Using Monstrosity to Teach First-Year Writing

Composition I: A Monstrous Discourse is a game-inspired first-year writing course where students focus on organizing and revising ideas and writing well organized, thoroughly developed papers that achieve the writer’s purpose, meet the readers’ needs, and develop the writer’s voice. Monstrosity is the framework for their exploration into the academic discourse. Playing the role of a steadfast investigator, the students examine how monsters work rhetorically in a variety of cultural texts from folktales to films and how these depictions not only act as cultural transmitters of social norms, but also as revelations into the shadow nature of these cultures—exposing the prejudices, repressions, and underlying anxieties typically hidden by the facade of social standards. Because of their inherent ambiguity, monsters encourage open-mindedness, productive questioning, careful scrutiny, and flexible research, all of which are the hallmarks of good scholarship. Students are encouraged to bring this open-mindedness and flexibility to their thinking and writing. Though the content and assignments of this course may unsettle, the experimentation prepares students for success at the collegiate level.

A Monstrous Beginning

I taught my first university course in August of 2015 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. This first-year writing course served as an introduction to academic writing. In addition to the sample syllabi the new instructors were given, I had a friend that taught the course previously and was happy to share some of his course materials with me. As I combed through this material, I noticed that while the assignments were connected mechanically—i.e. the skills needed for each assignment were scaffolded—overall the assignments felt disjointed. I instantly knew I wanted more cohesion between my major writing assignments and minor learning activities.

I also wanted to avoid some of the pitfalls other instructors encountered with their students’ writing, specifically regarding the generic topics students seem to gravitate towards when doing research. I had heard countless stories from other writing instructors complaining about the number of research papers covering legalization of marijuana, gun control, and abortion. The instructors could tell most students chose these topics because they are easy to research or, worse, easy to plagiarize. Taking all of this into consideration, I decided that a themed course would be a nice solution to a lot of these concerns and I had the perfect theme in mind: monsters.  

The Monster Emerges

In The Truce of God, Rowan Williams wrote “[s]ocieties give themselves away in their favorite fantasies; they betray their assumptions about what the world is really like. And that is a very good reason to take popular fantasy with a great deal of seriousness.” We are the stories we share, and it says a great deal about humanity that some of our most popular stories involve monsters. People are captivated by stories of monsters that lurk in the shadows, ready and waiting to gobble up the young and naive. And I am no exception. From fairytales to films, I love all things horrifying. It is from this infatuation that I came to discover the cultural significance of monsters and the monstrous and why I thought it would make a great theme for a writing course.

All societies have monsters and a lot of those monsters overlap from one culture to another. For example, almost every religion has an ouroboros myth or legend. Such cultural similarities exist for a myriad of mythical monsters making it a subject ripe with possibilities for research and exploration. Second, my warehouse of knowledge on the subject would make it extremely easy for me to help my students locate suitable topics for major and minor writing assignments. I would be able to see the gaps in the writing versus the gaps in their scholarship. In other writing courses where students can write about any topic, it’s impossible for an instructor to have intimate knowledge of everything their students might choose. It can make it hard to know if it’s the students writing that needs work or if they’ve chosen a topic that is too broad or narrow, and they need more guidance with their research. As an added bonus, my love of the subject matter meant that no matter what topic my students chose, I would find their papers interesting.

Defining Monstrosity

With my theme selected, it was time to start building the course. Based on my background as an instructional designer, I knew I wanted to use the Quality Matters Rubric as the foundation for the course because it provides a solid framework that is heavily researched and peer-reviewed. In the QM rubric, all learning starts with well-defined learning goals that inform the assessments, learning materials, and student interactions. The rubric also addresses the need for an overview that guides students through the course structure and expectations as well as the technology that will support the students’ progress through the course.

Learning Objectives and Assessments

My learning objectives were a combination of the UA Little Rock’s general education core curriculum, specific outcomes that all composition teachers had to follow, and the outcomes from the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), which was the previous framework used by my department. My course-level objectives utilized the university’s mandated outcomes and the WPA outcomes became the basis of my unit level objectives. These objectives shaped the content and structure of the remaining course materials.

With my objectives in place, I now had to decide how I would assess my students’ mastery of these outcomes. Typically, the first-year writing courses at UA Little Rock consisted of three to four major writing projects, a number of minor writing assignments, and an end-of-semester portfolio. Keeping this in mind, I decided to model my assignments on a friend’s first-year writing assignments and an article I found online written by Mark Collins, “The Method to the Monstrous: Monster Studies and College Composition.” Following the example of other first-year writing courses, my course featured several minor writing activities, four major writing projects—an argument essay, a rhetorical analysis, a personal narrative, and a research paper—and a portfolio.

Instructional Content

The first semester I used Everyone’s An Author, one of the available textbooks offered to the first-time teaching assistants, as the primary writing text for the course. It was a good textbook with a lot of useful information and it covered all of the writing material I would need for the course. I pulled the rest of the readings from websites and online databases. When I taught the course again, I decided to use Writing Spaces and other open educational resources because most students didn’t purchase the textbook the first semester. I also expanded the collection of web and database articles used the previous semester, added more content from YouTube, and created my own video lectures with updated Google Slides.

The course activities were designed to help the students actively engage with the instructional materials and serve as self-assessment of their learning. These activities consisted of in-class discussions with corresponding reflective journal posts, timed writing exercises to ensure they were reading the course materials, in-class application activities that allowed students to practice what they were learning, and peer reviews to help them reflect on their writing. These engagement activities urged students to contemplate, manipulate, and employ the instructional materials in a more meaningful way than they normally would.

Course Technology

For this course, I wanted to leverage game elements and mechanics as a way for students to track their progress. This meant that as students successfully completed major and minor writing assignments, they would gain ranks, levels, and experience points rather than earn a letter grade on assignments and activities. This meant I needed to find a system that would report several types of feedback to the students as they progressed through the course. Luckily, UA Little Rock uses the Blackboard learning management system which has a very sophisticated Grade Center. With some customization of the settings, I was able to gamify the grade book for my students so it would display their experience points, levels, and other game-related metrics instead of the typical letter grades they were used to seeing.

In addition to Blackboard, I used a lot of Google products both in the creation and delivery of my course. Almost all of my course design was conceptualized in Google Sheets, which allowed me to easily map out assignments and keep all the different mechanical components of the course in one place. With Google Slides, I was able to take advantage of it’s Q&A feature to promote in-class discussions. Students were asked to compose the drafts of their major writing projects in Google Docs because it was the easiest way to provide feedback on their work and the program provided a version history so students always had a copy of the previous versions of their assignments for review and reflection. Students were encouraged to use Google Sites to create their final course portfolio, but I also accepted sites built in Weebly and other platforms as well.

Finally, I tried to incorporate different types of social media like YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr with varying degrees of success. YouTube turned out to be one of the most successful resources because I could easily find and import videos directly into my Blackboard course shell. Before the start of the semester, I curated a massive collection of videos that the students could use for the various projects and even created a few of my own to help students navigate some of the more challenging aspects of the course.

Course Overview

The final component was the overview and introduction. This provided students with the expectations of the course and guided instruction on how to approach learning inside and outside of the classroom. The first semester I ran the course, I gave the students an orientation on the first day of class and included a lot of this information in the syllabus. The second semester, since I added more game elements to the course that changed how the structure was presented, students were given a course walkthrough that explained all the various components and the normal equivalencies.

What Worked

Course Development

The best idea I had was using Google Sheets to map out and develop my course. From my work as an instructional designer, I had experience working with content maps in the past. A lot of these were developed in Microsoft Word or Mind Mapping Software. I personally didn’t care for the layout of maps developed in either of these programs for various reasons. With Word, it was hard to rearrange and manipulate columns without the whole thing going haywire. And I just didn’t like the look of course maps created as mind maps. The best compromise for me was Microsoft Excel and, later, Google Sheets because not only could I easily reorganize my course content, but I could also use the spreadsheet functionality to calculate and distribute points across all of my assignments and activities.

Grading Scale

I decided early on that to use experience points instead of traditional letter grades and base the grading on a 10,000 point scale, later increased to 20,000. These decisions originated from my own experiences as a student. I often felt frustrated in classes where major projects or assignments were only awarded a few points. Working hard on a project and only earning 10 or 25 points felt like a slap in the face. I suspect using a low-point scale is supposed to make assignments seem more valuable, however it usually has the opposite effect. While I understood logically that the ratio of points toward the overall grade was what mattered, I still had a negative perception of the grading scale, and as a result the assignments, because it was so low.

For this reason, I decided to go the other way with my grading scale. Instead of a minor writing activity being worth 1 or 10 points, they were worth 100. While the ratio to the overall point total was the same as in a course using a 100-point or 1,000-point scale, the psychological effect was different. As a happy consequence, it also made it a lot easier to manipulate the distribution of points across my various assignments and activities.

Attendance and the Grading Scale

After seeing the way other faculty approached tardiness and absenteeism—most of which involved deducting a percentage of the student’s grade at the end of the semester—I decided to adopt a game mechanic popularly used in multiplayer online games where certain actions incurred the loss of experience points. Since all earned points in my course were additive—students could not lose points on an assignment, they could only gain them—giving absenteeism and tardiness a negative experience point consequence seemed to work pretty well. What I liked most about this approach was that students had full autonomy on how they earned or loss points in my class. The absence and tardiness calculators were set up in such a way that if a student missed eight class sessions, the highest grade they could earn in the course was a 70%, not including any extra credit opportunities. If a student chose to miss this much class, they would risk not earning credit for the course as anything below a letter grade of C earned no credit for the semester.

Writing Projects

Students seemed to respond really well to both the Defining Monstrosity and A Monstrous Story projects. Defining Monstrosity asked students to create a visual essay defining what monstrosity means to them and how writing shapes that definition. In A Monstrous Story, students composed personal narratives about a monstrous experience and then conducted an autoethnographic investigation to see what role their environment and culture played in constructing that experience. While I feel that A Monstrous Story went a little better the first semester as far as making the connection between experience and cultural impact, the students were highly engaged with the assignment both times it was presented.

Course Activities

In addition to these two writing projects, the two activities that went over the best with students were Message, Meaning, Mode, and Medium and a group annotation of the text “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” by Mark Federman. In Message, Meaning, Mode, and Medium, the class was divided into three groups and each group was given a version of Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red”: the book Through the Woods that features the comic, a webcomic from the author’s website, and an animation from YouTube. After the students read or watched their version of the text, we discussed how the medium of delivery and the mode of representation affected the message and the meaning of the text.

With the group annotation activity, the class read “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” and, in groups, they annotated the first two paragraphs of the text with comments or questions in a shared Google document. Outside of class, the students were tasked with annotating the rest of the article individually. I liked both of these activities because they gave the students a chance to interact with texts and apply what they were learning in the class.

What Didn’t Work

Assignment Progression

One area I’m still struggling with in this course is the progression of the writing assignments. The first semester, I assigned the personal narrative toward the end of the course. While the autoethnography part of the assignment was stronger, it felt out of place in relation to the research project. I thought this assignment should come earlier in the semester because it is less researched and more about their personal experience. When I presented this assignment earlier in the semester, the personal narratives were stronger but the autoethnographies were considerably weaker or completely non-existent. I still believe this assignment fits better at the beginning of the semester, but in the future I’m going to make the autoethnography a separate assignment toward the end of the term. I like the idea of the students revisiting their narratives at the end of the course and reflecting on what they learned.

I would do the same thing with the rhetorical analysis project. The first semester, students selected a commercial and discussed how and why monsters have persisted as a social construct. However, I feel this assignment came too early in the semester and, as a result, the students did not have enough background knowledge to write a successful argument—most of them were based purely on opinion and conjecture. The second semester, students could choose any short media from commercials to songs for their analysis, but were limited to only writing about the monsters from their research papers. The students that chose more obscure monsters struggled to find a short work to analyze. Like the personal narrative, I would probably break this assignment into two parts by letting students write an opinion based argument at the beginning of the term and then revisit that argument at the end of the term. Regardless of what monsters the students use for their major research paper, they should still be able to apply what they’ve learned.

Action Steps

When I rebuild this course, I’m going to focus the first part of the term on introducing and writing about the monstrous from a personal perspective with a visual essay, a personal narrative, and a rhetorical analysis paper using just the students’ experiences and prior knowledge. The second part of the semester, I’ll shorten the research paper, add a second rhetorical analysis project, and change the end of course reflection to the autoethnography removed from the personal narrative at the beginning of the semester. I think this would provide a better structure for the course and better support the learning because we’ll be revisiting old assignments with new ideas.

Reflective Writing

As with the assignment progression, I want to rethink the reflective writing done in the course. Most of the time the students didn’t truly reflect on their experiences, so I want to find a better way to work those into the final ethnography. I don’t want to students to see this writing as busy work, but as parts they can use for their final paper at the end of the semester. I would also like to have a lot more in-class activities like Message, Meaning, Mode, and Medium and the annotation exercise. Those activities were really engaging and I think the students learned better by applying what they read in the class activities rather than just discussing the reading.

Action Steps

I want to spend some time researching reflective writing and how to do it effectively. I’m sure there is a way to include this kind of personal writing in the course that doesn’t just come across as busy work. I have this idea for having students curate part of the course content, mainly the readings. Even using all open education resources, students barely read the assigned materials before class. I’m hoping that if they have some hand in selecting those readings or how those readings will be used in class, they will be more invested in those materials.

Extensive Game Mechanics

Finally, I would scale back the gamified elements I added the second semester. The first semester I had a nice balance with just a few elements like the experience points and Easter Egg Challenges. When I taught the course the second time, I changed everything to be more like a game from the names of the menu items to the way assignments were written. In hindsight, I can see how the amount of game mechanics confused the students and distract from the learning experience.

Action Steps

I’m going to revert back to the original game elements from the first version of the course and add in more optional Easter Egg Challenges. The Easter Egg Challenges turned out to be a good method for encouraging students to engage with resources on campus and with supplemental readings and activities they normally would ignore.

What I Learned

I’m currently working on a third iteration of this course that will expand on the things that worked and correct the things that did not. With this third version, my plan is to pull back some of the game elements and focus more on the activities and learning materials. The first two courses relied heavily on sources found online, but I think there were still too many unrelated readings in the course.

I’ve come to realize that students don’t actually need a textbook for most of the rhetorical concepts. Shorter articles and instructional videos about writing would probably be more effective and I’m also thinking of writing my own textbook that focuses on the monstrous as it relates to first-year writing. I’ll continue to curate texts, but I’ll start coupling those with in-class activities rather than just in-class discussions.