TEACHING
In 2020, I was offered my first full-time teaching assignment at the university. This required that I create a syllabus for the course and prepare weekly lessons. Of course, there is a lot more that goes into it, but I will provide a sampling of some of the work from the course and other related teaching material. I would very much like to teach my "Introduction to Game Studies" course in the future and with the pandemic-based transfer to remote teaching that occurred during the term, this course can now be provided online to any institution that is interested.
Coms 333 - Games, Media and Culture
Partway through the term, the course had to move to an online format. I quickly adapted by setting up a Discord server for the students while recording my lectures and providing them on Twitch in a modified livestream. The livestream allowed students to actively participate during the lecture. I have provided the course syllabus as well as my powerpoint presentation series.
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PROPOSED COURSE:
PLAYER STUDIES - CASUAL VERSUS HARDCORE
Course Description
This is a course that situates a new debate in the field of game studies around player values. The course surveys the literature of player studies, focused on digital gameplay (also including traditional gaming), but also builds a historical context through the Narratology vs. Ludology debate of the 1990s and early 2000s which persists among game scholars in the contemporary moment. Additionally, a theoretical semiotics-based context is provided through seminal works of cultural studies and reception studies. The course will explore the evolution of game cultures and player communities, with a focus on the plurality and diversity of playstyles and play approaches. By studying the diversity and changing nature of game cultures, a new pressure emerges which may constitute a second major debate in the field – that of game values between hardcore and casual players. This pressure produces an impulse to redefine familiar concepts and notions about game culture, players and play itself. This course will provide a framework of analysis for how players produce their values around playstyles and play approaches.
This is a course that situates a new debate in the field of game studies around player values. The course surveys the literature of player studies, focused on digital gameplay (also including traditional gaming), but also builds a historical context through the Narratology vs. Ludology debate of the 1990s and early 2000s which persists among game scholars in the contemporary moment. Additionally, a theoretical semiotics-based context is provided through seminal works of cultural studies and reception studies. The course will explore the evolution of game cultures and player communities, with a focus on the plurality and diversity of playstyles and play approaches. By studying the diversity and changing nature of game cultures, a new pressure emerges which may constitute a second major debate in the field – that of game values between hardcore and casual players. This pressure produces an impulse to redefine familiar concepts and notions about game culture, players and play itself. This course will provide a framework of analysis for how players produce their values around playstyles and play approaches.
| stangeby_-_player_studies_syllabus.pdf |
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT
My goal as a teacher is for all students to exceed their expectations for personal success. I hope to create a learning environment that is open, inclusive, and that will encourage the students to form a community mentality when engaging with material in the course and when building knowledge from that material. It is also important to remain open-minded as a teacher and to incorporate student knowledge back into the teaching material so that the learning environment reflects adaptation and innovation. An adaptive and innovative learning environment should help encourage the student community in being creative and communicative.
Students learn best through multi-dimensional understanding or what I call, “recursive understanding”. Recursive understanding happens when a student is able to make knowledge usable and engineer new forms of understanding from the basic knowledge that was imparted by the teacher. We learn best when we have become teachers for ourselves when in the role of the student. The introspective dialectic between the internal student role and internal teacher role results in deeper forms of understanding – the student must be both an encoder and decoder of messages to maintain a communication circuit. Some students will arrive in the classroom already prepared for recursive understanding, whereas other students will require the teacher to provide tools that encourage the jump from two-dimensional forms of understanding (recipient of information is primarily just a decoder of meaning) to multi-dimensional ones (encoder-decoder internal relationship operating in an endless circuit).
The potential discrepancies that will exist in a student base with respect to how they understand as they arrive in the classroom require that a teacher finds teaching methods that suit a variety of student needs. An effective approach can be for the teacher to provide a lesson and then allow students to provide examples anonymously (written on paper and submitted to the teacher) of what phenomena they believe properly demonstrate particular concepts or theories. Using multimedia resources, the teacher can then provide those examples back to the class while splitting the students into groups to discuss specific examples. After the discussion, the student groups can then explain to the rest of the class their rationale for believing the specific examples to be exemplary or inadequate for explaining the concept or theory that is the focus of the teacher's lesson.
For example, Actor-Network Theory may be understood through the stop-motion animation films of Czech filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer. As a group, students can watch some footage of Svankmajer films and discuss how they believe that puppets exemplify the tenets of the theory. The value of an exercise such as this is multifaceted: the students are teaching each other and understanding together, students will be encouraged to share special knowledge they have of the example (in this case, puppetry and stop-motion animation), students will be critically engaged as interrogators and investigators of a specific example, students will be encouraged to consider better examples, and the teacher will be able to use examples that make sense to students to further explain course material. This is a non-exhaustive list because the student will also have to fit the example into their mental framework that they have constructed for understanding more general principles related to the specific concept or theory. That framework will become more refined, and the student's understanding will be increasingly nuanced through the active formation of a mental framework by use of examples where some make sense to them, and others do not initially.
The assessment of students should take into consideration their submitted examples offered for class discussion. Although, the students should remain anonymous to each other with respect to offering examples for class discussion, the teacher must remain aware of which students offered particular examples. This student feedback system allows the teacher to understand something specific about the unique ways in which a student understands. The students’ answers on an exam or arguments from an essay may have greater clarity for the teacher as a reader when that teacher has learned how particular students construct their understanding of the world around them and which values the student privileges. This will lead to an overall fairer assessment and evaluation of students by teachers.
Diversity in the classroom comes first, but it can’t have the last word as a dominant ideology because that would denote exclusivity, which is anathema to the spirit of diversity and inclusiveness. All students must be encouraged to share their unique worldview, but the teacher has a duty to ensure that this process of sharing isn’t adversarial and doesn’t involve psychological bullying or ganging-up. All students should appreciate that the classroom is a place to try out new ideas but is also a place to abstract unresolved ideas from their individual consciousness into the social collective. Unresolved ideas internally can often remain unresolved because they do not operate properly within a social world. Students should not have to bottle-up these unresolved ideas (this leads to anti-social worldviews) and therefore the classroom must exemplify a spirit of toleration toward those who are sharing because they want to understand why their ideas might be anti-social or may be at odds with the notion of an inclusive, caring, and compassionate society. A teacher has failed when allowing students to create a learning environment that makes other students afraid to share who they are and how they think. Politics never ever comes before pedagogy within an institution of learning.
George Orwell wrote, "power is not a means, it is an end", and I would like to suggest that Orwell would have agreed that politics is the means to power. Pedagogy must remain divorced from politics in order for an institution of education to reject power hierarchies and thus ensure that classrooms remain open, fair, humane, and democratic. If a student senses that the classroom has a distinct political character, then they may no longer explore particular discursive paths around an idea, concept, or theory. They can also be expected to not share their knowledge with the teacher and other students which will then unfairly result in a limited learning experience. In this situation the other students lose out on understanding differing viewpoints and new ideas, and the teacher misses a chance to understand particular students better - everyone loses. An education institution should endeavor to not foster hermetically-sealed echo chambers for privileged groups of students. It is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that ideological-based dogma is muted in the classroom.
Communications and Media studies are fields of scholarship that require added emphasis on the aforementioned principles of fair sharing and toleration in the classroom. These fields represent a convergence of technology and critical thinking, such that proper understanding will involve quantitative as well as qualitative cognitive paradigms - paradigms that mitigate the conscious construction of meaning and significance. For millennia, humanity has managed to develop disciplines and fields of research that can strongly favour (or be exclusive to) either quantitative or qualitative paradigms for understanding. For example, the hard sciences have typically emphasized quantitative paradigms for understanding rooted in empiricism and absolute scientific facts whereas the soft sciences emphasized the qualitative that privileges individual interpretation and even affective imagination. However, the evolution of communications and media studies does not allow for scholars to turn a blind eye to one or the other of these paradigms. Either both paradigms must be considered as important, or a hybrid paradigm can be developed to help guide research and understanding in the postmodern context and into the future. The teacher in communications and media studies who privileges one of the paradigms over the other is out-of-touch and will inevitably fail a portion of students based on those students either privileging the opposite paradigm to that of the teacher, or alternatively because students have independently developed a hybrid paradigm for processing knowledge and bringing about understanding.
This is an age of flexibility and growth for individual consciousness which means that socially we must attend to each other’s cognitive ‘attire’ as it were. A student will not learn efficiently if they are uncomfortable, and they will not be comfortable if they are required to fit into someone else’s cognitive attire. The role of the teacher is to be an expert tailor who ensures that the students have the cognitive attire that fits best and provides the greatest psychological comfort, but also room for growth.
Students learn best through multi-dimensional understanding or what I call, “recursive understanding”. Recursive understanding happens when a student is able to make knowledge usable and engineer new forms of understanding from the basic knowledge that was imparted by the teacher. We learn best when we have become teachers for ourselves when in the role of the student. The introspective dialectic between the internal student role and internal teacher role results in deeper forms of understanding – the student must be both an encoder and decoder of messages to maintain a communication circuit. Some students will arrive in the classroom already prepared for recursive understanding, whereas other students will require the teacher to provide tools that encourage the jump from two-dimensional forms of understanding (recipient of information is primarily just a decoder of meaning) to multi-dimensional ones (encoder-decoder internal relationship operating in an endless circuit).
The potential discrepancies that will exist in a student base with respect to how they understand as they arrive in the classroom require that a teacher finds teaching methods that suit a variety of student needs. An effective approach can be for the teacher to provide a lesson and then allow students to provide examples anonymously (written on paper and submitted to the teacher) of what phenomena they believe properly demonstrate particular concepts or theories. Using multimedia resources, the teacher can then provide those examples back to the class while splitting the students into groups to discuss specific examples. After the discussion, the student groups can then explain to the rest of the class their rationale for believing the specific examples to be exemplary or inadequate for explaining the concept or theory that is the focus of the teacher's lesson.
For example, Actor-Network Theory may be understood through the stop-motion animation films of Czech filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer. As a group, students can watch some footage of Svankmajer films and discuss how they believe that puppets exemplify the tenets of the theory. The value of an exercise such as this is multifaceted: the students are teaching each other and understanding together, students will be encouraged to share special knowledge they have of the example (in this case, puppetry and stop-motion animation), students will be critically engaged as interrogators and investigators of a specific example, students will be encouraged to consider better examples, and the teacher will be able to use examples that make sense to students to further explain course material. This is a non-exhaustive list because the student will also have to fit the example into their mental framework that they have constructed for understanding more general principles related to the specific concept or theory. That framework will become more refined, and the student's understanding will be increasingly nuanced through the active formation of a mental framework by use of examples where some make sense to them, and others do not initially.
The assessment of students should take into consideration their submitted examples offered for class discussion. Although, the students should remain anonymous to each other with respect to offering examples for class discussion, the teacher must remain aware of which students offered particular examples. This student feedback system allows the teacher to understand something specific about the unique ways in which a student understands. The students’ answers on an exam or arguments from an essay may have greater clarity for the teacher as a reader when that teacher has learned how particular students construct their understanding of the world around them and which values the student privileges. This will lead to an overall fairer assessment and evaluation of students by teachers.
Diversity in the classroom comes first, but it can’t have the last word as a dominant ideology because that would denote exclusivity, which is anathema to the spirit of diversity and inclusiveness. All students must be encouraged to share their unique worldview, but the teacher has a duty to ensure that this process of sharing isn’t adversarial and doesn’t involve psychological bullying or ganging-up. All students should appreciate that the classroom is a place to try out new ideas but is also a place to abstract unresolved ideas from their individual consciousness into the social collective. Unresolved ideas internally can often remain unresolved because they do not operate properly within a social world. Students should not have to bottle-up these unresolved ideas (this leads to anti-social worldviews) and therefore the classroom must exemplify a spirit of toleration toward those who are sharing because they want to understand why their ideas might be anti-social or may be at odds with the notion of an inclusive, caring, and compassionate society. A teacher has failed when allowing students to create a learning environment that makes other students afraid to share who they are and how they think. Politics never ever comes before pedagogy within an institution of learning.
George Orwell wrote, "power is not a means, it is an end", and I would like to suggest that Orwell would have agreed that politics is the means to power. Pedagogy must remain divorced from politics in order for an institution of education to reject power hierarchies and thus ensure that classrooms remain open, fair, humane, and democratic. If a student senses that the classroom has a distinct political character, then they may no longer explore particular discursive paths around an idea, concept, or theory. They can also be expected to not share their knowledge with the teacher and other students which will then unfairly result in a limited learning experience. In this situation the other students lose out on understanding differing viewpoints and new ideas, and the teacher misses a chance to understand particular students better - everyone loses. An education institution should endeavor to not foster hermetically-sealed echo chambers for privileged groups of students. It is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that ideological-based dogma is muted in the classroom.
Communications and Media studies are fields of scholarship that require added emphasis on the aforementioned principles of fair sharing and toleration in the classroom. These fields represent a convergence of technology and critical thinking, such that proper understanding will involve quantitative as well as qualitative cognitive paradigms - paradigms that mitigate the conscious construction of meaning and significance. For millennia, humanity has managed to develop disciplines and fields of research that can strongly favour (or be exclusive to) either quantitative or qualitative paradigms for understanding. For example, the hard sciences have typically emphasized quantitative paradigms for understanding rooted in empiricism and absolute scientific facts whereas the soft sciences emphasized the qualitative that privileges individual interpretation and even affective imagination. However, the evolution of communications and media studies does not allow for scholars to turn a blind eye to one or the other of these paradigms. Either both paradigms must be considered as important, or a hybrid paradigm can be developed to help guide research and understanding in the postmodern context and into the future. The teacher in communications and media studies who privileges one of the paradigms over the other is out-of-touch and will inevitably fail a portion of students based on those students either privileging the opposite paradigm to that of the teacher, or alternatively because students have independently developed a hybrid paradigm for processing knowledge and bringing about understanding.
This is an age of flexibility and growth for individual consciousness which means that socially we must attend to each other’s cognitive ‘attire’ as it were. A student will not learn efficiently if they are uncomfortable, and they will not be comfortable if they are required to fit into someone else’s cognitive attire. The role of the teacher is to be an expert tailor who ensures that the students have the cognitive attire that fits best and provides the greatest psychological comfort, but also room for growth.