Laurel Jean Masters Thesis in English Teaching of Writing

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS TAUGHT ME HOW TO WRITE: ANALYZING THE PARALLELS BETWEEN GUIDES FOR NEW TEACHERS AND TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME MANUALS By Laurel Jean A Project Presented to The Faculty of Humboldt State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English: Teaching of Writing Committee Membership Professor Susan Bennett, Chair Professor Laurie A. Pinkert Professor Nikola Hobbel, Graduate Coordinator December 2013 ABSTRACT DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS TAUGHT ME HOW TO WRITE: ANALYZING THE PARALLELS BETWEEN GUIDES FOR NEW TEACHERS AND TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME MANUALS Laurel Jean Rule books for tabletop, pen and paper roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, are full of advice for creating stories that are coherent, three-dimensional, and engaging. In a composition classroom, students are striving to create arguments that are cogent, demonstrate their ability to analyze, and embed those arguments in interesting and relevant pieces of writing. Parallels exist between composition pedagogy and the techniques “players” and the leader in a Dungeons and Dragons-like game utilize to tell a story: collaboration, understanding audience, and maintaining continuity and coherence. Teachers in a composition classroom and Game Masters in a tabletop, pen and paper roleplaying game use similar techniques to achieve similar goals. I will expose these parallels with the aim to demonstrate what composition instructors can borrow from role playing manuals. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. iv LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................... 1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM ...................................................................... 4 DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS AND ITS FUNCTIONALITY ........................... 7 BANKING METHOD VS SCAFFOLDING METHOD ..................................... 13 ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT ......................................................... 15 STUDENTS' DESIRE TO LEARN: ENJOYMENT AND FLOW ...................... 22 STUDENT MOTIVATION .................................................................................. 26 COLLABORATION ............................................................................................. 29 ANALYSIS ....................................................................................................................... 34 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ............................................................. 51 CONLCUSION ................................................................................................................. 53 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 55 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1 ................................................................................................................................ 5 Table 2 .............................................................................................................................. 34 iv 1 INTRODUCTION I have wanted to be a teacher since I first started school. When I was eight years old, I asked my mother for an overhead projector, so I could teach my stuffed animals “more efficiently.” I loved school, and I assumed other students felt the same way about their teachers and classes as I did. Unfortunately, however, not everyone has a positive experience in school. The burden to learn something from a class does not fall solely on the students’ shoulders; a combination of things creates either a constructive or a destructive learning environment: diet, exercise, sleep, engaging subject matter, instructor teaching style, even what the students thought about as they were sitting down to take a test can affect the test’s outcome. The day they take a test, even, has an effect. Students who I often blamed for their own disinterest and poor grades were really just struggling against an education system that wasn’t working for them. One of the most difficult things to discover thing I discovered in my studying to become an educator was that I have very little control over the above conditions. I cannot make my college freshmen get enough sleep; I cannot make them eat better and exercise more, and I certainly cannot force them to think positively about the day ahead when they come into the room. But after having gone through eight years of learning to teach, the core messages that I have taken away from my training are that there are so many things that can go wrong in a classroom, and that there are so many ways to teach. In my 2 training to become an educator the fact that there is no one right way to teach has been simultaneously the hardest thing to accept, and the best thing I have come to understand. However, I didn’t just encounter these revelations in the classroom. One might assume I discovered these core lessons in the context of my college career, and I did. But I really began to accept that there is no one right way to teach when I began playing tabletop, pen and paper roleplaying games (hereafter referred to as tabletop RPG’s). I have learned an enormous amount in a formal classroom setting. I would never discount the knowledge garnered from my undergraduate courses, my graduate courses, office hours with instructors and students. But, I have also learned a lot from my time playing tabletop RPG’s. Just like in the classroom, the first lesson I took away was that many things can go wrong, and the second lesson I learned was that there are lots of ways to make sure things go well. There is no one right way to run a tabletop RPG, and there is no one correct way to teach. I have learned something from every game I have ever played. Given that I have played, on average, eight hours’ worth of tabletop RPG’s a week for eight years, that adds up to a lot of “study.” My experiences running and playing tabletop RPG’s has a lot in common with my experiences teaching, specifically composition, but also teaching in general. I believe there is something significant happening when people sit down to play a tabletop RPG. I believe that learning is happening, collaboration, sophisticated navigation of argument and narrative, and perhaps most significantly, roleplaying. Many teachers use roleplaying in the classroom: Write up a lab report, even though it’s never going to get published and you are totally unqualified to—pretend like you are; write an essay as 3 though you know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t. “Fake it until you make it” is one of the mottos of students from kindergarten to graduate school. Much of school is roleplaying. Education scholars, such as Lev Vygotsky and Mihaly Cziksentmihayli have given it different names—activating the zone of proximal development, finding flow—but it all boils down to people pretending to be something they’re not, yet. And while I will never become a powerful Wizard, or a stealthy Thief, or an Elf, I can always pretend. Inspiration for teachers can be found in lots of places, and while theories dealing with games and their functionality have been well gone over, gamification of the classroom is a relatively new concept, and theories related to gamification are becoming more and more legitimate with each passing year. Entire sections of conferences are now dedicated to games and role playing, even video games. For example, I recently attended the 13th annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference as a speaker, and was able to sit in later on an entire panel discussion about games and their functionality. In fact, one of the sources for my project came from this panel. This Master’s thesis is about exploring the parallels between how to teach and how to run a tabletop RPG, by closely reading tabletop roleplaying game manuals and instructional guides for teaching, exposing what I have known for several years: that these parallels exist. In exposing these parallels I demonstrate the relevance of roleplaying games to the ongoing academic conversation about gamification and mentoring new teachers. 4 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM There are many different kinds of tabletop RPG’s from which to choose. For the purposes of this paper I am limiting my discussion to Dungeons & Dragons. I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for eight years—not nearly as long as some, but D&D has taught me a plethora of useful, relevant skills and I have approached my role as player and as a Dungeon Master, or DM, with a different outlook than some of my more veteran peers, because I am a writing student, and I want to be a writing teacher. While I haven’t had the opportunity to employ all of my skills from my hours spent pretending to kill dragons and ogres, I have made careful note of how they might be useful in the future in relation to writing instruction. Those skills are highly relevant to formal instruction, as is evident in guides for writing instructors. Manuals for roleplaying game guides exhibit the same examples of skills and techniques for instructors. For example, chapter 1 of Wizards of the Coast’s 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide I, titled “How to Be a DM [Dungeon Master],” opens with the following claim: “Most games have a winner and a loser, but the D&Ds and Dragons Roleplaying Game is

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