By embracing my courses as a student-centered process, I empower my students to be independent, critical thinkers who boldly explore new ideas. I approach course design like game design. One of my favorite theories about games is Thomas Malaby’s (2007) conceptualization of games as “domains of contrived contingency,” where the rules create predictable and unpredictable outcomes. Players generate new practices and meanings as they play, which transform the game. Like games, teaching is grounded in human practice. I calibrate the class environment and its outcomes but allow my students to chart the course of their own education. It means being flexible with my approach and willing to embrace my student’s diverse perspectives. I want to create a dynamic learning environment that’s enriching and fun for the students.
I use emerging technology along with practice-based learning to give students experience with innovation within and outside the discipline and prepare students for their future careers. For my course on virtual world design, I taught students how to place 3D assets they created in Autodesk Maya into Mozilla Hubs to construct their own virtual worlds. Their projects exceeded my expectations; one group taught visitors about ocean pollution through a virtual installation, another group created a room in a castle that invited visitors to unravel the deadly mystery, and another created a virtual sculpture museum that unfolded into a surreal horror experience. You can see pictures of my students’ projects on my website. It was exciting to see how the students came together and pooled their unique skills toward projects that all felt distinct from one another. I had students focused on video game design combine forces with English literature students to produce virtual experiences grounded in proven theories of immersion and worldbuilding. Practice-based learning allows students to directly apply what they learn through lectures and readings toward something they can be proud of showing to the public or a potential employer, with the added benefit of preparing them for a world that embraces new technologies.
Involving students in the conversation about how a lesson proceeds encourages them to find new practices and meanings to class concepts. While I have a detailed lesson plan and clear objectives for the class, I encourage my students to explore topics relevant to their experiences and goals through student-led discussions and personalized assignments. I allowed my students to vote on the class topics and accompanying readings for the second half of my course on virtual worlds. The students picked topics that not only expanded upon the ones I had already chosen for the first half of the course but also catered to their interests and the direction they wanted to take their final projects. One group of students wanted to learn more about applications of virtual worlds in various industries such as education and healthcare. Another group chose topics about storytelling and immersion because they wanted to successfully create immersive virtual experiences with a strong storytelling focus. Students told me that it’s empowering for them to have a say in how the class proceeded, which made the class more meaningful for them.
I help students chart the course of their own learning by offering multiple options to complete an assignment, allowing them to pursue their interests in a way that works for their skillset. For one assignment of my Game Studies course, students had a choice between writing an essay (or creating a video essay) interpreting a game’s themes or making their own game in a game engine and reflecting on the process. One student chose to write an essay and explored how their mental health condition relates to how Disco Elysium blurs the lines between character motivation and player agency. Another student explored Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric by using Unreal Engine 5 to create a game inspired by the myth of Sisyphus. For my Communication in a Changing World course, I let students pick between writing an essay about an emerging technology or building a critical making project that intervened in and disrupted traditional models of technological development. My students produced excellent essays such as a student’s history of the intersection of queer identity and electronic music. They also produced amazing projects such as a student writing and composing their own song about hegemony and another creating their own video game in Unreal Engine to artistically represent the negative consequences of social media use. Students loved the freedom they felt in choosing how they completed assignments, and I am glad to use my course as an opportunity for them to build their skills in a way that not only advances their career but is also exciting and fulfilling for them.
I choose grading formats where students reflect on and evaluate their own practice and learning in the course such as contract grading. This is done to help them concentrate on their own growth and learning through hard work and collaborative efforts. The approach has been received well; students told me they appreciated the ability to choose which course topics they wanted to go deeper in through optional readings and assignments and the format encouraged them to apply themselves more than the minimum required to pass the course.
My teaching emphasizes digital media literacy; I strive to help my students direct the critical thinking skills they already have toward analysis of the digital media they consume daily. I constantly evaluate how the skills students learn can be useful outside of the classroom. Drawing on examples from advertising, news, and video games allows students to apply their skills to “real-world” situations. I challenge students to use what they learned about communication and rhetoric to analyze the world around them and construct compelling arguments to help explain it. During my lesson on AI in my Communication in a Changing World course, I had my students use ChatGPT to write their final essay and then the students graded the assignment ChatGPT wrote using the rubric I provided. Students not only learned not to rely on ChatGPT to write assignments for them (most essays didn’t score higher than a “B” and students noted that ChatGPT can make up sources and confidently say falsehoods), but it led to a class-wide discussion on how AI could potentially shape our communication practices as well as the potential negative consequences of relying too much on AI for communication. Through my student-led process, I encourage my students to be independent, critical thinkers who boldly explore new ideas.
I want to make the classroom welcoming for people of all kinds of positionalities. I do my best to be cognizant of how my teaching might perpetuate systems of oppression. I know students from underserved communities might face challenges with funding, so I use free to access readings and course materials wherever I can. I also choose readings from Black and Indigenous scholars as foundational texts for my course not only to expand my students’ perspectives beyond the canon of communication studies but to allow my students to see themselves in the authors they draw from. My students in public speaking visit the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, where they watch a digital recreation of one of MLK’s speeches. Students not only reflected on how they learned from MLK’s speaking techniques but also about the speech’s relevance to our current moment of civil rights struggles and how they can carry the message of the speech forward. I value conversations led by students from subaltern backgrounds and through my commitment to equity in the classroom, I do my part to create spaces in academia where everyone’s voice is heard.
I strive to support students who have disabilities and other challenges that might impede their education. When I was a teaching assistant at North Carolina State University, I took every letter from the Disability Resources Office very seriously and often worked with students on an individual level to meet their needs. I take advantage of the multiple affordances of learning management systems like Canvas and Moodle and other software to provide accommodations, such as classroom recording and livestreaming class sessions via Zoom. The hybrid format for one of my courses helped one of my students attend classes even though they couldn’t drive to the university due to a roadblock in their route. Everyone deserves to learn and thrive, and so everyone in my classroom deserves to get what they need to achieve their goals.
A successful learning environment is one where students feel empowered to experiment and participate in ways that are meaningful for the class and for themselves. I motivate my students to be active, engaged learners by allowing them to contribute to the dynamic flow of the course. Through incorporating emerging technologies into student-led, practice-based learning, I prepare my students for fruitful careers and embolden them to take a critical look at the world and change it for the better.
If you would like to see feedback from students I collected from course evaluations, you can visit my website.