Event Title
A Narrative of One’s Own: Twine and Community in the Classroom (Panel D)
Location
Room 409, South Hall
Start Date
30-9-2016 1:15 PM
End Date
30-9-2016 2:45 PM
Description
One of the best aspects of the Digital Humanities is their strong emphasis on praxis, especially the making of digital tools and archives that serve our scholarly and public communities. In this spirit, the Digital Humanities can challenge educators to reconfigure learning around making and doing, and furthermore to find new ways to create in a digital world. My presentation will focus on a recent course I taught at MSU on video games, narrative, and culture, in which I tasked my students with learning through creating their own games and stories with Twine. Twine is a free, web-based software for authoring interactive fictions and games, and by using it I encouraged my students to build their own understanding of narrative through hands-on experience, rather than just reading what scholars and authors say about it (though we did some of that too). With Twine my students could see that narrative is more than abstract theory for humanities scholars–it can be an incredible personal tool for making meaning and shaping understanding. As Twine games such as Squinky’s Quing’s Quest VII (created in response to GamerGate two years ago) demonstrate, a crucial aspect of this personal meaning making is navigating one’s relationship to larger communities and social structures, including building senses of belonging, critique, and even rejection. Furthermore, through the shared act of creating students become part of a new community of their own in the classroom, and it is up to the instructor to ensure that that community is inclusive and supportive of individual voices and narratives. Building on my experience in teaching with Twine, I argue that educators in the humanities should ground their teaching in practices of making and doing that go beyond traditional activities of reflection and critique (important, and indeed creative, as those often are). Doing so foregrounds the question of why humanities work matters, and answers that challenge head on by demonstrating how humanities concepts can be put into action. A renewed focus on praxis can even transform our understandings of our theories in generative ways, opening new perspectives and possibilities for our scholarship.
Links
A Narrative of One’s Own: Twine and Community in the Classroom (Panel D)
Room 409, South Hall
One of the best aspects of the Digital Humanities is their strong emphasis on praxis, especially the making of digital tools and archives that serve our scholarly and public communities. In this spirit, the Digital Humanities can challenge educators to reconfigure learning around making and doing, and furthermore to find new ways to create in a digital world. My presentation will focus on a recent course I taught at MSU on video games, narrative, and culture, in which I tasked my students with learning through creating their own games and stories with Twine. Twine is a free, web-based software for authoring interactive fictions and games, and by using it I encouraged my students to build their own understanding of narrative through hands-on experience, rather than just reading what scholars and authors say about it (though we did some of that too). With Twine my students could see that narrative is more than abstract theory for humanities scholars–it can be an incredible personal tool for making meaning and shaping understanding. As Twine games such as Squinky’s Quing’s Quest VII (created in response to GamerGate two years ago) demonstrate, a crucial aspect of this personal meaning making is navigating one’s relationship to larger communities and social structures, including building senses of belonging, critique, and even rejection. Furthermore, through the shared act of creating students become part of a new community of their own in the classroom, and it is up to the instructor to ensure that that community is inclusive and supportive of individual voices and narratives. Building on my experience in teaching with Twine, I argue that educators in the humanities should ground their teaching in practices of making and doing that go beyond traditional activities of reflection and critique (important, and indeed creative, as those often are). Doing so foregrounds the question of why humanities work matters, and answers that challenge head on by demonstrating how humanities concepts can be put into action. A renewed focus on praxis can even transform our understandings of our theories in generative ways, opening new perspectives and possibilities for our scholarship.