Unstorying the Canon: Role-Playing as a Critical Pedagogical Method of Disorientation

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Digital, Visual, and Gaming Literacies in Education (Table 10)

Abstract

This paper examines how roleplaying activities can be taken up in classroom contexts to critically engage with canonical texts. Using notions of gaming literacies spaces and theories of affect and orientation, we trace how desire functioned as a (dis)orienting force during student-led character creation and storying sessions in a disciplinary classroom context, particularly as players navigated a pivotal plot point about killing innocent creatures from the original ballad. Players had space to choose to align with (white, colonial) canonical tropes or to reorient and form new lines of desire. Players used unstorying practices to disorient from pre-existing elements of the poem and literary criticism, making choices that resisted the poem’s entanglement with Biblical allusions and colonialism.

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Empire State University - SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Sasha Karbachinskiy, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Castillo, TutorMe Education
  Presenting Author