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.
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Notes
- 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 specific aspects of what I was studying. The first 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.
- 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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Valença, M.M. (2020). Disciplinary Dungeon Master. In: Frueh, J. (eds) Pedagogical Journeys through World Politics. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20305-4_18
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