Category: Uncategorized

This semester, I’m teaching a literature course with a mouthful name: Thinking for a Thriving Planet – Environmental Politics in Worlds that Never Were. It’s part of a Department of English Teagle Grant in which ten faculty from different liberal arts departments teach fiction/non-fiction literature courses grounded in their respective disciplines. It was a tremendously fun and insightful course, and I’d been chomping at the bit to teach it again.

I taught a variant of this course at the US Air Force Academy in 2018. In that version, cadets analyzed science fiction and fantasy literature using international relations theory (I also included a block on board games and roleplaying games). For their midterm, the cadets had an open book/open note short essay exam analyzing an excerpt from the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting, which questions such as, how would realism interpret a 20th-level character freely adventuring across sovereign boundaries? And, how does magic in this setting influence the balance of power in this setting? The course culminated in a world analysis paper, requiring students to analyze at least three books in a series. I was also able to get post-Herbert Dune author Kevin J. Anderson and roleplaying game designer Sean Patrick Fannon as guest speakers, and authors Jeanne DuPrau (The Book of Ember) and John Scalzi (Old Man’s War) to comment on cadet papers written on their respective books.

For my current class, I was required to focus on environmental politics per the Teagle Grant. One minor problem: I don’t specifically study environmental politics. Too easy–I’ll learn alongside my students! Soliciting the help of my department’s environmental politics scholars–shout out to Bob Duffy, Ryan Scott, Dimitris Stevis, and Marcela Velasco–I assembled a collection of seminal environmental politics paired with six speculative fiction books, plus a book chapter appetizer. Listed below in order of course appearance:

• Tolkien, Return of the King (Book 6, Chapter 9, The Scouring of the Shire)
• DuPrau, The City of Ember
• Herbert, Dune
• Stewart, Earth Abides
• Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
• Valenti, The Past is Red

I’d already settled on Bacigalupi, DuPrau, Herbert, Miller, but folks on the Political Scientists Facebook page suggested Stewart and Valenti (and UNLV’s Chris Jensen suggested opening with the Tolkien chapter to ease students into analysis). They also have a similar midterm, analyzing an excerpt from the roleplaying game Shadowrun, and a world analysis paper grounded (pun unintended) in environmental politics. I’m also including a games lesson and two lessons on films.

Another challenge is that, unlike my 400-level USAFA course, this version is 100-level. Whereas my USAFA students already had introductory major’s courses under their belts, my current students were hit with a firehose right out of high school (hence, why Chris Jensen’s Tolkien chapter suggestion was a great idea). I’ve mitigated that by reminding my students that this is a discussion-based course with no right or wrong answers, just poorly organized ones. I also taught them strategies for approaching the material using Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book as a foundation. I think they understand that the thinking is high, but the risks are low now, as they exploded out of their shells yesterday to discuss Dune–I barely had to say or do anything beyond selecting raised hands!

So far, so good, but the midterm will be their next big challenge.

I likely just gave every academic a heart attack!

I’ll assuage your worries. The words are from legendary wargame designer Jim Dunnigan, author of Wargames Handbook. What he meant by those words was that first, use the minimum amount of game mechanics necessary to model your game’s objectives, and second, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to design games from scratch. I’ll discuss objectives further in a later post and focus on design “plagiarism” here.

Game mechanics are the rules that govern player behavior, such as card game hands, using dice to measure chance in a roleplaying game, or dribbling a basketball. Odds are someone’s already designed game mechanics that comes close to modeling your game’s objective. Even the first roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, was born from tabletop wargaming mechanics. Instead of designing from a blank page, borrow mechanics from those other games. Indeed, since game mechanics can’t be copyrighted, you can often download game rulebooks for free directly from publishers.

What this means for you as an educator is that there’s a world of material out there that you can use, mix, and match for gaming your course learning objectives. For example, For my Fall 2019 Comparative Authoritarianism course, I borrowed mechanics from Risk and Pandemic to build a zombie apocalypse game that measured students’ knowledge of different regime types and their expected regime behaviors (assessing games will be another topic!).

Great, where do you learn game mechanics? The best way is to play games (or watch people play), and the second best way is to read rulebooks. I’m lucky that Fort Collins has two game stores where customers can borrow games in the store for free (and Gryphon Games & Comics also rents out games for a few dollars a day, which is nice when games such as Gloomhaven cost $150).

In the absence of a local game store, BoardGameGeek is a fantastic resource. PAXsims is also great for following the professional, training, and education gaming scene. If you want a handy mechanics reference, I recommend Engelstein and Shalev’s Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design (2022).

The holy grail for political science educators, however, is Gaming Political Science, hosted by the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. I imagine Dr. John Filter cloistered away like a gaming monk, gathering games published in the Journal of Political Science Education, International Studies Perspectives, Perspectives on Politics, and so on (I’ll do future posts on games in journals, let alone numerous other resources).

I’m James “Pigeon” Fielder, roosting in Colorado State University’s Department of Political Science! I took up Chad’s request to help manage ALPS and am still getting my bearings, but I’ll start a regular posting schedule soon. That, and soliciting more guest submissions!

Short bio: in 2019 I retired as a USAF Lieutenant Colonel and associate professor of political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and chasing tenure-track positions in my late-40s was not my idea of a good time. My wife further advised, “honey, we can move anywhere you want after you retire, as long as it’s Fort Collins, Colorado,” which simplified my tactical problem. Thankfully, CSU had an open pool need and I’d met some faculty at MPSA who put in a good word for me, and now I figure they plan on keeping me around since they replaced my paper office nameplate with an etched plastic one.

I research the social aspects of cyber conflict, the politics of games (the settings themselves, their influence on players, and gamer culture), and political analysis of science fiction and fantasy literature. I also work for Littleton, CO-based roleplaying game design firm Mobius Worlds Publishing and consult on professional gaming–I’m legitimately a professional gaming nerd. When it comes to active learning, then, my posts will likely be game-centric.

Hello for now, and I’ll see you in future posts!

Painfully aware as I am that I’m writing this in the 11th year of almost weekly blog posts, it’s still worth considering when the best thing you can do is nothing.

This is going to be focused on the classroom, but you can draw your logical extensions to whatever arena you like.

Given we talk and write a lot about increasing participation, it might seem odd to even raise the question of participating less, but the two are necessarily interlinked, in three key ways.

Firstly, drawing back on your participation as an instructor leaves more space for your students to participate more.

No one likes a silence and I’m guessing you’ve noticed this in class. I’m also guessing you went to fill it, because that’s a natural thing to do and because you’re the person ‘in control’: it feels like your duty.

But holding back will encourage your students to step forward and do the filling for you. If they see that you aren’t going to fill the empty void, then they are more likely to do it instead. The moral hazard that comes with you always being the chatty one is that there’s no need to participate as a student.

At the most extreme, you can absent yourself completely from the teaching space, but even just holding back for a few seconds in a seminar might be enough to get students to open up.

Secondly, don’t talk if you’ve nothing to say.

Again, you’ve noticed when other people talk a lot without saying much/anything. Some of them might be in your class; others in meetings you’ve attended. Don’t be that person.

Think about whether your interjection is adding value to the discussion or not. That might be about new substantive information, or about resolving misunderstandings, or about different solutions to issues, or something else that moves things along. But it should always be about purposeful intention.

Again, this is practice that can help students too: they learn from your practice as much as from your discourse, so model the kind of debate you want to get out of them. Signal where there is more to be extracted from a discussion and when it’s time to move on.

Finally, there is a developmental aspect to this as well. As your class progresses, you might want to redraw the line of where to hold back, to give more space to them and less to you.

Behind all of this is a model of student learning that places them in the centre of things: you adjust to them as much as – if not more – them to you. Knowledge, ability and confidence all should be growing through their time with you, so your teaching interactions should usefully reflect that.

Ultimately, this is yet another post about being a reflective educator; thinking about what you do, why and how you do it. Thinking about when silence might be the best choice is certainly part of that process.

ISA was full of great ideas in the teaching and learning space, as it usually is. I want to talk about the one that has prompted me to blog for the first time in too long. Short version: chairs or course coordinators should screen student course evaluations for harmful, vitriolic comments prior to passing them on to instructors. First, credit: this idea originates with Dr. Meg Guliford, Penn Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, who was a panelist on a roundtable for early career faculty to talk about their experiences as teachers. It was a fantastic panel set up by Michael Murphy of the University of Ottawa, and I’m using this platform to raise the signal on what I think is an important practice that should be standard at all institutions.

Dr. Guliford noted the harmful effects of reading vitriolic comments on student evaluations, particular for a professor that is BIPOC, a woman, LGBTQ+ or a member of another marginalized community. Imagine you are scrolling through stacks of evaluations after a class has ended, looking for constructive feedback that you can use to reflect on your teaching practice. Instead, you read the most unconstructive of comments–racist, sexist, hurtful language that is included under the veil of anonymous end of course evaluations. There is no value in an instructor reading such comments; the practice is strictly harmful to the morale and mental health of the instructor.

So why not screen them first? Student evaluations are not private–they are typically processed by someone who passes them on to instructors after course grades are posted. Often copies are given to departmental leadership to review the performance of faculty in the classroom, and they are referred to in decisions on tenure and promotion. Why not then, as part of the process, have a step where someone in leadership reviews the evaluations and simply removes any comments that are entirely unconstructive and hurtful? Of course negative comments that are constructive in nature (“I did not get any feedback on assignments; the professor showed up late constantly; the professor was unprepared or unclear”) should remain–I only advocate for removing the kind of comments that can are entirely meant to hurt. To use the famous phrase, ‘you know it when you see it’. If you don’t think that happens, or have never seen it–I’m happy for you, but ask that you don’t assume your experience is representative.

In my view, this practice should be standard at all institutions. Sure, it will require some extra time from departmental leadership, but I can think of few things that cost so little and yet could do so much. Big thanks to Dr. Guliford for raising this idea and I hope to see it adopted widely.