Category: diverse college classroom

Game On: Competitive Gamification in Diverse ESL Classrooms – Faculty Focus

In many diverse English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms, sustaining student motivation can be difficult, especially when it comes to vocabulary learning. Traditional drills often fail to spark excitement, and learners sometimes hesitate to participate because they fear making mistakes or being judged. However, when competition enters the scene, particularly in the form of digital games or classroom missions, everything changes.

As an ESL instructor in Kuwait, I have seen how structured and respectful competition can shift classroom dynamics. Whether learners are battling a “final boss” in a vocabulary game or racing another team to answer grammar questions, their focus sharpens, and their energy rises. Competitive gamification may sound intimidating at first, but when approached with care and purpose, it can help learners take ownership of their progress, laugh a little more in class, and gain the confidence they need to use the language effectively.

This approach is especially helpful in diverse learning environments, where many students experience anxiety from past experiences with English. Classroom games that incorporate competition give students a safe space to try, fail, laugh, and try again. Below are five practical ways teachers can use competitive gamification to increase motivation, engagement, and participation without needing expensive tools or advanced technology.

1. Build Team Identity and Roles

Instead of dividing students into random groups, they can be allowed to form “game squads” with their own team names, mascots, or colors. Encourage them to assign rotating roles, such as speaker, scribe, timer, or cheerleader. This small step transforms teamwork into something more exciting and meaningful for the students.

Tools to try:

• Printed team badges
• Canva-designed team flags
• Whiteboards or Quizizz Team Mode

Why it works:

Many diverse learners place a strong value on group identity and cooperation. Giving students the freedom to name themselves “The Grammar Falcons” or “Team Lightning” adds emotional investment and a sense of fun to the class. I have noticed that when students feel like they belong to something, they participate more enthusiastically, even if they were shy at first. One class even created its own team chant and insisted on saying it before every challenge. This ownership made all the difference in their classroom engagement.

You can also level this up by awarding small points for creativity in team names, collaboration, and encouragement, in addition to correct answers. This shows students that being kind and supportive is as valuable as winning.

2. Introduce Weekly “Boss Battles”

One of my favorite strategies is turning the end of each unit into a “boss battle.” This gamified twist allows students to review the content creatively and energetically. It can be anything from a vocabulary quiz to a speaking relay or even a storytelling competition based on the week’s topics.

In my classroom, students know that Thursday is Boss Battle Day. I would project a countdown timer, play suspenseful music (there are tons of royalty-free tracks on YouTube), and announce the challenge like a game master. Rewards were simple stickers, power cards, or three bonus XP points, but the emotional payoff was huge. Students began asking midweek, “What’s the boss challenge this time?” This anticipation helped them stay focused throughout the week.

Pro tip:

Rotate the type of boss battles you use. For example:
• Week 1: Timed vocabulary puzzles
• Week 2: Grammar challenge maze
• Week 3: “Beat the teacher” quiz
• Week 4: Creative speaking duel between teams

This variety keeps students curious and prevents routines from becoming monotonous.

3. Alternate Between Individual and Team Challenges

Not all learners are identical. Some love the spotlight, whereas others prefer to work quietly. One of the best things you can do as a teacher is to offer a mix of competition formats.

In my classes, I alternate between weeks. One activity might focus on individual competition, such as a speed-based vocabulary game. The next step might focus on team challenges, where groups build sentences together or solve a language mystery. This balance helps every student to find their moment to shine.

This flexible structure especially benefits quieter students. One of my shyest learners once topped a solo Quizizz game and afterward told me, “I finally feel like I’m good at English.” That comment stuck with me because it showed that gamification was not just fun; it gave students a sense of achievement that traditional methods often do not.

Students can also choose their preferred challenge mode. They are given a short form at the beginning of the semester to determine whether they enjoy team play, solo missions, or a mix of both. Then, use this data to design your games in a way that includes everyone is voice.

4. Use Leaderboards Mindfully

Leaderboards can be powerful motivators, but they must be used with care. In my classroom, I publicly display team progress but keep individual rankings private unless a student asks about them. I also avoid using the same leaderboard for the entire semester. Sometimes, I reset the scores halfway through the course to give new teams a chance to rise.

Another trick I use is “rotating rewards.” For example, I celebrate the team with the highest points for one week. Next, I reward the “most consistent,” “most improved,” or even the “kindest player.” This approach relieves pressure on students who may not win the top score but are still deeply engaged and helpful.

Gamified tip:

Instead of grades, an XP system should be used. Students earn points for completing activities, participating in discussions, and helping their teammates. As they reach certain XP levels, they unlock titles like “Word Warrior,” “Grammar Guardian,” or “Team Captain.” These ranks do not carry grades, but they create a game-like progression that students enjoy tracking.

Some of my students even began drawing avatars to represent their progress and decorating their XP sheets with custom designs. These small things can make English class feel like something they get to do instead of something they have to do.

5. Let Students Reflect and Choose

One of the most overlooked yet powerful tools in gamification is student reflection. After each gamified week, I dedicated five minutes to reflection. I ask simple, open-ended questions, such as:
• What did you enjoy the most this week?
• Which challenge helped you learn the most?
• Do you prefer to work alone or in a team?
• Which game would you like to try next time?

Students often provide useful feedback. One learner suggested turning the vocabulary quiz into a timed team relay using flashcards. Another asked if we could create a “mystery box” round where students randomly pull a game task from a box. These ideas helped me expand my toolkit and showed the students that their voices mattered.

Involving learners in the game design process also boosts their motivation. When they help shape their experience, they are more likely to feel invested in their learning.

Final Thoughts

Gamification does not require flashy technology or perfect lesson plans. In many classrooms, where traditional teacher-centered approaches still dominate, the introduction of respectful and playful competition can shift the paradigm. With a bit of structure, some creative energy, and genuine care for your learners, you can transform English lessons into memorable learning experiences.

When competition is used with purpose and flexibility, it becomes more than just a game. It allows students to take risks, build confidence, and feel proud of their progress. Ultimately, it is not about who wins the boss fight. It is about helping learners find their voice and feel that English and their learning belongs to them.

Fahad Ameen is a PhD researcher in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham and an English language instructor at the College of Education, Kuwait University. His research explores competitive gamification, vocabulary retention, and learner motivation in Arab ESL classrooms. He has also designed gamified vocabulary books and classroom materials for A1–B1 learners.

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October 15, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus
The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:
- How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?
- How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?
- How can I support students to co-construct their learning?
As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:
- Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?
- What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?
- Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?
- Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?
To these, I added the following questions:
- Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?
- The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.
As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.
Source link
July 25, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus
The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:
- How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?
- How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?
- How can I support students to co-construct their learning?
As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:
- Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?
- What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?
- Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?
- Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?
To these, I added the following questions:
- Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?
- The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.
As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.
Source link
July 25, 2025