIC Winter Workshop here!

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

Tips and Approaches for Multimodal Revision

ewprog on

By Alycia Gilbert

Note: This post was originally developed for the Winter 2021 CIC Workshop and published to the CIC Blog; however, I thought it was especially relevant now, as students begin their second assignment sequences and instructors begin planning their requirements for the portfolio. Even if your course materials don’t lean too heavily into multimodal composition, this post raises applicable questions and provide tips for scaffolding the revision process for any major project. In resharing this post, I hope that it’s a useful prompt for considering how to define substantive revision for the portfolio, how to prepare students for revision, and how to set reasonable expectations for the revision process considering the scope of the project and the length of the quarter!

Both with my own students and with other instructors, I’ve had a lot of conversations about anxiety when approaching multimodal projects—specifically, anxiety over how to tackle revision. I’ve felt that anxiety myself; developing a philosophy on multimodal revision can be tricky, but it’s an absolute necessity for a portfolio-based writing course. What does substantive revision look like for a multimodal project? What do you emphasize as the end-goal of multimodal revision? And what do you do with multimodal assignments that are difficult to revise within the course’s timeframe?

While everyone’s approach varies with context (and often even by assignment!), here are a few tips for facilitating and framing multimodal revision:

Scaffolding the Revision Process

Assignment sequences that allow you to pace out feedback and the timeline for revision can make the whole process much less daunting, both for you and your students. To scaffold the revision process into your course design, you might…

  1. Consider dividing projects into preliminary drafts

    Preliminary drafts are often easier for students to revise; they’re much more malleable, and students are often more receptive to feedback during the drafting stage. This also helps focus your feedback, which can be geared toward students actualizing their project. You might have shorter assignments that ask students to first create scripts, storyboards, mock-ups, “minimum viable product” drafts, or pitches, depending on the nature of their multimodal project.
  2. Create opportunities for peer review during the drafting process

    Similarly, incorporating peer review into the earlier stages of drafting provides students with concrete insight into how their project is working and where they could make adjustments. These early interventions create a more collaborative class environment and make it easier to resist the urge to backload revision at the end of the course.
  3. Set clear expectations for revision and articulate them before feedback

    Potentially as early as in your syllabus, in your first few class sessions, or within the assignment prompt itself, you might find it helpful to clearly state what goals and expectations the class will have with revision. What does substantial multimodal revision look like for your course? For an assignment? If this is a question that you want your class to negotiate from project to project, what general, core expectations might you let these individual negotiations stem from?
  4. Consider crowd-sourcing assessment criteria with your class

    Not only does this create space for students to more actively and equitably engage with their own assessment, but establishing a communal vocabulary for assessment can make understanding and incorporating feedback easier for students. It can also make peer review more effective, as well. You might begin with the course outcomes and ask students to brainstorm what these outcomes would look like specifically for the assignment, or you might have students assess a past sample together.

Process Over Product

In framing revision, it can be helpful to emphasize gaining and understanding new skills over producing perfect final products—this allows students to experiment with genres they may not feel like they have mastery over and places the focus on growth, student choice, and active use of course outcomes.

  1. Use reflection prompts or revision plans

    These encourage students to demonstrate knowledge of course outcomes and concepts, as well as to explain their rhetorical choices as composers. Revision plans create space for students to explain what they would revise if they had time or were asked to do so; revision plans keep the focus on the process of learning multimodal composition and negotiating feedback with questions of rhetorical effectiveness, while acknowledging the time constraints of the course (“If I had more time to work with this project, I would…”). Additionally, these types of assignments tie in well with the goals of the final portfolio and incorporating metacognition.
  2. Provide multiple opportunities for students to reflect at different stages of the composing process

    Reflecting across a project’s composition helps students break down the creative process and see how feedback, revision, and trial and error shaped their work. Ask students to focus on the effects of their compositional choices and incorporate evidence from their compositions.

Giving Feedback to Multimodal Assignments

Sometimes, anxieties about facilitating multimodal revision are tied to broader anxieties about giving feedback on multimodal projects. In addition to emphasizing process over product, here are a few things that might demystify the feedback process:

  1. Be aware of time management

    Multimodal pieces often take more time to grade, but it’s important to experience the piece in full—the pace at which the audience engages with the material is a rhetorical aspect of the text. You might try to develop systems for responding quickly and effectively to multimodal texts, like taking screenshots or marking areas to return to after your first viewing.
  2. Consider Higher Order Concerns for multimodal feedback

    With multimodal projects, keeping tabs on how much revision you’re guiding students toward can make your feedback more straightforward and their revision process less overwhelming. Like in any other composition classes, use rhetorical principles to guide your comments. With HOC in mind, you might focus feedback on:
    • The composition’s effectiveness in addressing the rhetorical situation
    • Where the composition could better meet the requirements of the assignment or tie to the course’s overall goals and conversations
    • How effectively the composition uses multiple modes symbiotically, rather than considering the modes separately in your feedback. Does the composition combine appropriate modalities effectively to communicate the piece’s purpose? Or do the multiple modes overlap in ineffective, redundant ways or seem extraneous?

An effective, consistent feedback system and scaffolding revision into your course are just a few of the larger approaches that you can take to make multimodal revision a little less intimidating in the composition classroom. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got any tried and true approaches to framing multimodal revision to add to this conversation!

For further reading, check out these sources that helped inform this post:

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

7 Tech Tools for Accessible and Engaged Masked Classrooms

ewprog on

On November 10th 2021, the CIC hosted a workshop through the EWP’s Teacher Talk series on strategies and technologies for pandemic classrooms. As part of this workshop, we shared tools that can be integrated into EWP/IWP courses to promote active learning, especially in masked classroom environments.

As we wrap up Fall Quarter and begin thinking forward to Winter, here are a few tech tools and class practices that you might consider building into your next course. Some of these technologies are less common in our classrooms, while others are familiar hits that we wanted to recontextualize in light of their accessibility features and their potential to generate student engagement. These technologies were recommended based, in part, on our experiences with masked classrooms this quarter; however, we think it’s even more important for you to reflect on your own experience in pandemic classrooms—both this quarter and online—when considering these tools. What worked for you, and what could have been more successful? What would you like engagement to look like for your next course? What would you like technology to accomplish in your course, and how will you assess if your technology practices are meeting students’ needs?

1. Google Suite: Google Slides

While Google Slides is a familiar tool used by many instructors in the EWP, we wanted to highlight a few of its functions that could be useful in pandemic classrooms:

  • Live Questions Feature

    Google Slides’ live questions feature allows students to ask questions through their electronic devices using a private code. As the instructor, you can see these questions as they’re submitted, as well as project questions onto the presentation to raise to the whole class.
  • Automatic Live Captions

    Google Slides can also generate live captions for your lecture as you speak. This can be a useful tool both for recording asynchronous materials and for instructors who are particularly concerned with masked communication, perhaps because of a student accommodation need. This feature does require being near a microphone, and may best suit instructors who stand by a podium while teaching or folks (like me!) who carry their tablet around as they teach. Microsoft PP 365 has a similar live caption feature.
  • Visual context + supplementary info

    True for any slideshow, slides are useful for providing additional context for your lecture and helping students follow along with the lesson, which can be even more difficult in masked classrooms. Consider having more text or images than you might in a maskless classroom! Students are more likely to need additional visual cues.

2. Google Suite: Google Docs

Another popular Google Suite application, Google Docs can acts as shared spaces for students to engage course materials and each other online. You may already use Google Docs for sign up sheets or handouts, but you might consider bringing the tool into your lesson plan, where it can be useful for:

  • Group Annotations
  • Collaborative Class Notes
  • Group Share-Outs or Activity Notetaking

3. Google Jamboard

Google Jamboard is an online whiteboard tool. If you’re worried about calling students up to physical whiteboards and causing crowding, this is an excellent replacement that you can project while students participate at their seats. On Google Jamboard you can also upload images that can then be drawn, written, and sticky-noted on. Great for visual analysis activities!

Check out Jamboard’s About Page to learn more. 

4. Canvas: Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is a great interactive learning tool that’s most well known for its live online polling, but can be also used for activities like surveys, Q&As, quizzes, word clouds, and more. Poll Everywhere is very versatile for masked classrooms; you can generate and project live feeds of student responses, and there are tools for gauging student understanding and soliciting student feedback. Poll Everywhere can be integrated into your Canvas course as well.

To get started with Poll Everywhere, check out UW IT‘s information page!

5. Canvas: Hypothesis

Hypothesis is a collaborative annotation tool that can be integrated into your Canvas course. With Hypothesis, you can assign readings to the whole course or to groups, and students can annotate course readings collaboratively, share comments, and reply to each other’s comments with text, links, images, and video. Hypothesis annotations work well for both asynchronous activities (especially useful for if your course is hybrid or if you need to move online!) and also for in-class annotation activities. Hypothesis is also fully integrated with SpeedGrader.

6. Canvas: Video/Media Discussion Posts OR Flipgrid

Using media or video comments in discussion threads became a popular way to build community during remote learning, but it remains a useful tool in our current teaching environment. You might consider, for example, bringing back video introductions on Canvas at the start of the quarter for a more personal introduction where students will be able to see everyone’s unmasked faces.

For instructors who prefer not to use Canvas in their courses, Flipgrid offers a Canvas alternative that similarly allows for students to have video-based discussion threads.

7. Reclipped Video Annotation Tool

With Reclipped, you and students can highlight, annotate, and share timestamped moments from videos. Another useful group annotation tool, Reclipped makes responding to video content much easier, and again makes space for students who feel less comfortable during in-class discussions to participate. Reclipped also doesn’t require any video downloads and can be used to annotate YouTube videos as well as uploaded materials.

Returning to in-person teaching has been, in many ways, a process of trial and error; similarly, integrating technology in the classroom can be seen as an experiment! New tech can be tricky and involves planning and preparation, as well as negotiating with students and getting their feedback. If you’re interested in using more technology in your classroom, we recommend picking only one or two new tools to try based on your teaching style and course content. The CIC AD and the rest of the EWP staff are here to support you in facilitating, practicing, and framing this!

If you’re looking for further resources on the topic of active learning in pandemic classrooms, a recording of the CIC workshop and presentation materials have been made available for EWP instructors here! I also recommend Columbia’s CTL’s “From Online to Face-to-Face–Keeping What Works” and their resource on collaborative learning, both of which were helpful in developing this resource page.

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy Workshop

ewprog on

by Belle Kim

In this post, I want to share a workshop I led in 2017 following Trump’s election and the ensuing, urgent call for more active conversations and mobilizations within our department and program around issues of race, equity, access, power, and critical pedagogy. I’m attaching a detailed description of the workshop along with materials used in the hopes that we as a program will return to and take up the questions raised below again and again in productive ways that lead to substantial, material, and institutional change.

ENGLISH 131 POST-ELECTION WORKSHOP
“All presidents have been destroyers.” – #StandingRock

The purpose of this workshop is to (1) think and strategize together on developing a critical antiracist pedagogical practice that reflects our commitments and investments as scholars and activists; (2) develop course descriptions that situate composition and the thematic content of our class in the current political reality in which we reside, as well as a statement for the syllabus that articulates our own commitments and the expectations we have for our students; (3) mobilize the rhetoric of “stakes” and “warrants/assumptions” (Outcome 3) to teach the ethical and political implications of producing particular kinds of argumentation and discourse; (4) launch collaborative teaching projects that can offer individual teachers more support.

Below are some critical questions that have shaped the structure, content, and objectives of this workshop:
  • How do we frame and confront the post-election moment in our classrooms in ways that actively acknowledge and hold different vulnerabilities and their uneven effects?
  • What would attempts to think historically about the present look like, given that the entire history of the US has been one of state violence against people of color? For whom has the normalization of white supremacy been consistent rather than a newly emergent crisis?
  • What is ethical and political pedagogy? What does it mean to be accountable in the present?
  • How can we inhabit and disrupt the university and its current iteration as the production of neoliberal, settler colonial, antiblack racist expansionism while remaining committed to learning as a decolonial, noncolonial, and abolitionist practice?
  • Given that the neoliberal university establishes itself by incorporating diversity, difference, and radical disruptive energies into itself, how might we cultivate a practice of critical pedagogy that cannot easily be subsumed, co-opted, or evacuated of political force?

Critical Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop (click here for powerpoint)