Music for a Boss Fight: Creating for the Context of Video Game Worlds

Creating music increases student engagement, and drawing on students’ background knowledge is a respectful way to value students’ lived experiences. By challenging students to create music for the context of a video game world, teachers can build on students’ previous knowledge and bridge that knowledge to the elements of music and creating music for specific contexts and purposes. This column outlines a project for fourth graders to create video game music for specific contexts within the game.

Challenging Students to Engage Meaningfully Across Ideological Differences

As college student educators, we notice a pattern of difficulty in our students’ ability to engage meaningfully across ideological differences. In this work, we posit the social media mindset’s penchant for reductive framing and outgroup shaming as a potential diagnosis of the problem. We explore how these tendencies show up in the classroom; we present alternative frameworks for stimulating better conversations across differences. These frameworks include promoting democratic civility (as opposed to niceness), understanding ourselves as works in progress (as opposed to engaging call-out and cancel culture), and creating the conditions for the call-in (as opposed to “ducking diversity”).

https://wjbphs.com/content/visibility-and-invisibility-women-contribution-environment

Recent study about women and science is a good source of material for addressing the under representation of women in science. This article is the result of an interdisciplinary fusion of science and women’s studies in environment. Discipline demographics reveal that women are presented to textbooks less often expected and that explicit discussion of the social and cultural context is enriched with material about women’s contributions, students’ awareness of women scientists improves. Such knowledge of women can play a critical role in proactively challenging students’ perceptions of ecology.

Bringing Excitement to Learners Working With Real-Life Clients

Getting students engaged in their education involves a wide variety of teaching strategies and techniques that offer opportunities for acquiring and applying knowledge and developing skills that will benefit them in their careers. The current chapter describes the experiences of students of the Fundamentals of Marketing course when working with real-life clients (RLC) in Southern Manitoba as they developed a marketing plan for local small and medium-sized companies. As the data collecting is still ongoing in order to obtain extensive and comprehensive results, the process of organizing and launching the “Connections Project” is related here. Also considered are the pedagogical benefits of challenging students to apply the theory into a real market situation and the challenges such an endeavor like this might face. The results seen thus far show that, despite the extra work for the faculty instructors, students, and companies involved, the experience is worthy and should be continued for years to come.

Assessing, Deliberating, Responding: An Annotated Bibliography for a Post-Truth Age

The Infosphere Probe is a project geared toward re-envisioning some features of traditional annotated bibliography assignments in an attempt to empower contemporary information citizens. By challenging students to assess the information circulating in their everyday lives, the Infosphere Probe explores strategies with which contemporary classrooms might nurture and cultivate empowered information practices that appreciate lived information cultures traditionally neglected within academic discourse.

An Intricate Balance: The Challenge of Caring During COVID-19 While Maintaining High Student Expectations

Understanding the challenges faced by graduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult for professors aiming to maintain high expectations of students. This essay explores the balance between caring for and challenging students in the face of their needs and limitations during social distancing.