She Kills Cisheteronormativity: Queerness in She Kills Monsters and Dungeons & Dragons

for Queer Theatre class, 2023

In Qui Nguyen's She Kills Monsters, "average"[1] Agnes – an English teacher in the original; a cheerleader, that quintessentially ‘normal’ pursuit for ‘normal’ girls, in the Young Adventurers version – unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, is introduced to D&D through playing a D&D module written by her deceased teenage sister Tilly. Tilly’s D&D module doubles as a sort of coded diary, and Agnes learns things about her sister of which she had previously been unaware, including exploration of non-heteronormative sexuality.[2]

A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, which boils down to a combination of complex tactical board game, collaborative storytelling, and amateur improv theatre performed only for an audience of your fellows playing the game with you[3]. It has tremendous overlap with a myriad of subjects – drama, English Language Arts, teaching (half my repertoire of teaching tricks originates in D&D), very basic arithmetic, and so on. Tuns of ink have been metaphorically spilled arguing the nuances of D&D as relating to game design and ludology, to socializing activity design, to social justice, to queerness, and to other things.

The current edition of D&D is known as 5th Edition, because, just as you might expect, there have been at least eight distinct editions of D&D:

• 1974: Original Dungeons & Dragons – The barebones original version created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, adapted from a game of army warfare.[4]
• 1977: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition[5] – Greatly expanded from the original in terms of gameplay options, this was the first edition to see large-scale publication.
• 1989: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition[6] – As She Kills Monsters is set in 1995, this is most likely the edition Agnes, Tilly, and so on play – as confirmed by the narrator’s line at the beginning of the play, “Forged by the hands of nerds, crafted in the minds of geeks, and so advanced in its advanciness it would take a whole second edition to contain all its mighty geekery.”[7]
• 2000: Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition[8] – The first edition published after the property was acquired by Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, also known as the creators of the collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
• 2003: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5th Edition[9] – 3.5th Edition was a fairly minor yet comprehensive rules update to 3rd Edition, allowing a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, so you could continue to play your 3rd Edition characters in a way you couldn’t have continued to play existing characters in any previous edition change.
• 2008: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition[10] – Most notable because, when D&D shifted from 3.5th Edition to 4th Edition, many fans disliked the new edition and felt disenfranchised, so new company Paizo swept in with Pathfinder 1st Edition in 2009, which was basically another version of 3.5th Edition, to the extent that many nicknamed it ‘D&D 3.75e’ – the similarity was great enough that backwards-compatibility was alleged as a major selling point, but in my experience rarely actually taken advantage of[11]. Pathfinder remains D&D’s biggest competitor, although they have increasingly diverged from their common source over time and new editions.
• 2014: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition[12] – Something of a synthesis and a distillation of all previous D&D editions, and one which has brought in an unprecedented influx of players new to the hobby.
• The 2024 update to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition – They keep changing what they’re calling the 2024 version – most commonly it is called “One D&D”, but its official name appears to be something like “the revision to 5th Edition D&D to be released in 2024”. Despite it being almost exactly analogous to 3.5th Edition’s relationship to 3rd Edition, I have seen neither WotC nor any prominent fan refer to it as “5.5th Edition”.[13]

Personally, I came into the hobby around 2010, and, though I played a few games of 4th Edition, I ultimately preferred 3.5th Edition, then Pathfinder. When Paizo printed a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder and WotC printed a 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I found I preferred D&D 5th Edition, so I switched teams again.

The Queerness of Geekery

D&D is, of course, eminently queer in a variety of ways – never mind what the grognards[14] of the hobby will tell you, and never mind the reputed conservative politics of Gary Gygax himself. It is an ongoing cold war within the hobby that D&D either is, or is not, ‘political’, and every slight move that either Wizards of the Coast or, in some cases, prominent fans make towards ‘wokeness’ is met with an uproar of outrage from a contingent of grognards.

For example: since the inception of D&D, the term “race” has been used in a Tolkien-esque sense, to refer to Elves, Orcs, Humans, etc.[15] Unfortunately for the hobby, “race” is a term that carries a tremendous amount of real-world baggage, so in 2019, Paizo switched from “race” to “ancestry” in its shift from a 1st to a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder, and WotC is catching up by switching from “race” to “species” for the 2024 version of 5th Edition D&D. This ameliorates (but does not solve) the problem that some races – especially orcs and drow/dark elves – are generally presented as antagonists and have, historically, been treated (or even, in earlier editions, outright described by the game) as inherently evil. However, both changes and the reasoning for them remain controversial, contested primarily by grognards who, in general, resist change of any sort[16].

Gygax himself has, as mentioned, a reputation as having been socially conservative – for example, he was “known to carry a weapon” and “known to be a member of the Libertarian Party”, according to the FBI’s file on him and his company[17]. In the earliest editions of the game penned by Gygax, non-human races faced limits (such as level caps) not imposed upon humans, and in 1st Edition, female characters had a lower maximum Strength score than male characters of the same race[18]. Observing these facts is perhaps more unkind to Gygax than necessary – he did, in his later years, seem to recognize the inherent queerness of D&D, and recanted some of his earlier design decisions.

At the beginning of She Kills Monsters, the point is immediately recognized that “geeky”[19] pursuits like D&D are inherently queer, in a way that is generally lost on grognards (or it could be that grognards attempt to suppress nonconformity in their hobby for the same reason any marginalized minority may end up attempting to oppress and marginalize other, more marginalized, minorities) – normal Agnes is initially put off by the demeanor of Chuck, Tilly’s dungeon master, and is reluctant to try D&D at all; once she does, she proceeds repeatedly throughout the play to try to hide the fact that she is playing D&D (even to the point that for a time she allows her boyfriend to believe she’s cheating on him rather than admit to doing something geeky).[20]

“Why Do Gamer Dudes Always Play Girl Characters?”[21]

One of D&D’s queerest aspects is explored in She Kills Monsters: the play recognizes and probes D&D’s capacity to allow for exploration of sexual or romantic orientations and gender.

In the Young Adventurers Edition, the character Tilly plays in D&D before her death, Tillius the paladin, is male, a different gender than Tilly’s own presumed gender, a common phenomenon known in the hobby as ‘crossplaying’. Tillius only appears in the play after Tilly’s death, presented (we presume faithfully, from the module Tilly wrote, described as a coded diary) by Chuck the dungeon master, but the character of Tillius nonetheless represents Tilly – at least until (though maybe also after) he turns out to be an evil five-headed dragon god in disguise. [22]

Similarly, the character of Kaliope is played by an apparently male performer in drag in the BAVPA production, which goes un-commented-upon.[23]

Agnes: "Why would she do that?"

Chuck: "I don't know, why do gamer dudes always play girl characters?"[24]

I personally know, at the absolute minimum, at least two people (including myself) who are explicitly confirmed to have changed their self-recognized gender identities or presentations because of having explored gender options in D&D. I know at least a dozen more who have crossplayed without it necessarily having an impact on their genders or reflecting real-world gender exploration – while something like half of them have turned out to be transgender, I haven’t explicitly confirmed with them any direct causal connections between that and crossplaying.

The Belt of Gender-Changing has been a cursed item found in D&D for many editions, which helps to open the scope of gameplay and storytelling to exploration of trans stories. You put it on, it alters your biological sex, and you can’t take it off until you cast remove curse on it. My main problem with this item is its name – it would take powerful mind-altering enchantment to alter a person’s gender, whereas altering their sex is a trivial feat of transmutation in a world with such spells as alter self and polymorph, which can wreak much more substantial bodily changes than mere sex changes. To be sure, many groups play with this item as a sometimes-malicious joke, but in my experience, for every group playing it that way, there’s a group playing with it to actually deeply explore gender.

Tillius, moreover, is in a relationship with fellow D&D character Lilith – one appeal of D&D for Tilly, we are told, is that Tillius "gets to save the princess"[25]. Lilith is based on Lily, a fellow player with whom Tilly shares her first kiss, although neither Tilly nor Lily is out of their closets in any official capacity – being 15, Tilly is still exploring her sexual identity, at least in the Young Adventurers Edition:

Agnes: "Are you [lesbian]?"

Tillius: "I… don't really know?"[26]

That doesn’t stop a group of cheerleader demons from bullying and making fun of Tilly for being a lesbian, implied to be based on an actual event from Tilly's life – Chuck: “I think this is actually your sister’s diary. She just wrote it in geek.”[27]

In the original version, everyone in the game’s setting is homosexual (including Tillius, who in this version is female, not crossplayed):

Agnes: “Wait, the big slacker demon is gay?”

Kaliope: “As is everyone in New Landia.”[28]

This is a reflection of Tilly’s own homosexuality:

Agnes: “Tilly, why’d you make everyone gay?”

Tillius: “Um, I don’t know. If I were to take an educated guess, I’d venture to guess that maybe the author of this world was into wearing tanktops and The Indigo Girls.”[29]

The concept of a D&D setting where homosexuality is welcomed, and in some senses even universal, is not unheard-of in actual D&D play. It is commonly thought that Paizo’s position is all non-player characters (NPCs) in Pathfinder Adventure Paths[30], and by extension in the setting, are bisexual unless the text specifically says otherwise – the official position is somewhat more nuanced, as clarified by James Jacobs, creative director for Pathfinder’s Adventure Paths:

Milo v3: “Is it true that NPC's in the Adventure Paths are bisexual unless otherwise stated?”

James Jacobs: “Sort of. More accurately, unless their sexuality plays into something significant of their character (such as them being in an established relationship), it's not something we decide for NPCs. They can be whatever the GM wants them to be, which isn't EXACTLY the same as ‘always bisexual.’ The ‘Always bisexual’ is a simplification.”[31]

In my home D&D setting, after long struggles with what policy would be best, I have made it canon that 90% of NPCs are panromantic – ‘romantic’ because I prefer sex not to be a very big deal in my D&D games, ‘pan’ because it’s a little more intuitively inclusive than ‘bi’ – and the remaining 10% are evenly divided between some flavors of heteroromantic, homoromantic, or aromantic. Moreover, polyamory is well-accepted in society and by most deities. It would be nice for me to say that this is all for the purpose of representation and social justice, but in all honesty it’s just so the romance options for player characters are maximized, for the purpose of gameplay fun[32] – if you want to pursue an NPC romantically, it is almost certainly an option, even if they, or your own character, are already in a romantic relationship.

“This is a D&D adventure, not therapy.”[33]

The characters of the party that Tilly puts together, the characters played by her friends, are a queer crew in the tradition of Dorothy’s Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. They include Orcus the retired demon Overlord of the Underworld (a name drawn from the canon of D&D, where he is the demon king of the undead); Lilith, a demon queen whose father is “the Devil”[34] (a name drawn from real-world mythology, most famously the alleged first wife of Adam in certain apocrypha of Judaism/Christianity, banished from the Garden of Eden for insisting on being on top when making love to Adam); and Kaliope, a dark elf, a race shunned and considered evil by others.

A digression on race: the script calls for Kaliope to be a dark elf, or drow, but that comes with its own heap of issues, rooted in the issues with the drow species itself. Evil spider-worshipping matriarchal dominatrices with literal black skin (sometimes dark indigo in illustrations, never brown) are not a concept that would pass muster with a cultural sensitivity consultant today[35]. Two obvious options present themselves for casting Kaliope in this play as written: either put a white person in blackface, which has obvious problems; or cast a Black person as Kaliope, which has different, equally serious problems.

Casting a non-Black person as a drow and painting them with blackface runs into the issue that blackface has historically been used in minstrel shows to make fun of and oppress actual Black people, and is therefore utterly verboten. In the second season episode of the television sitcom Community, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”, the Asian actor Ken Jeong, playing Asian character Ben Chang, who was in turn playing drow character Brutalitops the Magician by coming to a D&D game in blackface. Ultimately, this was poking fun at the Chang character’s cluelessness and at the issues inherent with the drow in D&D, but the episode was nonetheless pulled from Netflix and Hulu in 2020.[36] No production of She Kills Monsters could possibly get away with casting Kaliope as a person in blackface makeup.

Casting a Black person as Kaliope presents problems which reflect the core issue with the drow species in D&D. Drow are usually depicted as literally black of skin, or sometimes some shade of dark indigo, no hue ever found on any real-world human – but the point remains that a species of usually-evil[37] antagonists use a visual shorthand that describes an actual marginalized group of humans.

Why did the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feature no drow, despite an excursion to the Underdark, their traditional stomping grounds?[38] After the movie came out, I saw a solid half dozen articles wondering why the drow Drizz’t Do’Urden, possibly the most famous D&D character, did not make an appearance in this movie. The obvious answer: good luck casting a drow in anything without radically updating their appearance!

Maybe you could get away with casting a Black person and painting them with black- or indigo-face makeup – but probably best not to risk it.

So the BAVPA performance of She Kills Monsters, among others, went with the somewhat less contentious casting choice making Kaliope a regular – i.e., with a beigey skin tone – elf, not a dark elf.[39]

At the end of the play, Tillius turns out to be, by some strange turn of events, the evil five-headed dragon god Tiamat (another name and concept drawn from D&D’s canon: Tiamat is the goddess of evil dragons[40]) that the party has been questing to defeat for the duration of the play – and to have been Tiamat since at least the earliest part of the quest, because Tillius casting magic missile, a spell not traditionally castable by paladins, is cited as evidence for Tillius being Tiamat[41]. This could potentially add a new twist, a new facet, to the exploration of Tilly’s psyche. Did Tilly see herself as a multi-headed dragon?

The five heads of Tiamat are played by doubling the actors of Agnes’s party – Tillius/Tilly, Lilith/Lily, Orcus/Ronnie, Kaliope/Kelly, and Chuck the DM. Might this represent Tilly’s struggles with friendship – or Agnes’s struggles with D&D?

Post-Script: Disability Is Queer, Too!

Disability is baked into She Kills Monsters. The script casts Kelly, the beautiful human player corresponding to the beautiful dark elf game character Kaliope, as a girl in a wheelchair (Kaliope does not need or use a wheelchair). BAVPA instead cast Kelly as walking with crutches[42].

Georgia State University transferred the wheelchair use to Tilly and Tillius[43] – although it was not well-supported in 1995, playing a character with a wheelchair is perfectly possible in this day and age, thanks to a well-known fan-made unofficial “Combat Wheelchair” supplement for D&D 5th Edition[44], which naturally has been the subject of many angry tirades from grognards who somehow contrive to find wheelchairs less realistic than orcs, magic missile, liches, dragons, meddlesome gods, hungry gelatinous cubes, demons, and polymorphing people into chickens.

Works Cited

Beuth, K. (Director). (2023, May 31). She Kills Monsters. (BAVPA 11th/12th Grade Theater Department, Performer) BAVPA Black Box Theater, Buffalo, NY, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmQxs99zWGU

Bulmahn, J. (2009). Pathfinder: Core Rulebook. Paizo Publishing.

City Springs Theatre Company . (2022). She Kills Monsters. Georgia, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7deLsNgb9Q

Cook, D. (1989). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monstrous Compendium. TSR, Inc.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2000). Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2003). Dungeons & Dragons v3.5: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1995, April 28). 149A-SF-106204. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3866268-TSR-Pt-4.html

Goldstein, J., & Daley, J. F. (Directors). (2023). Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [Motion Picture].

Gygax, G. (1977-1979). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide. TSR, Inc.

Gygax, G., & Arneson, D. (1974). Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set. TSR, Inc.

Heinsoo, R., Collins, A., & Wyatt, J. (2008). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Jacobs, J. (2015, April 5). Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here! Retrieved from Paizo Discussion Forums: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=1082?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#54090

Maas, J. (2020, June 26). Netflix Pulls ‘Community’ Episode ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Due to Blackface Scenes. The Wrap. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/community-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode-removed-netflix-blackface/

Mearls, M. C. (2024). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Mearls, M., Crawford, J., Perkins, C., & Wyatt, J. (2014). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Nguyen, Q. (2011, November 4). She Kills Monsters. Samuel French, Inc.

Nguyen, Q. (2012, November 14). She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition. Samuel French, Inc.

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_

Wiktionary. (2023, May 5). grognard. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grognard

Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

Critical Queer Theory in the ELA Classroom

There are two senses in which ELA pedagogy can be queer: in one sense, we might study texts featuring queer characters or themes; in the other, somewhat more abstruse sense, it is queer to look at a text slantwise, focusing on violations of social normalcy and norms (especially, but not exclusively, sexual or gender norms) within the text – to look at the text with the queer lens. I would maintain that both senses are good and desirable, and an intersection between the two – looking slantwise at texts featuring queer characters – is best of all.

Queer pedagogy calls for queer readings […] in at least two ways: incorporating texts about and from the perspective of queer subjects, and reading queerly. The mainstream curriculum already includes, or at least allows for including, plenty of texts written by and about queers; it is just that we read them ‘straight.’ If reading queerly is seeking out the queer or potentially queer meanings in a text […] then reading straight is reading around queer meanings and seeking out meanings that support normalcy. […] Queer educators […] need to notice what it is that reading straight has prevented us from knowing, and invite the queer subtext back into our readings. (Shlasko, 2005)

Queer theory, and pedagogy in reference to queer theory, is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as 2005, queer theory was “often discussed not as a discrete theoretical model, but rather as an indeterminate and shifting set of theoretical possibilities. […] Queer pedagogy, like queer theory, resists stable discrete definition. […] Queer pedagogy is a queer thing to study, and so only a ‘queer lens’ will suffice to examine it.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Texts With Queer Content

As a matter of definition, queer is anything that stands outside the ‘normal’, chiefly, but not necessarily exclusively, in terms of gender and/or sexuality. “As a subject position, queer describes people whose gender and/or sexuality fall outside of cultural norms and expectations. It describes one’s location relative to those norms, or perhaps, one’s status from the point of view of the normal as an outsider.” (Shlasko, 2005) For the purpose of this paper, the entire long and ever-growing alphabet soup (LGBTQQPIA23NF[1]… etc.) of sexual and gender identities is included within the umbrella of this sense of queer.

Some teachers, especially newer or pre-service teachers, may “believe that teachers must be neutral and apolitical” (Bach, 2016); the prima facie response could be that the identity of a substantial portion of one’s students is not a political matter, states which ban discussion of such subjects (Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557, 2022) notwithstanding – but my position would target the premise itself: there are certain political matters that secondary school teachers are not only permitted but expected to address and to equip students to come to a socially just personal position on: is, for example, a social studies teacher covering the 20th century expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of the social pros and cons of Nazis and Fascists? Is a science teacher expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of intelligent design, whether humans have landed on the moon, or whether the Earth is flat? Is a math teacher expected to acquiesce in the name of neutrality and apoliticality to a student who insists that π is equal to exactly 3 (Bible, 1611)? There are some few political subjects where there is an objectively correct and good position, and the existence, identity, validity, acceptance, and welcoming of queer students is one of them.

It is good and important to include texts featuring queer characters and themes in the ELA classroom – “Given the number of studies that indicate the importance of including these titles in secondary schools as a way to validate and explore students’ sexual orientation and gender expression, meet curriculum standards, and address bullying, these books belong in secondary classrooms”. (Bach, 2016) “The absence of school-based supports such as inclusive curricula is associated with school climates more hostile to [queer] students.” (Schey, 2021)

In the 1990s, students might have had access to “historical texts detailing Nazi medical experiments; ‘scientific’ information in biology class asserting that homosexuality was genetic, and neither unhealthy nor voluntary; literary images of depressed and alienated gay people much older than myself; […] Ellen DeGeneres’s (1997) (finally!) coming out episode.” (Shlasko, 2005) Today, fortuitously, “adolescents have access to a wide range of books that feature LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters.” (Bach, 2016) “Each of these genres of gay/lesbian representations has multiple messages, and will have different meanings for different students.” (Shlasko, 2005)

That said, “research continues to suggest that teachers are reluctant or unsure how to incorporate these LGBTQ-themed texts into their classrooms, other than as independent/out-of-school reading.” (Bach, 2016) I would answer to such teachers: the most productive way to read a queer text is queerly (subsequently proceeding to read straight texts and the world queerly, too).

Queering the Text: the Queer Lens

“Queer pedagogy […] pulls from queer theories and ‘requires something larger than simply an acknowledgement of gay and lesbian subjects in educational studies.’” (Bach, 2016) “As a politic, queer challenges the very idea of ‘normal.’ […] As an aesthetic, queer looks for and enjoys potentially subversive content in cultural texts of any media. […] The text itself is not queer. Rather, it is one’s reading of the text as politically radical that ‘queers’ both text and reader. We might say, one is reading (or listening, or viewing) queerly.” (Shlasko, 2005) “One of queer pedagogy’s purposes is to interrupt ‘familiar patterns of thinking’”. (Bach, 2016)

Queer pedagogy beyond simple representation and inclusion is important for, among other things, the inclusion and uplifting of queer students. “To tell students that, ‘It’s okay to be gay’ is dishonest, and transparent in its dishonesty. After all, we do not tell them that it is okay to be heterosexual. The very pronouncement of tolerance assumes an underlying intolerance. […] Furthermore, simply to tell students that they are okay belies the lived experience of queer kids who feel themselves violently excluded from the realm of normal. They know very well that something is not okay.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Moreover, “If we stick to representations that are unthreatening to the norm, we only reinforce the legitimacy of the boundaries that continue to keep some people on the outside.” (Shlasko, 2005) Inclusion is “not only un-queer but actually […] anti-queer.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Teachers can “engage students with textual representations of diverse and norm-disruptive sexualities and genders in ways that work against normative and oppressive discourses, practices, and systems which produce and regulate sexuality and gender”. (Helmer, 2016) Teaching the queer lens can “disrupt[] cisheterosexism and, in turn, invite[] youth to disrupt further.” (Schey, 2021)

The queer lens is thus not just about queer representation and inclusion. To read with a queer lens is to read queerly, to queer the text and the self, to internalize the queer. In the same sense as reading with the feminist lens opens the mind to issues of gender, or reading with the Marxist lens opens the mind to issues of social class and wealth, reading with the queer lens opens the mind to the possibility that there might be more to the world than the normal, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to gender or romantic or sexual attraction.

Critical Disability Theory in the ELA Classroom

In discussing the critical lenses in pedagogy in ENG694, we only looked at most of the important theories and lenses, but there's at least one important one that we conspicuously left out: the lens of disability.

Disability studies is of universal import: every human being is fated to become disabled (if they don't die first). As far as I can reason, the only form of oppression more universal within humanity is ageism (everyone was once an oppressed youth, and everyone will eventually be an oppressed elder if they don’t die first). In my life in particular, my partner is physically disabled, and I've got approximately three minor mental disabilities myself, so it's relevant to me already. Moreover, every teacher will, in their time, teach countless students with mental or physical disabilities – and will therefore have classrooms full of abled students with disabled classmates, abled students who can be persuaded, through the magic of the lens of disability, to better put themselves in the shoes of said disabled classmates.

Where an aspect in queer pedagogy and the queer lens is on queering the text and the self, the disability lens can have more to do with abled students becoming aware of the struggle of navigating in an uncaringly ableist world while disabled. The “responsibility [is] on able-bodied people to pay attention to how disabled people have to navigate the spaces being afforded to them, including […] educational spaces.” (Stewart & Way, 2023)

“‘Disability encompasses a broad range of bodily, cognitive, and sensory differences and capacities’ but also […] ‘the meanings we attribute to disability are shifting, elusive, and sometimes contradictory’ […] disability and education need to be understood intersectionally.” (Stewart & Way, 2023) “As a pedagogical application, [disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies] incorporate the experiences, texts, podcasts, artwork, and activism of disabled scholars of color, poverty scholars, and community activists, highlighting educational inequities to center the lives of students.” (Kulkarni, Miller, Nusbaum, Pearson, & Brown, 2023)

Disability Topics and Texts

There is a “massive diverse array of imagery related to people with disabilities.” (Nocella, 2008) Disability is common in texts, and, almost as commonly, a shorthand for – i.e., occurs in a character in conjunction with – something else, usually something negative – villains are disabled more often than heroes.

Disability can, most obviously, include physical disability, such as, most commonly in popular media, missing limbs – e.g. Star Wars[2] (Lucas, 1977-2005), How to Train Your Dragon (Sanders & DeBlois, 2010), Harry Potter (Rowling, 1997-2007), and virtually any media focusing on pirates.

In online discussions of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, debate periodically raises its head about the validity of adventurers in wheelchairs – a play option made possible by a fan-made item supplement (Thompson, 2020), popularized by a variety of Actual Play series – The questions on each side of the argument are something like: is it unreasonable to expect ADA-accessible dungeons (in the fictional game-worlds our characters inhabit)? or is it unreasonable to expect disabled players to never want to play characters who are like themselves?

Disability can also include mental disability, which is perhaps more common in the traditional literary canon – e.g. Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey, 1962), and Flowers for Algernon (Keyes, 1966).

What, one might ask, of mental illnesses, such as sociopathy and/or psychopathy? Are they disabilities to be accommodated? What does it say about us as a society that ‘he's a psychopath’ is so often used as the entire characterization of a villain – e.g. the Joker from DC comics and movies (Finger, Kane, & Robinson, 1940)?

The lens of disability can lead one to ponder subjects that may prove important in social and legal spaces – is genetic discrimination, as one sees in Gattaca (Niccol, 1997) or X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963), fair and reasonable, or is it good that laws have been passed prohibiting it, or should those laws be strengthened?

What of people with increased ability relative to human average, such as in superhero media (including, again, X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963))? Is it fair that Michael Phelps is some sort of super-powered swimming mutant? Should such people be brought down to human average – or even, should everyone be brought down to a minimum, so that everyone is truly equal, as in “Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut, 1961)?

These Theories in My ELA Classroom

One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics (Ribeiro, Ottoni, West, Almeida, & Meira, 2020), you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science (without the teacher expressing any judgements or assertions about the authorship of that particular text, of course).

Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.

When the critical queer lens is turned on texts, the self, and the world, some students might come to realize things about their own genders or sexualities that they had not previously understood; certainly may be brought to greater understanding of queer peers; and everyone can just inherently benefit from contemplating the rejection of societal norms, even if one does not actually end up rejecting them.

Similarly, a disabled lens can bring students to understand more about their own minds, may bring better understanding of disabled peers, and may lead to slightly better lives for the disabled among us – in my experience, many problems faced by disabled people result less from overt ableism than from people simply not thinking (which, of course, has ableist results). The classic example is the maintenance guy who chooses to shovel snow off the stairs before shoveling the ramp, not pausing to think that a shoveled ramp is usable by all students while shoveled stairs are usable only by able-legged students. Perhaps if the maintenance guy had studied critical disability theory in his ELA classes, he would have paused for that thought.

Works Cited

Bach, J. (2016). Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 917-932. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1071758

Bible (King James Version ed.). (1611). Church of England. Retrieved from https://www.bible.com/bible/1/1KI.7.KJV

Finger, B., Kane, B., & Robinson, J. (1940, April 25). Batman. DC Comics. DC Comics.

Helmer, K. (2016). Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 902-916. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1120943

Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Press & Signet Books.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. Harcourt, Brace & World.

Kirby, J., & Lee, S. (1963). The X-Men. Marvel Comics.

Kulkarni, S. S., Miller, A. L., Nusbaum, E. A., Pearson, H., & Brown, L. X. (2023, July 11). Toward disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies in teacher education. Critical Studies in Education. doi:10.1080/17508487.2023.2234952

Lucas, G. (Writer). (1977-2005). Star Wars, Episodes I-VI [Motion Picture].

Niccol, A. (Director). (1997). Gattaca [Motion Picture].

Nocella, A. J. (2008). Emergence of Disability Pedagogy. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies(6), 77-94.

Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557. (2022, July 1). Florida. Retrieved from https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=76545

Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A., & Meira, W. J. (2020, January 27). Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 131-141. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879

Rowling, J. (1997-2007). Harry Potter (Vols. I-VII). Bloomsbury.

Sanders, C., & DeBlois, D. (Directors). (2010). How to Train Your Dragon [Motion Picture].

Schey, R. (2021). Fostering Youth's Queer Activism in Secondary Classrooms: Youth Choice and Queer-Inclusive Curriculum. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(6), 623-632. doi:10.1002/jaal.1150

Shlasko, G. (2005). Queer (v.) Pedagogy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38, 123-134. doi:10.1080/10665680590935098

Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. Covici Friede.

Stewart, F., & Way, L. (2023). Beyond boundaries? Disability, DIY and punk pedagogies. Research in Education, 115(1), 11-28. doi:10.1177/00345237231160301

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sirEGlUeANviDstyZMpVUDf-KVqyhs40/view?usp=sharing

Vonnegut, K. (1961, October). Harrison Bergeron. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Good Knowledge and Evil Power in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

for Hauntology class, 2023

A Word

In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist Oscar de León reads and writes genre fiction (Fritz) and specifically seeks to become known as a “Dominican Tolkien” (Díaz), and references to and concepts from genre fiction frequently find their way into the text through the words of Yunior de las Casas, the narrator (and diegetic writer of the book). In that nerdy spirit, channeling J.R.R. Tolkien as Díaz habitually does in this text, I shall begin by inventing a word – which does, admittedly, channel the linguist aspect of Tolkien, while Díaz tends to channel other aspects of the Professor’s work (Schulenburg; Sepulveda; Tait).

I shall borrow a concept from genre fiction where living beings – typically, but not exclusively, villains – control, or attempt to control, the dead, or the undead, to their own purposes. In genre fiction[1], this is typically referred to as necromancy, which is, it turns out, too etymologically imprecise for my purposes.

-Mancy, typically, refers specifically to divination or telling the future, from the Ancient Greek manteía, prophecy. Necromancy, then, is, most strictly, learning about the future by asking the dead (the Greek prefix necro- referring to death) about it – which is perfectly in line with, or perhaps even relies upon, the conception of ghosts as atemporal beings who begin by returning, for whom “time is out of joint” (Derrida). Hereafter, I will use necromancy exclusively to refer to divination by means of ghosts.

Which does, of course, leave a bit of a lexical gap. Control of the (un)dead for purposes other than divination is a concept found in genre fiction, and which I will explore here, and, having excluded it from the scope of necromancy, we require a term for it. By analogy with theurgy and thaumaturgy, I will pull out the suffix originating from the Greek érgon, meaning work, and refer to control of the (un)dead for one's own purposes as necrourgy.

This invention of a word is not simply a gimmick of pedantry; by extracting works of power and control from the traditional word and depositing it in a new one, I leave knowledge as the sole domain of necromancy. In relation to this text, there is a real distinction to be drawn, one which few observers have recognized: in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it transpires (with some potential twists) that the work of necrourgy, in the form of fukú in the text, is the domain of villainous characters; necromancy granting knowledge, in the form of zafa, is the domain of heroic ones (or at least the less actively villainous).

The Fukú

"No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you." (Díaz 5)

Running as a theme through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the fukú, described on the first page as “generally a curse or a doom of some kind”, originating in Africa, “carried in the screams of the enslaved” (Díaz 1), delivered to the Americas by Christopher Columbus: “a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles […] it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since […] we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.” (Díaz 1-2).

Regarding the fukú as a ghost, as something dead or undead, is perhaps to blur concepts together that would be better off left unblurred. One might more reasonably describe it as a sort of black magic, an evil entity or sorcery, not necessarily related to the dead in particular. Blurring this concept so, so soon after being so pedantic as to invent a whole new word to satisfy my gratuitous pedantry, admittedly appears inconsistent on my part.

Still, the fukú is described as an almost consciously malevolent entity, “a demon” (Díaz 1) among other things, and as a Faceless Man who appears several times over the course of the text. Moreover, humanity has never been particularly fussed about the taxonomic classifications of spirits – peruse the etymology of ghost and behold the breadth of what its linguistic ancestors and close relatives have meant, from demon to human to angel and everything in between (Harper, Etymology of ghost).

Even setting that all aside, the fukú is, in the first sentence of the text, described as “carried in the screams of the enslaved [and] the death bane of the Tainos,” (Díaz 1) so it certainly may have something to do with somebody having died.

Even speaking of the fukú is dangerous. "To say [the Admiral's] name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours." (Díaz 1) This taboo avoidance calls to mind the linguistic origins of bear – the original European name of the bear may have been arkto, but fell out of use and was forgotten in Germanic languages: bear comes from proto-Indo-European terms meaning brown or wild animal, because to say the brown one's true name was to invoke its terrible coming. (Harper, Etymology of bear)

The fukú was “[a]lso called the fukú of the Admiral [Columbus] because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing […] divine voices.” (Díaz 1) Did Columbus deliberately, fumblingly invoke or attempt to harness or deploy the fukú? Or was he simply a sort of bystander, Patient Zero in a plague of dooms?

The fukú is deliberately harnessed and employed by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, president of the Dominican Republic 1930-1961, “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator” (Díaz 2). Or, more specifically, “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away[2], that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (Díaz 226)

(Yunior does, at least once, describe the harnessing of the fukú as “the necromantic power of El Jefe” (Díaz 158), but this is presumably because he is not so linguistically precise or pedantic as I am choosing to be.)

Anyone who opposed Trujillo wound up encountering a terrible doom, up to and including U.S. President John F. Kennedy Jr, who allegedly green-lit Trujillo’s assassination (which assassination perhaps incorporated Trujillo himself into the fukú, a ghost to haunt future generations), and was promptly assassinated himself two years later – not by “the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe [or] aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman [or] the Hunt Bruthers of Texas or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission” (Díaz 4), but by the fukú of Trujillo.

The character Abelard, grandfather of the eponymous Oscar, is made subject to the fukú: "Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard's daughter, but when he couldn't snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family's ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened." (Díaz 243)

On the other hand, Abelard is thought to have constructed a book describing Trujillo’s control of the fukú – “an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president – that he was supernatural, that he was not human – may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (Díaz 245) – and to have been made a target of the fukú because of that.

Either way, Abelard is arrested by Trujillo, and “[a]las, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive.” (Díaz 245) In fact, none of Abelard’s books or publications, not one trace of his handwriting, was allowed to survive, a sort of damnatio memoriae executed by Trujillo or by the fukú or both.

In, among other places, chapter Six, Oscar’s lifelong depression, which drives many of his actions and the plot, is attributed to having inherited the fukú on Abelard (Díaz 263-307).

The Zafa

“Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.” (Díaz 7)

The antidote to the fukú is the zafa. In its primary sense, the word zafa itself suffices – “anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s name or anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. […] A simple word[:] Zafa.” (Díaz 7)

That this sole practical protection against fukú would be a word is in line with traditional conceptions of the supernatural as being linguistic, or language as being supernatural – for example, going back in Christianity to the first passage of the book of John, where “the Word [logos] was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), or, for another example, the entire intertangled cluster of etymology leading to English words like grammar, glamour, and grimoire, through words signifying concepts pertaining to words, learning, incantations, and magic spells (Harper, Etymology of grammatical).[3] In the text, it turns out that in practice the zafa is more consistent with magic as knowledge and magic as story than magic as language – a subtle distinction, to be sure, and applying such clear distinctions to something so woolly as magic may be foolish.

In this sense, prima facie, the zafa is on the same order of magic as the fukú: a deliberate invocation of supernatural powers, albeit protective instead of harmful – where “[f]ukú works in an active fashion” (LeBlond), zafa is protective and reactive.

More specifically, throughout the book, the actual zafa that appears, most commonly taking the form of a golden mongoose, trends towards the necromantic, not the necrourgic. The mongoose does not typically defend against the fukú directly; more precisely, it grants knowledge of how to defend against the fukú.

A turn of wit allows Abelard to protect his daughters from Trujillo for a time: cleverness inspired by “a Numinous Being.” (Díaz 223) The golden mongoose comes to Oscar’s mother Beli after she is beaten by goons in a cane field, and leads her to safety. (Díaz 149-150)

Oscar’s great-aunt, La Inca, receives several messages and instructions from her late husband in dreams, instructions which serve to counter the fukú. One instructs her to find Beli; another reveals that she should send Beli to New York for safety (Díaz 157).

Oscar’s sister, Lola, is said to congenitally have the ability to harness supernatural powers for knowledge: “For as long as you've been alive you've had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tia's winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative.” (Díaz 53)

The golden mongoose comes to Oscar, as Oscar is about to jump to his death from a train bridge onto the highway, and may be what guides him to fall on a concrete divider, instead of into traffic, saving his life (Díaz 190-191).

Indeed, Oscar himself is a ghost haunting the text – he never speaks directly, and his story is (necromantically) told after his death by others, chiefly by Yunior. Through writing the book (in part for Oscar’s niece, who is presumably subject to the fukú), Yunior conjures Oscar’s spirit as a guiding, storytelling, informing zafa against the fukú that “just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around my throat.” (Díaz 6) Yunior – and Oscar – take the role of heroes, invoking zafa with their writing (Mahler).

In nearly all cases, the power of the zafa comes in the form of knowledge granted by – or anyway acquired from – the spirits – necromancy. In one of the few cases where the zafa does something other than grant knowledge, La Inca prays so hard for Beli to recover from a beating that it works: “Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl's life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?).” (Díaz 155) I feel it would be not entirely honest to claim the zafa merely vouchsafed methods of healing to La Inca which saved Beli, so this stands as a counterexample to my assertion.

This necromancy of the zafa occasionally fails, or is incomplete, as in the case where the mongoose tells Oscar, “— — —” (Díaz 301), cases of páginos en blanco explored satisfactorily by other authors (O'Brien).

One might observe that Trujillo’s powers are described as possibly also having included uncanny knowledge – “that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away” (Díaz 226) – but I would contend that Trujillo’s powers of knowing were more likely purely mortal – after all, the “[d]ude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (Díaz 217), and his non-ass-oriented spy network was even more extensive – “he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States […] you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass.” (Díaz 225)

Other Considerations

One other noteworthy point of intersection – be it similarity or opposition – between necrourgy and necromancy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that the mongoose usually seems to come to people willingly, bestowing its wisdom unsolicited (La Inca’s days of prayer for a zafa notwithstanding), while it is left deliberately unclear whether Trujillo is master of the fukú, or works in tandem with it, or even works subordinate to it: “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

One might also observe that the zafa usually plays a reactive role, helping mortals defend against the depredations of the fukú (in literature, a tendency more traditionally reserved usually for heroes), while the fukú more actively seeks to bring about its victims’ doom (actively seeking change being a tendency reserved more usually for villains). And yet, the fukú can also be defensive or reactive, as, for example, when it retaliates against Kennedy for his role in the death of Trujillo (Díaz 3-4), so this is not a particularly strict dichotomy.

Works Cited

Bethesda Game Studios. "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Bethesda Softworks, 11 November 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Print.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.

Fritz, Robert K. "Gender and Genre Fiction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Chasqui 48.1 (2019): 206-223. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26795323>.

Harper, D. Etymology of bear. 6 October 2022. 3 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear>.

—. Etymology of ghost. 7 December 2018. 25 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ghost>.

—. Etymology of grammatical. 7 December 2020. 26 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/grammatical>.

John. "John." The Bible. King James Version. n.d.

LeBlond, Lisa. "From Plátano Player to Questioning Chronicler—Historiography in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023).

Mahler, Anne Garland. "The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19.2 (2010): 119-140. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2010.494928>.

O'Brien, Sean P. "Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45.1 (2012): 75-94.

Schulenburg, Chris. "Nerd Nation: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao and Life in Tolkien’s Universe." MLN 131.2 (2016): 503-516.

Sepulveda, Fremio. "Coding the Immigrant Experience: Race, Gender and the Figure of the Dictator in Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao"." Journal of Caribbean Literatures 7.2 (2013): 15-33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43672608>.

Tait, Connor. "There and Back Again: Tolkien's Work in Diaz." ENG621 at Buffalo State University. Buffalo, 14 December 2023.

Student Engagement and Motivation in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

The Problem

A core element of a well-managed, productive, and engaged classroom is well-motivated students. There are, according to my classes, two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation – wanting to do the thing for the sake of doing the thing, because the thing is inherently desirable (also called, in the literature, autonomous motivation) – and extrinsic motivation – willingness to do the thing for a desired external reward or to avoid an undesired external consequence (also called controlled motivation).

A student’s intrinsic motivation generally has more effect on their engagement, productivity, self-efficacy, and generally doing the thing; their extrinsic motivation has less effect, to the point sometimes of having virtually no significant effect at all.

The core conundrum that arises is this: the forms of leverage available to teachers work almost exclusively on students’ extrinsic motivation and hardly at all on their intrinsic motivation. How do we, as teachers, square this circle? What tools are available to us to increase intrinsic motivation, or, failing that, at least to make extrinsic motivation more effective?

What Is Motivation?

It’s more complicated than the above-described two-factor schema, of course – “high-school students possess complex motivational characteristics” (Xie, Vongkulluksn, Cheng, & Jiang, 2022); “Achievement motivation is not a single construct but rather subsumes a variety of different constructs like ability self-concepts, task values, goals, and achievement motives” (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

The aspects of motivation are more finely divided out by Kosovich et al. (2015): assessment of ability to do a thing – i.e. whether one can do a thing now (ability) and whether one will be able to do the thing in the future (expectancy) – is termed expectancy; assessment of value expected to be derived from the the thing can be split out into intrinsic value (the thing is inherently enjoyable), utility value (the thing can help achieve other short- or long-term goals), and attainment value (the thing can affirm an important aspect of one’s identity); cost reflects any negative aspect of doing the thing, e.g. time and/or effort required, opportunity cost, boredom, or negative psychological states induced by struggling or failing at the thing. Expectancy and value are positively correlated with one another, and with positive educational outcomes; cost is negatively correlated with all three things (Kosovich, Hulleman, Barron, & Getty, 2015).

It appears that classroom motivation is influenced by at least five factors: the learner, the educator, the course content, the teaching method, and the learning environment. (Kong, 2021)

The Impact of Motivation on Learning

Student interest in education has a positive effect on learning: “It is extensively approved that learners who are actively participating in the learning progression and take interest in their academic education are more likely to achieve higher levels of learning.” (Kong, 2021)

As a subset of that, it is pretty consistent that student motivation correlates with academic outcomes – highly motivated students tend to be highly successful in school (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

As a subset of that, high intrinsic motivation is strongly correlated with student success. According to Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde (2020),

high-quality learning can only be achieved if the learner experiences a sense of self-determination. Self-determined learning (e.g. based upon intrinsic motivation) leads to a sense of well-being and contentment during the learning activity, a higher degree of learner engagement, and better performance outcomes. By contrast, learning processes that learners perceive as being controlled by others are connected to less contentment, less engagement, and a relatively low level of performance. (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020)

This reiterates the problem: intrinsically motivated students are more equipped to learn and to succeed at learning than extrinsically motivated students.

Techniques for Already Motivated Students

When students are already intrinsically motivated, clear and comprehensible instruction improves student outcomes relative to muddled or unclear instruction – but it has no significant effect on unmotivated students. (Bolkan, Goodboy, & Kelsey, 2016)

Similarly, when content and lessons are ‘gamified’, using principles of game design, it can increase learning… but primarily among students who are already intrinsically motivated. “[I]t is not a simple ‘gamification increases engagement’ relationship. Gamification impacts students with different types of motivation differently. […] it is particularly effective for students who are intrinsically motivated, particularly either by a motivation to know or a motivation towards stimulation. […] Overall, the results suggest that gamified learning interventions have a larger impact on students who are intrinsically motivated.” (Buckley & Doyle, 2016) Thus, gamification, while potentially good practice, doesn’t much help to improve intrinsic motivation.

Relevance of Material

Johansen, Eliassen, and Jeno establish that when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases (Johansen, Eliassen, & Jeno, 2023). This seems straightforward, but in tension with the student’s interests are the texts the curriculum demands be covered – which the teacher does not necessarily set themselves – and the interests of every other student – even assuming a teacher who can bring themselves to be interested enough in subject matter that interests any given student to plan lessons about it.

The fact that choice of content influences student motivation – when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases – seems, prima facie, challenging to use in the classroom. The curriculum may call for specific texts, with the teacher having limited control over it; a text that interests one student may hold no interest for another student; and a text that interests many students may hold no interest for the teacher, and it is, of course, challenging for a teacher to devise compelling lesson plans for content that is uninteresting to themselves – I find myself able to find a shared interest or two with most individual Gen Z students these days, but what tends to interest most of them – sports, dance TikTok, rap music, etc. – is usually difficult for me to bring myself to share. Still, I can usually count on a fair degree of success when using pop music for an anticipatory set.

One good solution to this, of course, is a decentralized inquiry-learning-based curriculum where each student pursues their own content interests, as propounded at length in the Buffalo State English Education program. This doesn’t help me as much if I end up in a position where I have no influence over the curriculum, though aspects of decentralized inquiry learning can be deployed even in the absence of curricular control.

Teaching Style

According to Zou et al.,

teachers' motivating styles can be divided into two orientations: controlling and autonomy‐supporting. The controlling motivating style is one in which teachers exert pressure on students to think, experience, or behave in a particular way, while the autonomy‐supporting motivating style is one in which teachers use noncontrolling methods to reduce pressure on students, and support students' autonomous development. […] Autonomy‐supporting classroom activities can improve students' perception of classroom teaching and can increase students' motivation and learning ability. […] Particularly, as for student psychological needs, experts agreed on the destructive effect of yelling, unfair punishments, abusive language, and criticism of fixed qualities, while the benefits of helping students find ways of monitoring their own progress and empathy for students. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023)

The obvious conclusion for a teacher to draw is that they should teach autonomy-supportingly, not controllingly, and definitely without yelling at, screaming at, ranting at, verbally abusing, punishing unfairly, or criticizing fixed qualities of students.

Juxtaposing good and bad and very bad methods of teaching in this way could lead to a misapprehension: so long as I’m not screaming at the students, I’m fine, right? Wrong! Students do need to, ideally, be supported and given tools to succeed, not just not yelled at.

Unfulfilled basic psychological needs, like perception of autonomy, perception of competence, and perception of relatedness, can negatively affect motivation (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020). “[W]hen students feel controlled, their intrinsic motivation is weakened, while their extrinsic motivation is strengthened.” (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023) Conversely, fulfilling these psychological needs can positively affect motivation:

To enable students to experience autonomy, competence and relatedness, a context should be created in which students’ actions result in the desired outcomes […] this means that students are provided with tasks […] that help them to reach the learning objectives […] By doing so, students get the opportunity to determine their actions (autonomy) and be effective (experience competence). […A] teacher can create the right conditions by providing appropriate help to students. Help contains the provision of resources to obtain the learning objectives, and information on how to apply those resources, like strategy explanations and meta-cognitive or self-regulatory suggestions. Providing help to students will empower them to act autonomously and effectively (experiencing competence). Moreover, as they experience that the teacher cares about them, it contributes to students’ feelings of relatedness. Feedback that provides information on how to proceed […] has proven to be effective. […] Teacher classroom practice in which constructive feedback [i]s provided [i]s associated with higher student perceptions of autonomy and competence. (Leenknecht, et al., 2021)

Other supports for motivation include: providing choices; taking student preferences and interests into account; explaining a rationale of why the material is important; giving opportunities for students to ask questions. Meanwhile, use of uninteresting activities can thwart motivation. (Patall, et al., 2018)

Teacher-Student Relationship

Much of the academic literature suggests that the teacher-student relationship mediates student motivation, making it a key to teaching, in this matter as it is in so many matters. On a basic level, it contributes towards the student’s need for relatedness, as mentioned above.

Zou, et al. (2024), among others, have found that the teacher’s intrinsic motivation for teaching correlated strongly with their students’ intrinsic motivation for learning, with the arrow of causation pointing from the former to the latter.

Students who believe that teachers are intrinsically motivated to teach are more willing to explore new skills and learn more than students who believe that teachers are extrinsically motivated to teach […] a teacher's motives for engaging in instruction can provide cues related to teachers' displays of positive affect and autonomy supportiveness, which can provide contextual cues that positively influence motivational orientations of students. Additionally, teachers' own motivating style and personality traits that involve control have been found to lead to their tendency to adopt a controlling motivating style. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023).

Henry & Thorsen (2021) finds self-disclosure – teachers telling students about themselves – can improve teacher-student student relationship and increases student motivation:

While some strongly-endorsed reasons are instrumental, and relate to the content of learning, for example clarifying learning materials and providing real-world examples, other purposes are relational and aimed at developing positive teacher–student relationships and creating a comfortable classroom environment. Generally, students are aware of teachers’ self-disclosures and recognize their value in creating a climate conducive to communication. Students often see beyond the personal stories teachers tell, interpreting their self-disclosures as attempts to be honest and open about themselves, to make personal connections, and to create an open and positive learning environment. (Henry & Thorsen, 2021)

Henry & Thorsen are, to be sure, looking at ENL teachers in Sweden, but this seems like a finding that could plausibly be consistent between disciplines and across oceans.

Impact on My Teaching

These findings reinforce the understanding that teacher-student relationship is paramount and fundamental in virtually every aspect of teaching. I shall henceforth redouble my efforts to quickly learn every student’s name and general interests and attempt to make connections by being authentic and (within reason) open about myself.

Luckily for my students, my motivation for teaching is largely intrinsic, which should correlate with them ending up intrinsically motivated. I enjoy teaching, I enjoy it for its own sake as well as believing it is inherently a good thing, and the motivation of money is, while not entirely unimportant, secondary.

Moreover, my teaching style tends not to be very controlling, though I could stand to do better at encouraging and helping students to autonomy.

Works Cited

Bolkan, S., Goodboy, A. K., & Kelsey, D. M. (2016, April 2). Instructor Clarity and Student Motivation: Academic Performance as A Product of Students’ Ability and Motivation to Process Instructional Material. Communication Education, 65(2), 129-148. doi:10.1080/03634523.2015.1079329

Buckley, P., & Doyle, E. (2016, August 17). Gamification and student motivation. Interactive Learning Environments, 24(6), 1162-1175. doi:10.1080/10494820.2014.964263

Henry, A., & Thorsen, C. (2021, January 2). Teachers' self-disclosures and influences on students' motivation: A relational perspective. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(1), 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1441261

Johansen, M. O., Eliassen, S., & Jeno, L. M. (2023). "Why is this relevant for me?": increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality. Frontiers in Psychology, 14(1184804). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184804

Kaiser, L.-M., Großmann, N., & Wilde, M. (2020, November 21). The relationship between students’ motivation and their perceived amount of basic psychological need satisfaction – a differentiated investigation of students’ quality of motivation regarding biology. International Journal of Science Education, 42(17), 2801-2818. doi:10.1080/09500693.2020.1836690

Kong, Y. (2021, October 22). The Role of Experiential Learning on Students’ Motivation and Classroom Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 771272. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771272

Kosovich, J. J., Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., & Getty, S. (2015). A Practical Measure of Student Motivation: Establishing Validity Evidence for the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale in Middle School. Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(5-6), 790-816. doi:10.1177/0272431614556890

Leenknecht, M., Wijnia, L., Köhlen, M., Fryer, L., Rikers, R., & Loyens, S. (2021, February 17). Formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(2), 236-255. doi:10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228

Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F.-F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016, April). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314-328. doi:10.1037/edu0000092

Patall, E. A., Steingut, R. R., Vasquez, A. C., Trimble, S. S., Pituch, K. A., & Freeman, J. L. (2018, February). Daily autonomy supporting or thwarting and students’ motivation and engagement in the high school science classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(2), 269-288. doi:10.1037/edu0000214

Steinmayr, R., Weidinger, A. F., Schwinger, M., & Spinath, B. (2019, July 31). The Importance of Students' Motivation for Their Academic Achievement – Replicating and Extending Previous Findings. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(1730). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01730

Xie, K., Vongkulluksn, V. W., Cheng, S.-L., & Jiang, Z. (2022). Examining High-School Students’ Motivation Change Through a Person-Centered Approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(1), 89-107. doi:10.1037/edu0000507

Zou, H., Yao, J., Zhang, Y., & Huang, X. (2023, July 28). The influence of teachers' intrinsic motivation on students' intrinsic motivation: The mediating role of teachers' motivating style and teacher-student relationships. Psychology in the Schools, 61(1), 272-286. doi:10.1002/pits.23050

Welfare of Zoo Bears

for Animal Welfare class, 2017

Introduction

Positive welfare is a concept of welfare that goes beyond simply preventing negative experiences and outcomes (as some concepts of welfare do, for example the Five Freedoms, of which four are “freedom from” things considered bad) and is concerned instead (or additionally) with maximizing positive experiences and outcomes – positive welfare is concerned with pleasure, not just the absence of suffering.

Positive welfare can generally be measured similarly to negative welfare, but may be a bit more difficult to measure in some cases. Stress hormones are fairly straightforward to detect (for negative welfare), as are pleasure hormones (for positive welfare). Abnormal (e.g. stereotypic) behavior is an easy indicator of negative welfare, and play behavior is an indicator of positive welfare. It’s fairly straightforward to set up a system to test whether an animal chooses to pursue or avoid a thing, indicating positive welfare (if they acquire a thing they seek) or negative welfare (if they are subjected to a thing they seek to avoid). An animal’s environment need only be compared to their habitat in the wild to determine its naturalness (positive welfare) or lack thereof (negative welfare). On the other hand, disease, injury, and premature death are fairly easy to detect, but the concept of positive welfare in these areas poses a challenge, although good and consistent reproduction can be an indicator of positive health welfare.

This paper will assess the situation of bears in zoos and make recommendations for their positive welfare. I will be dealing with the extant species of bear (family Ursidae) other than polar and panda bears – among other things, the former has unique thermal and swimming requirements and the latter has unique dietary requirements and are notoriously fussy (especially in the realm of reproduction), whereas the other six are broadly more similar to each other in terms of welfare needs – specifically: the brown bear (Ursus arctos), the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus), the American black bear (Ursus americanus), the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus), the sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), and the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus).

Research Summary and Analysis

Are They Healthy?

In negative terms, a healthy bear is one that is free of disease, injury, premature death, hunger, pain, and so on. But in terms of positive welfare, we can do better than merely that (although positive physical welfare is a bit more difficult to conceptualize than positive mental welfare). Bears should be fed a diet fit for their nutritional needs, not too much and not too little, and should be able to get a sufficient amount of exercise. Good reproduction is an indicator of good health, as is an appropriate weight (not too heavy, not too thin), a long life, and certain behavioral indicators, such as play (Held & Špinka, 2011).

Most bears have better lifelong health (e.g. sloth bears reproducing better, as in Forthman & Bakeman, 1992) when raised by their mothers, as opposed to those raised by human caretakers. However, there is a tradeoff in allowing bears to raise their own young – some mother bears may cannibalize their offspring, and bears who have been eaten as cubs tend to show poor welfare indeed.

Ambient noise is a rarely-considered aspect of welfare, but its effect on mothering behavior has been studied in sun bears by Owen, et al. (2013). In short, loud ambient noise increases mothering behavior, and is probably energetically costly during a time (cub-rearing) when there is little energy to spare.

A nutritionally healthy diet is important. Most bears in the wild eat more plant than animal matter and are opportunistic omnivores, eating anything from leaves, roots, and berries to insects, carrion, fresh meat, and fish; sloth bears in particular are adapted to be myrmecophagous. For a more natural and healthy diet, bread should be minimized; plants and meat or fish should be maximized.

Do They Feel Well Mentally?

It is important to keep bears entertained and active and displaying directed behaviors (indicating good mental welfare), rather than bored and passive and displaying stereotypic behaviors (indicating poor mental welfare). For this purpose, a variety of enrichment can (and ought to) be used (Shyne, 2006).

Feeding enrichment is among the most-studied forms of enrichment for bears. For Kodiak and grizzly bears (two subspecies of brown bear), ice blocks and “fishcicles” (whole mackerel or salmon frozen into ice blocks, sometimes with “layers of peanuts, apple pieces, raisins, peanut butter, and grape jelly, as well as scattered peanuts, bread, raisins, and sunflower seeds”) are a common (and apparently effective) form of enrichment, causing the bears to be more active and spend less time engaging in abnormal behaviors (Forthman, et al., 1992; McGowan, Robbins, Alldredge, & Newberry, 2009). Similarly, logs filled with honey are effective at reducing stereotypic and abnormal behaviors in sloth, American black, and brown bears, as is hiding food throughout an enclosure for bears to search for and collect (Carlstead, Seidensticker, & Baldwin, 1991). Offering food at unpredictable times is also effective enrichment in spectacled bears (Fischbacher & Schmid, 1999) and sun bears (Schneider, Nogge, & Kolter, 2014). Throwing food from the visitor area is suboptimal, seen to cause stereotypy in brown bears (Montaudouin & Le Pape, 2004); food should instead be hidden around the exhibit.

As with physical health, human-reared sloth bears tend to exhibit worse mental health than mother-reared bears, including self-directed and stereotypic behavior (Forthman & Bakeman, 1992). Male brown bears orphaned at an early age have been observed engaging in abnormal apparent fellatio behavior with each other, further suggesting that remaining with their mother for at least the first year of life is important for the lifelong mental health of a cub (Sergiel, et al., 2014).

Do They Live A Normal/Natural Life?

Female sloth bears are most social when exhibited with a familiar male and least social when exhibited with other females (Forthman & Bakeman, 1992). Social activity is often considered good for mental welfare (and as a practical matter exhibiting bears together decreases the total enclosure space required), especially in bears who have grown used to the presence of conspecifics (Mattiello, et al., 2014), but bears in the wild are famously solitary – considered the most asocial of the carnivorans – so for maximum naturalness, they should perhaps be exhibited alone and introduced to one another only for breeding.

Bears naturally range across a wide territory, so bear enclosures should be as large as possible – it is recommend that a single bear be housed in an enclosure of at least 2,500 m2, with an additional 1,000 m2 for each additional individual (Maślak, Sergiel, Bowles, & Paśko, 2015). Barren indoor enclosures are terrible for the bears, increasing stereotypies significantly – enclosures should be outdoors, but with ability to get away from inclement [M5] weather (Tan, et al., 2013). Slightly better is the common style of enclosure in older zoos: a small concrete area with a pool, with a moat separating the bears from visitors. This is insufficient [M6] – bear enclosures should provide opportunities to express natural digging, climbing, and tree-rubbing behavior; to wit: dirt and trees should be available (Maślak, Sergiel, Bowles, & Paśko, 2015).

Conclusion

One flaw with many areas of research on bear welfare (a flaw that almost all articles cited in this paper share) is small sample sizes: most studies are of only a handful of individuals at a single zoo; even the largest study is only a review of all of Poland’s zoo bears, which is still not very many animals. Unlike herd animals, who are kept in large groups that allow many animals to be studied, bears are usually kept alone or in pairs, only a few at each zoo, making it difficult to achieve high sample sizes in studies of zoo bears.

In some ways, recommendations about positive welfare are difficult to disentangle from recommendations about negative welfare. Increasing positive experiences in an area will tend to correspondingly decrease negative experiences in that area.

For maximum positive welfare in zoo bears, my research turns up three primary recommendations: outdoor enclosure space should be maximized, and enclosures should be fitted with dirt, trees, and pools rather than bare concrete; food should be varied, suitable to the bears’ natural diet, and presented interestingly (within logs or ice blocks, or hidden throughout the enclosure); cubs should be kept with their mothers for at least a year.

Food enrichment is the easiest and most achievable of these recommendations. All one needs to turn boring fish into entertaining “fishcicles” is a bucket, a hose, and a freezer. Hiding food throughout the enclosure may occupy a bit more keeper time than simply throwing the food to the bears, but is worth it for the animals’ mental health.

Keeping cubs with their mothers is sometimes risky, but for the lifelong health (mental and physical) of the bears, it is probably worth the risk except when the danger of cannibalism is very high.

Maximizing enclosure space and switching from bare concrete to dirt and trees will be the most difficult proposal for many zoos to enact. Zoo space is quite often simply limited, and increasing space for bears will decrease space for all the other animals. Moreover, even redesigning an exhibit without expanding it can be expensive, beyond the budgets of many zoos. Still, this should be done whenever space and budgets permit.

Works Cited

Carlstead, K., Seidensticker, J., & Baldwin, R. (1991). Environmental Enrichment for Zoo Bears. Zoo Biology, 10, 3-16.

Fischbacher, M., & Schmid, H. (1999). Feeding enrichment and stereotypic behavior in spectacled bears. 18, 363-371. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-2361(1999)18:5<363::AID-ZOO1>3.0.CO;2-H

Forthman, D. L., & Bakeman, R. (1992). Environmental and Social Influences on Enclosure Use and Activity Patterns of Captive Sloth Bears (Ursus ursinus). Zoo Biology, 11, 405-415.

Forthman, D. L., Elder, S. D., Bakeman, R., Kurkowski, T. W., Noble, C. C., & Winslow, S. W. (1992). Effects of Feeding Enrichment on Behavior of Three Species of Captive Bears. Zoo Biology, 11, 187-195.

Held, S. D., & Špinka, M. (2011, May). Animal play and animal welfare. Animal Behaviour, 81(5), 891–899. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.007

Maślak, R., Sergiel, A., Bowles, D., & Paśko, Ł. (2015, October 9). The Welfare of Bears in Zoos: A Case Study of Poland. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 24-36. doi:10.1080/10888705.2015.1071671

Mattiello, S., Brignoli, S. M., Cordedda, A., Pedroni, B., Colombo, C., & Rosi, F. (2014). Effect of the change of social environment on the behavior of a captive brown bear (Ursus arctos). Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 9(3), 119-123. doi:10.1016/j.jveb.2014.01.002

McGowan, R. T., Robbins, C. T., Alldredge, J. R., & Newberry, R. C. (2009, October 8). Contrafreeloading in grizzly bears: implications for captive foraging enrichment. Zoo Biology, 484-502. doi:10.1002/zoo.20282

Montaudouin, S., & Le Pape, G. (2004, September 30). Comparison of the behaviour of European brown bears (Ursus arctos arctos) in six different parks, with particular attention to stereotypies. Behavioural Processes, 67(2), 235-244. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2004.02.008

Owen, M. A., Hall, S., Bryant, L., & Swaisgood, R. R. (2013, December 17). The influence of ambient noise on maternal behavior in a Bornean sun bear (Helarctos malayanus euryspilus). Zoo Biology, 33, 49-53. doi:10.1002/zoo.21105

Schneider, M., Nogge, G., & Kolter, L. (2014, January 9). Implementing unpredictability in feeding enrichment for Malayan sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). 33, 54-62. doi:10.1002/zoo.21112

Sergiel, A., Maślak, R., Zedrosser, A., Paśko, Ł., Garshelis, D. L., Reljić, S., & Huber, D. (2014, June 4). Fellatio in captive brown bears: Evidence of long-term effects of suckling deprivation? Zoo Biology, 33, 349-352. doi:10.1002/zoo.21137

Shyne, A. (2006, April 19). Meta-analytic review of the effects of enrichment on stereotypic behavior in zoo mammals. Zoo Biology, 0, 1-21. doi:10.1002/zoo.20091

Tan, H., Ong, S., Langat, G., Bahaman, A., Sharma, R., & al., e. (2013, April). The influence of enclosure design on diurnal activity and stereotypic behaviour in captive Malayan Sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). Research in Veterinary Science, 94(2), 228-239. doi:10.1016/j.rvsc.2012.09.024