Disciplinary Dungeon Master

Abstract

This chapter provides a perspective on teaching from the Global South— Brazil, to be more precise. It describes how I ended up becoming a professor. I relied on something that was familiar to me in order to feel comfortable in class and it soon became my most noticeable characteristic as a professor. Based on active learning methodologies, I use narratives and storytelling to structure my classes as Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. It helped students to connect theory and practice and to understand complex/abstract concepts as this strategy allows me to catch student’s attention and to provide context, relevance, and meaningful connections between what they are studying and their real lives.

Full text

© The Author(s) 2020
J. Frueh (ed.), Pedagogical Journeys through World Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20305-4_18
CHAPTER 18
Disciplinary Dungeon Master
MarceloM.Valença
Current institution: state military academy
Classroom settings: large classes; introductory classes;
Pedagogical approach: active learning; storytelling
Disciplinary ID: Political Science, International Relations;
International Politics
I never thought I would end up being a professor. During high school, I
wanted to be a music journalist. My plans lasted for about three weeks after
I started college, when I decided to change my major and become an attor-
ney specialized in cyberlaw. Two semesters later, my plans changed again;
my goal became to work with human rights. And then it changed again a
few years later, as I applied for grad school in a completely different area.
Like other authors in this book, this chapter is autobiographical. My
narrative reects the many positive (and the not-so-positive) experiences I
have had in more than ten years as a professor. It reects the choices I
made and the challenges I faced while navigating that path from grad
school to a professorship. You won’t hear me complaining about not get-
ting a formal training in teaching or how teaching plays a marginal role in
tenure evaluations or funding—but these are facts, especially for adjunct
and junior faculty.
M. M. Valença (*)
Brazilian Naval War College, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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Although I am writing from Brazil, I believe my experience applies to
other academic cultures. I was an adjunct faculty member in private col-
leges for several years. I got tenured in a research university and moved to
a military school in a new tenure-track position and new research topics.
Now my research and teaching include maritime studies side by side with
international law and international politics.
A lot has changed since I started lecturing. I always had plans to guide
my choices, but none of those plans were fully executed, and I am totally
ne with that. I hope this chapter somehow helps graduate students and
junior faculty feel better about choices, strategies, and decisions made with
the intent of securing a more fullling career.
A WARM WELCOME
Graduate school was not part of my plans until my senior year. When I was
about to get my J.D., I landed a couple of job offers from law rms and
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ofce in
Rio. However, I was not sure I wanted to be an attorney. I had some OK
internship experiences, but I was not very fond of corporative environments.
While I was writing my undergraduate nal paper, my advisor sug-
gested that I apply for graduate school. He insisted a bit, explaining the
possibilities, challenges, and what to expect from pursuing an academic
career. After some reection, I decided to apply to the International
Relations (IR) program at another department, ranked among the top
three in the country. It was a long shot, but I decided to try. My applica-
tion was successful.
I wasn’t a complete stranger to IR.My nal paper discussed the tension
between solidarists and pluralists on human rights. During undergrad I
took some courses on IR theory and international politics that I really
enjoyed. Brazil was a rising player in international politics and there were
future opportunities for IR specialists. The job market was expanding due
to the boom in IR undergraduate courses, so teaching jobs were plentiful
at that time. Moreover, and being quite frank, I felt comfortable staying in
school for a few more years. My acceptance letter came in a few weeks and
I was scheduled to start in the following year.
My rst experience teaching was probably the same as most of grad
students. I was a teaching assistant (TA) in an introductory course on
Peace and Conict Studies for freshmen. The professor responsible for the
course was nishing his Ph.D.We had chatted a few times so he could
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brief me on my responsibilities and on the expectations students had of me
when he said something that still echoes in the back of my mind. It was
something like “no matter what happens in class, don’t be afraid to say, ‘I
don’t know. Can I look it up and get back to you next class?’” Can you
imagine a professor saying that to his students? At the time, I couldn’t.
His premise was that students have to trust you. And the best way to
get someone’s trust is to be honest with them and with yourself. He
explained that by knowing and recognizing your limitations, you will feel
more comfortable in class. Your lectures will sound more plausible and
students will be more tolerant, no matter which teaching strategy you
adopt, even the less orthodox ones.
This was both a relief and a shock. “OK,” I thought, “I am ok with the
idea that I don’t have to know everything, but should the students know
that?” My experience in college was that most of my professors dodged or
simply ignored challenging questions. Most were prosecutors, judges, or
renowned lawyers who wanted to have some college afliation just to beef
up their résumés. Being a faculty member in a top school would grant
them prestige. They didn’t want to show weakness or any aw that would
impact on their reputation. Even the few full-time professors were not as
honest as this Ph.D. candidate.
At one point in the semester, I was responsible for some of the sessions.
I still remember a particular class about humanitarian law, a familiar topic,
as I had already studied that when in college. I took some days to reread
my books and notes. I was going to be so prepared nothing wrong would
happen, but you can guess what happened in real life.
When the class started, I completely froze in front of forty-something
students. I did not remember a line of the material and I was not able to
speak for several minutes. OK, maybe it was only a few seconds, but it
seemed like forever. I may or may not have spoken some random sen-
tences and I probably looked like I was planning to run through the door.
Students were starting to laugh when that a-ha moment came up.
I sat on the desk, looked at the students, xed the sleeves of my shirt,
and started talking: “There was this episode of ‘The Simpsons’ when…”.
And then I started describing what happened in a given episode that
somehow correlated to our class. I don’t recall which episode I mentioned
or the situation I described, but it worked. As I spoke, I felt more com-
fortable and relaxed. The students sat there in a mix of shock and awe.
I talked for a little more than an hour that day. I was able to go through
all the topics by mixing it up with some references to pop culture as I
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somehow created a narrative full of twists and cliffhangers that resembled
the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaigns I played with my friends a
few years earlier. I went through the details of the reading material and I
even made some funny jokes. I left the room at the end of the class think-
ing that I did an OK job. By the end of the semester, I had lectured a few
more times in the same fashion and I felt good about the choices I made
and happy about the evaluations students provided at the end of the course.
As I go through these evaluations forms to write this piece, I see stu-
dents saying they had never had a professor lecturing the way I did. They
wrote that most TAs were eager to show they were knowledgeable and t
for the job. I, on the other hand, looked so authentic they were more open
to the ideas I was suggesting. They appreciated the efforts I made to cre-
ate connections between concepts and reality (or the reality constructed
by movies and cartoons) and praised me for easing their study sessions.
This experience helped me feel more comfortable and created a positive
learning environment in class. I was hired a year later to offer that same
course. When I was planning my course, I was not sure which path I
should follow. However, I knew I should look for strategies that worked
for both the students and me. I was just 26 and my students were only a
few years younger than me, so they knew I was still learning how to teach.
I decided that my best shot was to be as honest and open as I could be,
choosing strategies and topics I felt comfortable with. A little more than a
decade later, I guess it worked.
ON THEDOOR STEP
As with many grad students, I had no experience at all when I began
teaching. I could go on by saying I did not have any formal training dur-
ing grad school, but we all know the drill: programs don’t train grad stu-
dents to teach so we have to learn on the job while we try to publish to get
more attractive to land a teaching position.
My rst positions were as an adjunct faculty member at private colleges.
I was a Ph.D. candidate at the time and juggled multiple courses at these
schools with my studies and publications. I had both no incentive or time
to innovate in teaching, as adjunct faculty were hired as bodies to perform
the tasks senior faculty were not willing to do, that is, teaching and advis-
ing undergrad students.
A few colleagues were willing to help me during my rst months as a
teacher, advising me on how to perform better in the classroom. However,
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it didn’t work very well. Their focus was on easing the class workload; they
had the tips and shortcuts to replicate the same class in different courses.
They didn’t want to become better teachers, just to decrease the time
spent preparing classes. Their advice sounded like it would produce my
average college course. Monotonic lectures based on a prewritten script
that followed the table of contents of the adopted books. These classes
were uninteresting and didn’t excite me. I didn’t know what I was going
to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be like them, so I kindly ignored their
advice. I didn’t want to sound as boring as many of the professors I had.
Don’t get me wrong. I was not planning to be Robin Williams in Dead
Poets Society. But I did not want to replicate what they did. If I was going
to spend four hours every week with a group of students in class, at least I
should try to make the best of our time. Maybe even try to score some
good evaluations to add to my résumé. Not an easy task, I know.
Despite being the most reasonable option, I wasn’t comfortable doing
something that would make me unhappy if I were in my students’ shoes.
I had little time to prepare lectures from scratch, so I focused on bringing
my own abilities and the good experiences I had while in college to the
table. I also asked myself a simple, but revealing question: if I were a stu-
dent in that class, what I would like my teacher to do?
I am the type of person that needs to relate to something in order to
understand: ideas need to make sense by correlating to everyday events,
even the most ordinary ones. I decided to refer to something I had already
read about, applied sometimes during undergrad, and that was reasonably
successful. I decided that using active learning strategies to structure my
courses would be the way to go.1 As it helped me to study, I hoped it
should contribute somehow to my teaching.
Active learning consists, by and large, of using pedagogical techniques
to engage students in the discovery of knowledge (Lantis etal. 2018).
One of the premises of active learning strategies is that we are more able
to learn and retain knowledge by engaging critically with the subject and
exploring several cognitive processes (Valiente 2008). Active learning
1 At that time I did not know that the strategies I focused on my courses were described as
active learning. The strategies I chose to develop were means that I frequently referred to in
order to understand some specic aspects of what I was studying. The rst time I attended
an ISA conference, in 2007, I was introduced to a group of scholars studying pedagogical
techniques to improve how students learnt. They called it active learning and it involved
many strategies and class activities that I already did in class but without any structural
planning.
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strategies place students as active participants in the generation of knowl-
edge (Kille etal. 2008: 412), leading to a meaningful connection with the
subject. Moreover, studies show that we are able to retain more knowl-
edge when we create meaningful connections between what we study and
real-life examples (Cherney 2008; Valença and Inoue 2017). By using
these strategies, active learning promotes collaborative work between stu-
dents and teachers, as well as a conscious pursuit of long-term pedagogical
goals, such as the creation of conceptual linkages between theories and
real-world examples, better learning and retention, and adding meaning
to what is studied (Cherney 2008; Kember etal. 2008; Powner and
Allendoerfer 2008; Kille etal. 2010).
Incorporating active learning strategies increased my teaching skills. I
became more involved in this discussion and included cognitive studies
and pedagogical approaches in my research agenda. I realized I could
become a more dynamic professor without neglecting my substan-
tive research.
At rst, it did increase my workload to prepare classes. That’s a natural
outcome as I was getting used to new approaches, questions, and other
structural formalities. The workload, however, gradually decreased, as I
discovered efciencies in class. Depending on the topic, the number of
students, or the expected outcomes, I managed to create different peda-
gogical environments in class without much effort. I was able to pick from
a variety of activities to use in class. In some, I ran simulations and played
quick games. In others, I opted to use case studies or structured debates.
But one thing was common to all of them. In every class, I structured the
reading material within a story, as if I was a Dungeon Master (DM) in a
D&D campaign. It sounded like a solid strategy to communicate with my
students, as well as to engage them on the topics in the lecture.
I gradually increased my ability to connect theory and practice and
transmit it to my students. My classes were getting more crowded and I
landed a few job offers before graduating. As IR was becoming a popular
major in Brazil, private colleges were looking for new faculty. My reputa-
tion of being a good lecturer spread and helped me to get a better, yet still
temporary, position.
AU1
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INSIDE INFORMATION
My teaching methods and philosophy reect the difculties I had as a
student and the strategies I developed to overcome them. I adopted two
main approaches to my classes that eventually became my style of teach-
ing, as well as helped me to overcome my discomfort of public speaking:
telling a story as a way to engage students and using pop culture references
to illustrate the contents. These two aspects characterize my classes and
students know beforehand what they will face when they sign up for one
of my courses.
I have always struggled with theory. As I have said, abstract concepts
rarely made sense to me without adding some context to them. Beginning
in high school, I learned that I need to connect what I am studying to
applied situations, either referring to the real world or to the not-so-real-
but-still-relatable fantasy world. When I started teaching, I tried to repli-
cate these strategies for my students, using my experience as a DM to
create learning narratives. I spent a lot of time playing D&D during high
school. I always liked to be the DM to control the destiny of the players
and tweak the rules according to my will and humor. And, man, I was
good at that.
A noticeable quality of my courses is that they are structured as a long
narrative. I like to call it “story-telling teaching.” Since the rst time I
lectured, back when I was a TA, I realized any session could be structured
as a part of a campaign. The audience is looking for a narrative that will
catch their attention. In the same fashion, students are willing to be enter-
tained, to experience different emotions. The power to do so rests on the
hands of the narrator, the lecturer, the DM.Instead of describing elves,
dwarves, and dragons, I play with concepts such as deterrence, peace, and
security dilemma. These concepts play a key role in my courses and they
should be treated accordingly: their legends (i.e., their description and
their role in the discipline) were told to the folks and they battled other
concepts and ideas for glory (or perhaps dominance in a rival debate).
Teachers, as well as DMs, are in charge of the whole experience. Both
teaching and DMing develop your ability to grip an audience and keep
them involved with your story. You learn how to mix the ideas, elements,
and descriptions available for a class/game session and turn it into a coher-
ent narrative in real time. Being a DM helped me to identify quickly which
structures benet my story and what does not work with my players, I
mean, students.
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It may sound nerdy,2 but it helps students to get involved with the
course contents. They create expectations on the topics and become more
open to new ideas. They even try to guess what is coming up next. Young
students, especially freshmen, are not used to the vocabulary or the
demands of college courses. By creating a narrative and telling stories in
class, I am able to ease the transition from high school to college while I
introduce more complex discussions and get them prepared for
advanced courses.
Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t consider “making students feel
good about themselves and bringing joy to the world” to be a part of my
job description. I do consider, however, that, as much as entertainers do,
lecturers need to engage students and keep them with you while you walk
them through your narrative—or the contents of your course. Teaching is
a job that demands empathy and professors should be able to establish a
relationship with their students in class. That explains my choice to be a
DM in the discipline.
Much like a D&D campaign, every class is structured as a story, either
real or invented. I rst introduce students to the main aspect of a given
topic—“the plot.” The underlying goal in presenting students with the
plot is to describe the main topics and concepts of a given session as char-
acters. This part of the class is structured as a regular lecture, when I high-
light the background of our heroes as a way to create a context where the
characters will perform. It takes around 15–20minutes to create the right
atmosphere and then I move to the next part of the class.
The next step is to give life and agency to the characters. This is done
by creating a side story for these characters based on people students know
or even friends of mine. All my stories are either true or inserted in a pop
culture reference, which helps students create meaningful connections
with the situation described. Students get involved with the narratives to
the degree that they can relate to the stories. That is why I like to add
references to pop culture. The use of songs, cartoons, and movies do
impact how students comprehend and translate the denitions and ideas
of the class into operational concepts they may apply to real-life situa-
tions—or something close to it.
I use storytelling to try to explore students’ perceptions and emotions.
Sometimes the narrative involves humor; many times I keep them
2 I must confess I named the sections of this chapter after the chapters of Tolkien’s The
Hobbit. Is this nerdy enough?
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interested by creating an environment that resembles a thriller movie.
Most of the time, students are anxious to nd out what is going to happen
next. In some cases, I add a plot twist to the narrative, something that cre-
ates an uncomfortable situation and leads them to question the validity or
the relevance of what they are studying.
The conclusion of the lecture coincides with the end of the story. I offer
the tools and resources to create that “a-ha moment”: they connect the
dots and nd out the denition of a given idea or the state of a given topic.
During the debrief, when they are asked to recall the details they consider
most interesting, students usually bring some key aspects that helped them
to construct the concept or denition. They do seem to be truly involved
with the lecture, especially younger students.
This strategy works as a pedagogical tool in two different ways. First, it
provides a break from the intense debates and theoretical approaches to
study. It helps me to take some moments to mentally review how the class
is going and what I should do next. Students feel more involved in the
discussion and can easily refer to the idea we are discussing. Secondly, it
refers to something students can relate to in order to show them that the
idea/event is not that distant or abstract. Students realize that is possible
to learn and to build knowledge in any situation.
THE LAST STAGE
“Things should be made as simple as possible—not simpler” (Jackson
2011: p. xii). This principle is frequently neglected based on our expecta-
tions of what a scholar should be or represent. But that is exactly what we,
as teachers, should aim for. Many early career scholars do not think about
a teaching philosophy unless they are writing a piece for a job application.
By and large, we teach as we are told to or as we are used to.
The advice I got when I was a TA led me to focus on what I teach and
how I teach. It made me realize that I could do a lot more if I were able
to understand how I learn in order to help others to learn. As a result, I
got involved with and developed my way of storytelling teaching. It helped
me to be a better teacher and to enjoy what I do a lot more. Even if this
method does not t everyone’s prole, the experience of developing your
own strategies based on what you are may be benecial to early
career scholars.
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