This was tricky for me because they were being asked both to create the texts they would eventually analyze, and then in later analyze them. Here’s what I did:
As I’ve posted about previously, the students each participated in 5 85-minute block days where they did 3 things:
- Read parts of Beowulf, answered questions that invited some connections between their adventures and Beowulf (15 minutes each day)
- Participated in a D&D small-group adventures – one DM and 4 adventures per group – all adventures began with the same 4 pre-set characters, and same plot and setting materials, but all the group’s adventures diverged over the course of these 5 days (60 minutes each day)
- Wrote summaries of their adventures from their characters’ points of view (10 minutes each day). On the first day, pre-adventure (“session 0”) they wrote paragraph-long backstories (the DMs wrote about settings and themes they wanted their adventurers to explore).
Let me say more about 3, because it’s important for the end-game. I told the DMs to write their best 3rd person omniscient narrative of what happened that day. I told the characters to write 1st person narratives based on what their character did that day. I told them to adopt whatever style felt best for them. I didn’t want to over-structure this part. I just let them write at the end of each day.
[side note – Oddly, 2 out of 49 students clearly used chatGPT to write their stories. I still do not know what could have motivated that. It’s honestly very puzzling. I’m pretty sure that most of the rest of them just typed their stories. It’s sort of weird to even imagine what they asked chatGPT – “write a story based on the adventure I just had in class that you didn’t hear where I was a rogue”? “Write a paragraph that sounds like a D&D adventure so I can go back to shoe shopping”?]
When all 5 gaming sessions were done, all 25 of them had a document with each of their stories in it. All of the documents started with some kind of backstory or setting-heavy paragraph, followed by 4 story segments. If you’re following me so far, since each person in each group had a different role, what we now had was 25 stories. 5 DMs’ stories, 5 fighters’ stories, 5 rogues’ stories, 5 wizards’ stories and 5 priests’ stories.
What I did next was had them regroup into the jigsaw groups they used way back at session 0. The DMs all sat together, and fighters, rogues, wizards and thieves too. I told them to take all their stories and, to the best of their abilities, synthesize them into one master-story, that would retain the best features of each of their stories. I gave them Chaucerian names to work with – “The Thieves’ Tale” – for example. They took about an hour to do that. And they really had fun with this part. They began by reading each others’ stories, and discovering similarities and differences. I told them this is basically what the people who wrote our Odyssey (and our Beowulf) likely did. They integrated generations of oral story-telling into different canonical texts. They wrestled with all the things people in that situation would have to wrestle with: there were inconsistencies, some of which were more reconcilable than others. I told them they could figure it out creatively, either by merging, or just making up something entirely new. Their goal was to make the best story they could.
At the end of that day, there were now 5 stories. I I told them that, on the next class day, they would be writing in-class essays in response to the following prompt, meant to emulate an AP Lit Question-3 style “Open Question”:
In many works of literature, authors draw on archetypes – traditional and well-known model stories, characters, or themes that the story’s audience will be familiar with – but they also introduce a significant twist or variation that reshapes the traditional narrative.
Working with Beowulf and also select one of the four narratives developed during this unit’s Dungeons & Dragons sessions that you did not write, in a well-written essay, analyze how the narrative you have selected both draws on and alters an archetypal story character, setting or plot from Beowulf, and explain how this alteration contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.
This question wouldn’t appear on an AP exam, because the ‘open question” gives them much more latitude about what texts they can write about. It usually says “one of the following works of fiction [insert long list] or a something else you have read” or something like that. I have them 4 choices, rather than the much wider selection AP offers them.
But I could see a version of it appearing on an exam – probably more like this:
In many works of literature, authors draw on archetypes – traditional and well-known model stories, characters, or themes that the story’s audience will be familiar with – but they also introduce a significant twist or variation that reshapes the traditional narrative.
Working with a work of fiction you have studied, in a well-written essay, analyze how the work you have selected both draws on and alters an archetypal story character, setting or plot, and explain how this alteration contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.
I put it on them to pick which story they would write about. I told them they could bring in some handwritten notes if they wanted. Some of them prepared more than others (what else is new?). At the end of the day, the ones that succeeded wrote essays that worked roughly like this:
(a) what their chosen D&D story had in common with Beowulf (dragon killing, a heroic arc, moral goodness central to the hero, someone sending them on a mission, etc. etc.)
(b) How their chosen D&D story deviated from this archetype (a big one was one protagonist vs. multiple protagonists, but also the way the “enemy” turned out to be more morally ambiguous in the D&D adventure, or how the protagonist did, or something about the class background of the protagonists, or a lot of other things
(c) how this contributed to the work as a whole – this is the sort of vexed AP Lit construct of “theme” – which often becomes a reductive “moral” or “lesson” – here a lot of them ended up being about point of view – like the way point of view works in stories in general being part of the lesson, or the nature of heroism in different eras, what helps or hinders moral decision making, etc. One got stuck with ”this difference made the story more interesting to read” (that was one of the chatGPT users), but most of the rest of them found some thematic argument to make, and several made some interesting observations about storytelling in general, in kind of a media-studies sort of way (which makes sense given how I framed a lot of the lessons).In the end, the assessment felt smaller than the work they had done, because all it was really assessing was their ability to analyze those two stories, something they likely could have done, and done decently, without the D&D part. But that’s how it goes a lot, especially in this AI-addled era. It feels like what I really need to give them is enriching classroom experiences, and the assessment can take a bit of a backseat, and in that enrichment they are learning even if it’s not so easy right now to measure in the ways we used to. But I think this also will pay dividends for the rest of the year, as they did also implicitly review a lot of things about plot, character, setting, and theme. Which of course I could have done in other ways too, but this felt more fun. Also, they got to know each other in an interesting way, a way that felt better than “two truths and a lie” or whatever. Also, when we started the Othello unit, and they were reading scenes out loud, I heard a subtle change (this may be confirmation bias but whatever): when kids were debriefing about the scenes they read, they were like “oh, that’s why I was so mad” (where that “I” was in fact them talking about a character whose role they had inhabited through reading.
Dungeons and Dragons in AP Lit – Part 4 – Assessment
This was tricky for me because they were being asked both to create the texts they would eventually analyze, and then in later analyze them. Here’s what I did:
As I’ve posted about previously, the students each participated in 5 85-minute block days where they did 3 things:
- Read parts of Beowulf, answered questions that invited some connections between their adventures and Beowulf (15 minutes each day)
- Participated in a D&D small-group adventures – one DM and 4 adventures per group – all adventures began with the same 4 pre-set characters, and same plot and setting materials, but all the group’s adventures diverged over the course of these 5 days (60 minutes each day)
- Wrote summaries of their adventures from their characters’ points of view (10 minutes each day). On the first day, pre-adventure (“session 0”) they wrote paragraph-long backstories (the DMs wrote about settings and themes they wanted their adventurers to explore).
Let me say more about 3, because it’s important for the end-game. I told the DMs to write their best 3rd person omniscient narrative of what happened that day. I told the characters to write 1st person narratives based on what their character did that day. I told them to adopt whatever style felt best for them. I didn’t want to over-structure this part. I just let them write at the end of each day.
[side note – Oddly, 2 out of 49 students clearly used ChatGPT to write their stories. I still do not know what could have motivated that. It’s honestly very puzzling. I’m pretty sure that most of the rest of them just typed their stories. It’s sort of weird to even imagine what they asked ChatGPT – “write a story based on the adventure I just had in class that you didn’t hear where I was a rogue”? “Write a paragraph that sounds like a D&D adventure so I can go back to shoe shopping”?]
When all 5 gaming sessions were done, all 25 of them had a document with each of their stories in it. All of the documents started with some kind of backstory or setting-heavy paragraph, followed by 4 story segments. If you’re following me so far, since each person in each group had a different role, what we now had was 25 stories. 5 DMs’ stories, 5 fighters’ stories, 5 rogues’ stories, 5 wizards’ stories and 5 priests’ stories.
What I did next was had them regroup into the jigsaw groups they used way back at session 0. The DMs all sat together, and fighters, rogues, wizards and thieves too. I told them to take all their stories and, to the best of their abilities, synthesize them into one master-story, that would retain the best features of each of their stories. I gave them Chaucerian names to work with – “The Thieves’ Tale” – for example. They took about an hour to do that. And they really had fun with this part. They began by reading each others’ stories, and discovering similarities and differences. I told them this is basically what the people who wrote our Odyssey (and our Beowulf) likely did. They integrated generations of oral story-telling into different canonical texts. They wrestled with all the things people in that situation would have to wrestle with: there were inconsistencies, some of which were more reconcilable than others. I told them they could figure it out creatively, either by merging, or just making up something entirely new. Their goal was to make the best story they could.
At the end of that day, there were now 5 stories. I I told them that, on the next class day, they would be writing in-class essays in response to the following prompt, meant to emulate an AP Lit Question-3 style “Open Question”:
In many works of literature, authors draw on archetypes – traditional and well-known model stories, characters, or themes that the story’s audience will be familiar with – but they also introduce a significant twist or variation that reshapes the traditional narrative.
Working with Beowulf and also select one of the FOUR NARRATIVES developed during this unit’s Dungeons & Dragons sessions that YOU DID NOT WRITE, in a well-written essay, analyze how the narrative you have selected both draws on and alters an archetypal story character, setting or plot from Beowulf, and explain how this alteration contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.
This question wouldn’t appear on an AP exam, because the ‘open question” gives them much more latitude about what texts they can write about. It usually says “one of the following works of fiction [insert long list] or a something else you have read” or something like that.
But I could see a version of it appearing on an exam – probably more like this:
In many works of literature, authors draw on archetypes – traditional and well-known model stories, characters, or themes that the story’s audience will be familiar with – but they also introduce a significant twist or variation that reshapes the traditional narrative.
Working with a work you have studied, in a well-written essay, analyze how the narrative you have selected both draws on and alters an archetypal story character, setting or plot, and explain how this alteration contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.
I put it on them to pick which story they would write about. I told them they could bring in some handwritten notes if they wanted. Some of them prepared more than others (what else is new?). At the end of the day, the ones that succeeded wrote essays that worked roughly like this:
(a) what their chosen D&D story had in common with Beowulf (dragon killing, a heroic arc, moral goodness central to the hero, someone sending them on a mission, etc. etc.)
(b) How their chosen D&D story deviated from this archetype (a big one was one protagonist vs. multiple protagonists, but also the way the “enemy” turned out to be more morally ambiguous in the D&D adventure, or how the protagonist did, or something about the class background of the protagonists, or a lot of other things
(c) how this contributed to the work as a whole – this is the sort of vexed AP Lit construct of “theme” – which often becomes a reductive “moral” or “lesson” – here a lot of them ended up being about point of view – like the way point of view works in stories in general being part of the lesson, or the nature of heroism in different eras, what helps or hinders moral decision making, etc. One got stuck with ”this difference made the story more interesting to read” (that was one of the chatGPT users), but most of the rest of them found some thematic argument to make, and several made some interesting observations about storytelling in general, in kind of a media-studies sort of way (which makes sense given how I framed a lot of the lessons).In the end, the assessment felt smaller than the work they had done, because all it was really assessing was their ability to analyze those two stories, something they likely could have done, and done decently, without the D&D part. But that’s how it goes a lot, especially in this AI-addled era. It feels like what I really need to give them is enriching classroom experiences, and the assessment can take a bit of a backseat, and in that enrichment they are learning even if it’s not so easy right now to measure in the ways we used to. But I think this also will pay dividends for the rest of the year, as they did also implicitly review a lot of things about plot, character, setting, and theme. Which of course I could have done in other ways too, but this felt more fun. Also, they got to know each other in an interesting way, a way that felt better than “two truths and a lie” or whatever. Also, when we started the Othello unit, and they were reading scenes out loud, I heard a subtle change (this may be confirmation bias but whatever): when kids were debriefing about the scenes they read, they were like “oh, that’s why I was so mad” (where that “I” was in fact them talking about a character whose role they had inhabited through reading.
Original Positions 