Rebekah Shultz Colby

7 articles
University of Denver ORCID: 0000-0001-6381-7796
  1. Playing the digital dialectic game: Writing pedagogy with generative AI
    Abstract

    This article explores teaching writing with generative AI as critical play where students and teachers engage in an ethically dialectical and aleatory game with generative AI. I qualitatively surveyed 24 writing teachers about how they teach writing with generative AI as well as its advantages and disadvantages. I discovered that teachers used generative AI to teach about the ethics of generative AI's design and rhetorical use to avoid plagiarism. Teachers also critically played with generative AI to teach the writing process of invention, drafting, revision, and editing. Specifically, the critical, dialectical interplay of human and machine invents in aleatory and emergent ways, creating moments of epiphany for students and teachers within the writing process for invention, drafting, revision, and editing while the real time pace of generative AI democratizes education, making writing and teaching more accessible for them.

    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2025.102915
  2. Embodying empathy: using game design as a maker pedagogy to teach design thinking
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2022.2077453
  3. Making games matter: Games and materiality special issue introduction
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102730
  4. Cultivating ethical gameplay dispositions through the materiality of gameplay in Illuminati
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102724
  5. Reinventing argument: How games persuade through performative enthymemes
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102693
  6. Game-based Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2016.11.002
  7. A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2008.04.005