Playing Out Social Action: Game-Based Learning and Visual Rhetorical Analysis

Introduction

In our role as writing instructors of required composition classrooms at our particular land-grant university—Iowa State—we have substantial freedom in the selection of content for our courses. We have both found ourselves using materials that deal with content related to social justice, current events, global issues, and controversies for a variety of pedagogical reasons, but the learning objectives of our courses that revolve around helping our students develop communication skills are best served when our students see communication as meaningful action. At the headwaters of rhetorical views about genre over the past decades, Carolyn R. Miller's explanation of genre is a great example of how we can think about the conventions we are teaching as enabling our students to act. She argues that genre is "a classification based in rhetorical practice . . . and organized around situated actions" (155). This action-centered view privileges the purpose of communication instead of the form of the communication. When we select readers and assignments for our students each semester, we have the opportunity, and obligation, to consider the types of voices we are privileging, and the types of action we are promoting.

An additional challenge that we face when assigning texts in a composition classroom is that the ideas in the texts can become separated from, and secondary to, the goals of the course. We bring in provocative and insightful writers, only to have our students quickly move on to the next task. Of course, we can have them respond to the authors, but that may leave some of our students in the position of writing to satisfy us that they have read. We do not really need our students to tell us what the reading was about because we read the texts too. Instead, we hope to find ways to have our students engage the ideas and perspectives represented by the texts.

We are aware that many of our students struggle with thinking outside their own perspective—or, at least, they are often resistant to change. We want our students to see the existence, variety, and importance of diverse perspectives as well as why differing views of the world persist. We are not alone.Betty Jeanne Taylor and others argue that "As institutions of higher education become more diverse, there is a heightened obligation to implement educational programs that prioritize reflective learning about self as well as learning about perspectives other than one's own" (231), and we agree. However, researchers such as Lynn Leonard and others explain that "The word 'diversity' is politically charged, and biases and preconceptions will precede students' . . . acceptance of diversity as a legitimate area of scholarship" (56). If we as instructors want to bring these conversations into the classroom, then it is important that we set up an environment where students have tools to explore these concepts without becoming prematurely recalcitrant.

Giving students a chance to explore social issues in our courses requires us to think through ways of inviting students to explore and understand. Crucial for us in this respect is the world of games. Within a game, instructors can address these (sometimes delicate) issues while students have a chance to consider seriously new or unfamiliar perspectives. Within our game in particular, we present multiple scenarios that require visual analysis, all of which include issues of social justice and inclusion. In doing so, we demonstrate how teacher-made instructional materials can employ invitational rhetoric to encourage a receptive stance from students that will enable a better understanding of the diversity of perspectives as well as a deeper understanding of rhetorical theory.

Inviting Perspectives

As teachers, we often become focused on the use of rhetorical theory to teach students how to write, and justifiably so. However, we need to remember that rhetorical theory offers more than basic tools for analyzing and producing essays. Our goal is to educate, but we must still carefully consider our own contexts in using the classroom to communicate ideas. We use rhetorical theory to discuss a whole range of communicative acts. In fact, our own activities in the...