Teaching

The key to my pedagogical practice is creating situations in which my students will draw lines between their lived experiences, the course topics, and the world around them in ways that will permanently change their understanding of all three. This was not always the case, however; I, like many unseasoned educators, believed that knowledge could exist in a kind of intellectual vacuum, as a detached and even disinterested set of facts about the world. I learned how wrong I was when I first began teaching as an untested MA student, dryly lecturing to a roomful of tired, reticent undergraduates about the importance of digital media literacy. No matter how passionately I exhorted my students to take seriously, say, the use of social media in government surveillance, I found that while they might memorize the facts they expected to find on the test, they did not feel the import of the topic at hand. When we moved on the next week to matters of personal responsibility and social media use, I found that my students were deeply passionate about their online lives – they spoke at length about the loves and fears, hopes and anxieties they attached to platforms like Tumblr – but they could not see why those feelings mattered to the world at large. I, as an immature teacher, was once again left scratching my head. Over the years, I have come to understand why my early teaching failed to inspire both emotional and intellectual investment from my students: knowledge is not the accumulation of facts (as any good pedagogue will explain), but the connection of facts to experience, on the one hand, and to the world around us, on the other.

Since that first revelation nearly a decade ago, I have taken my own advice, and focused my efforts on creating classes that draw together what I think of as the “three spheres” of personal experience, course information, and the contemporary world to craft classes where students can recognize themselves in the world and to recognize the world in themselves. In the Fall semester of the 2021 year, for instance, I was given the chance to design a new course for the Media School from the ground up, which would be called Games, Culture, and Society. As I envisioned it, this course would complement IU’s excellent game design track by asking would-be professionals difficult questions about games’ relationships with power and about my students’ relationships with games. Following my own advice, I pulled from my own best undergraduate experiences to design a seminar-focused course that would allow the students to drive discussion by drawing from their own memories, hopes, and fears to connect the ostensibly frivolous world of video games to the major issues of the day. In our module on feminism in gaming, we accomplished this by briefly playing through three games with three very different approaches to feminine representation and play - Bayonetta, Diner Dash, and Gone Home – and then sitting down to discuss which games seemed to best embody feminist ideals. The conversation began, as is so often the case, with two male students suggesting that the game with the least sexualization and the least violence was clearly the most feminist. But as the class warmed to the topic, several young women began to speak up about their own strong preferences for Bayonetta, a game about a leather-clad witch who battles angels using BDSM. I barely spoke for the rest of the class time, as the students began to debate – of their own accord, and with remarkable civility – whether feminism is something inherent to a work’s representations, or if it comes from the personal desires and experiences of the people engaging with it. They laughed, they argued, and they stayed late simply to continue discussing the topic at hand not because I asked them to apply feminist concepts to existing games, but because I asked them to connect these ideas with their own lives in ways that allowed the elements of personal preference (from the female students) and surprise (from the male) to lead the group. When the discussion threatened to heat up, I found that all I needed to do was intercede and ask the parties in question to explain themselves, and through that measured explanation the students found almost always found that their disagreements masked a deeper concurrence.

When I teach history, I now likewise make a point of bringing the past into the present and bringing the students’ present into the past. This wasn’t always the case. The first time I taught the History of Video Games, I included a section on Nintendo’s marketing history and the way that Nintendo “colonized” childhood by being the first game company to successfully “brand” childhood through its saturation approach to licensing and its innovative prosumer-esque fostering of fan clubs and newsletters. I paused in my lecture to ask the class: is this alarming? Perhaps inevitably, these students that had been born into a hyper-branded world saw no problem; their parents had been the “Nintendo Generation,” and they had been born into a world of naturalized brand-based licensing. Disappointed, I vowed to reframe the debate in the future. When I taught History of Video Games again the following year, I included the Nintendo question again, though this time I prefaced it by asking what contemporary marketing strategies, if any, made them uncomfortable. The response from most was algorithmic marketing, particularly the instances in which students felt their phones were listening to their conversations and pushing them advertisements based on that surveillance. Using that personal anxiety, I asked the class whether Nintendo’s efforts to control children’s creative activities in some way resembled this newer phenomenon. And while many students still maintained that they saw no real harm in it, this time around a third or so of the class decided they had changed their minds about Nintendo’s marketing efforts and were at least willing to entertain the notion that marketing to children in general might pose uncomfortable questions.

When I sit down to craft my assessments, I always make an effort to include the all-important personal element as well, since I feel strongly that it will both motivate students to produce their best work and encourage them to deeply consider their own relationships to the themes at hand. For instance, as the second major assignment for Games, Culture, and Society, I had my students write a design pitch for a socially-informed game of their choice. Knowing that many of my students were in the game design track (and many others armchair designers), this assignment gave them the chance to simultaneously express themselves creatively while also asking them to engage analytically with the class materials, which they then had to convey as persuasively as possible. The result was as fascinating an array of game ideas as I’ve ever seen. One student, whose family struggled with addiction, proposed a horror game centering around the fractured impressions and feelings of powerlessness she associated with alcoholism. Another student focused less on matters of representation on more on matters of player experience by pitching a game that would simulate the experience of playing as a disabled person whose games do not always account for their needs. A third designed a game that put the player in the shoes of an app developer, who can, if the player chooses to exploit increasingly uncomfortable amounts of user data, become extremely wealthy at the cost of their moral compass. In each case, the students mixed deeply personal convictions with significant political and social concerns of the day through the language of our course materials.

 I will admit that I have a great deal more learning to do myself. I would like to develop more innovative in-class activities, for instance, and to speak less often where possible. But as I hope I have conveyed in this statement (and in the gradual upward climb of my student evaluations, enclosed below), I see this as a strength rather than a weakness. At the risk of leaning on cliché, I genuinely believe that my students teach me at least as much as I teach them. Through their experiences, which are often so radically different from my own, they inevitably find new ways of thinking about, expressing, and applying ideas that I have researched for years. I see my own growth as they least that I can do to repay them and the generations that will come after they have graduated and gone out into the world to change that, too, in the best ways they know how.