Finding Joy in Academic Integrity
With each new year, academic integrity concerns begin afresh. Faculty and staff worry about upholding policy, explaining expectations, and designing assessments students find worthy and engaging. This is especially true as emails continue to pile up, policies change, and deadlines loom ever closer. When thinking about a fresh way to teach students about academic integrity, the Academic Integrity Office, located in the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, felt those same concerns. How do we teach students policy in a way that sticks and doesn’t put them to sleep? Through much reflection, we decided to embrace the challenge and find joy in academic integrity.
This year, to combat the new semester scaries and to better connect with students, our team decided to try gaming. While many faculty already implement gaming in the classroom, this opportunity allowed us to find joy in teaching about a complex and challenging topic. After months of hard work, attention to detail, practice sessions, and feedback implementation, the Academic Integrity team created the FYS 101 Shared Experience, “Academic Integrity: Escape from Bird Library,” a 50-minute escape-room style game. It introduces academic integrity concepts like self-advocacy, group project conflict management, syllabus and assignment instruction review, citations, and more. This low-stakes competition helped students meet new peers, engage in active learning, and even brought about a few laughs. Thank you to the First Year Seminar team, Shannon Hitchcock-Shantz, Aimée Shukuru, Alexa Jones, and Carlee Kerr for allowing us this opportunity to experiment, have fun, and test our gaming skills.
“Escape from Bird Library” can be easily adapted for classroom use or any departmental training! If you would like AIO to come to your class or department meeting and facilitate this activity, simply submit a request form: Request a Presentation
Finding joy in academic integrity, and gaming, requires us to recenter students in their own learning. We must allow students to actively engage with the material and create an opportunity for mistakes and feedback without penalty. This fun permits students to enjoy the learning processes while simultaneously providing us with valuable lessons around having fun, practicing curiosity, and not taking ourselves too seriously. The escape room activity took months of planning before implementation, and we recognize that this planning period is a privilege that many faculty and staff do not have. However, there are ways to find your own joy in classroom based academic integrity activities. Can you create a Jeopardy game? Could students have a Family Feud-style face off? Is a scavenger hunt a possibility? How can we help students connect with the material and with each other? These questions, these games, and finding joy can stretch beyond the academic integrity sphere, but finding fun in this world is so important.
Whether you’re interested in us hosting the escape room or other types of presentations for your class and want to learn more, have your own game idea that needs feedback, or just want to connect about joy in teaching and learning, please reach out to the academic integrity team via email at aio@syr.edu or by calling 315-443-5412 any time. We would love to arrange a consultation with you.
Kate Marzen, Director of Academic Integrity
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