In a new freshman writing class, movies and video games are part of the curriculum
by David Carew
photo by Daniel Dubois
The enthusiasm in their voices is palpable.
Professors Jay Clayton and Matt Hall sit in an interactive conference room at the Hill Center, eagerly bouncing insights, observations and reflections off one another as they discuss their new first-year writing survey Worlds of Wordcraft: Narrative Forms in the Digital Classroom. Their unique course uses video games, DVDs and literature as fundamental – and synergistic – teaching tools.
On the surface, the two men seem dissimilar: Clayton is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and chair of the English department; Hall is assistant vice chancellor for Information Technology Services. But they share a close friendship, a zest for interdisciplinary instruction, and now, a singular passion for their just-born class.
“Worlds of Wordcraft is a first-year writing survey that helps students think critically and write effectively beyond the basic composition level,” Clayton said. “It reveals how narratives are transformed as they move across media, from books to films to digitally generated virtual worlds.”
To achieve this multi-dimensional, multi-media learning experience, students gather around a large conference table with their wireless laptop computers and hardback novels open in front of them. Large screens linked to DVD players and video games dominate one end of the classroom.
“We can read a scene from the novel, show the movie version of the scene, and talk about the narrative transformation between book and movie,” Clayton said. “Then, we actually have all 17 of the students in the video game at the same scene they’ve (just) read in the novel and witnessed in the movie. In this way, we explore fundamental concepts of narrative theory. We look at how different media affect narrative structure on multiple levels, ranging from such basic features as character, setting, point of view and the experience of space and time.”
Why does such comparison matter? What value does it hold for students?
“In literary studies today, scholars are deeply interested in understanding how the medium has always shaped narrative form. For example, the movement from oral formulaic poetry to the Homeric epic to the written epic of Virgil or Milton is something you would study,” Clayton said. “You also want to make students aware of how something that seems unique to the YouTube era (relates) to the book era and to the oral formulaic poetry era.”
Hall said the course emphasizes that just because we live in a digital age, students still need to read novels and express themselves through writing.
“Instant messaging, e-mails, these high-speed, low-drag technologies – they are making people not socially equipped for the impact that rapid, thoughtless communication can have on their lives,” he said. “People have to slow down; they have to apply some discernment and thought to what they consume. So this course, ultimately, is about making students write.”
The writing demands of the course are fairly rigorous, Clayton said, including a required weekly blog entry, which is graded.
Students also are required to write three formal argumentative essays. Hall said the high-tech dimension of the essay process includes peer review as well as digital collaboration, facilitated by Microsoft Live Office, which allows students to post, compare and review essays online. Vanderbilt is one of only five institutions of higher learning in the country benefiting from Microsoft Live Office in this way, he said.
Another benefit of the course is its highly interactive nature, which is something of an equalizer among classmates and the instructors.
“Students aren’t in a mode where it’s relatively flat in terms of the hierarchy,” Hall said. “Jay and I do possess the knowledge, the agenda, the power to grade. But students are not only in the business of receiving new knowledge, they’re creating new knowledge.”
The benefits of that go far beyond the classroom.
“This environment facilitates knowledge creation and helps students collaborate in ways they otherwise would not have,” Hall said. “That, in turn, will match the ways in which they’re going to collaborate when they leave Vanderbilt and become (community) leaders.”
Clayton said the course is a classic example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight that “the medium is the message.”
“One of the themes of this class is that knowledge in the 21st century is collected and disseminated collaboratively and collectively in ways that were not as common in the 20th century. So the mode of the class becomes part of the content of the class.”
Hall and Clayton said they eagerly await one of the upcoming stages of the course: when the students create their own online video game using “Neverwinter Nights 2,” a highly customizable game from Atari set in a Renaissance fantasy world.
“You have to write your own code for it, so that will be the basis – the platform for creation – for writing the code for a video game based on Spenser’s Faerie Queen,” Hall said.
Clayton said the idea has drawn interest from other colleagues.
“When I’ve talked about this to other English professors, they are dazzled, because Spenser is a very hard sell to undergraduates. It is difficult to make them appreciate Spenser’s poetry. Our wager is that the excitement of going in and building your own Spenserian world is going to produce an engagement with the text that we’ve never seen before in a freshman class.”
This interactive course is readily available outside the walls of the Hill Center classroom. In fact, the captured audio, video, text and images are available to all Vanderbilt students – and anyone else – on iTunesU, a section of the iTunes Web site where increasingly more Vanderbilt professors are making class materials available.
“The class ends at 3:30 p.m. and I usually have all the uploading done by 4 p.m.,” Hall said. “At that point, everything is available. You can download every exciting episode.”
To view content, read student blogs, listen to podcasts, or view related video, visit http://worldsofwordcraft.wordpress.com or the Worlds of Wordcraft course listing in the Vanderbilt section of iTunesU.
Worlds of Wordcraft Resources
Video Games
“The Lord of the Rings Online,” 2007 Edition
“Dark Age of Camelot”
“Neverwinter Nights 2”
Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry
The Fellowship of the Ring
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Faerie Queen
by Edmund Spenser
Gamer Theory
by McKenzie Wark
Remediation: Understanding New Media
by Jay David Bolter
Half Real: Video Games Between Real Worlds and Fictional Worlds
by Jesper Juul
DVD
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
David Carew is a freelance journalist and the author of Everything Means Nothing to Me: A Novel of Underground Nashville.
To comment on this story, e-mail view-editor@vanderbilt.edu.
Posted 11/01/07
