learning experiences inspired by the possibility of joy

Let’s start with games and gamification. Turning school into a computer game, this once strange prospect, now thrills students and taxpayers alike. Computer games can teach in a visceral, engaging way, no doubt, and often without those expensive facilities and staff. During COVID, those games were probably the highlight of a school day. Autonomy, relatedness, pleasure, purpose, challenge and success are powerful motivators, and harnessed in service to learning they have proven indisputably effective.

In a 2014 survey, teachers revealed why they use games in classrooms (Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014, slide 22):

to teach new material
to practice material already learned
to conduct formative assessments
to conduct summative assessments
to motivate/reward
to pass students’ time between assignments or tasks
to give students a break activity
to manage the classroom
to connect students with one another
to communicate with others

By providing a primitive, high-contrast emotional context, games motivate and focus attention.

Instead of dwelling on their obvious utility, it seems more useful to consider their limitations. That way, we can manage their utilization effectively. Games come with baggage:

1. Commodification

In a teacher-student relationship, both come to a negotiated understanding that teaches students about the interpersonal dynamics and allows the teacher to tune their style for maximum impact. When we hand over a standardized teaching product or tool to a roomful of students, the computer isn’t negotiating. One-size-fits-all tuned to the average student, as if there were such a thing, risks tremendous disservice to anyone seeking or needing a different learning path. In a survey of teacher professionals we find evidence that games don’t serve all students equally. Who benefits most from computer games in the classroom? 47% of teachers say low-performing students benefit the most, while only 15% believe high performing students benefit more (Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014, slide 51). Enhanced individualization, improved computer programming that adjusts the learning experience to what the computer perceives to be the skill level of the student, offers progress on this issue.

2. Relationships

Computers may bring distant people closer, but they separate people who are otherwise together. On-line courses can be effective as a financial, convenience or access solution, but they deliver tepid, computer-mediated relationships instead of fresh, live interaction. It is often literally “phoning it in”. We might ask, outside the context of a killer pandemic, if mediated relationships are what our students engage with at home (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram...), should we perpetuate them in the social environment of school? Is it the best use of that time together? Is this the best we can do for them?

3. Simulacra

In addition to distancing us from each other, computer games distance us from life. This is what we are offering our students: a virtual imitation, disembodied, abstract and disconnected from weather and the more complex sensations and relationships of our non-virtual existence. It is thin gruel, but we should recall that traditional school was less: passively listening to lectures with scant relief from slides or white board notes. Nostalgia is useless. Simulacra hide a discomforting truth though:

The more time we spend cognitively, perceptually and emotionally within the confines of that 15” screen, the more it defines our sense of the world. There is no more passing it off as “virtual”. It is the reality.

4. Appropriateness

Computers have colonized classrooms as well as dinner tables. When we discuss the election at dinner and my daughter can look something up and tell me I’m wrong: awesome. When we try to have a discussion and we can’t pry her away from her texting habit, less so. Often the tool is inappropriate to the project. A meta-analysis of digital games found:

Games, in other words, can teach content but don’t teach reasoning or creativity. All games are not computer games of course, inspiring the question: what kind of games are we talking about? Computer game, athletic game, backgammon/go/chess/mah-jong, card game, hopscotch, gambling, golf, pickup sticks, hangman? Long before consumer computing, a year before I would learn how to use a slide rule after tediously learning logarithms, and two years before calculators were allowed in classrooms making that slide rule effort completely irrelevant, my fourth grade teacher led us through a week long exercise in which we were charged with maximizing the yield on a mythical farm. The game was engaging, the competition stimulating, that entire experience unforgettable. I can’t imagine what a computer could have added. In the spirit of a hypothesis, an experiment, here’s a little rubric for evaluating your next game plan:

Inspiring            Entertaining      Fulfilling            

Irrelevant          Boring                Engaging

                          Passifying           Activating

Question: How often are the educational games you utilize inspiring?
Question: How often are they fulfilling in all but the primitive, emotional sense?

5. Environment

If games are an abstraction of reality, is a digital version of a game an abstraction of an abstraction and thus one step further removed from the world, physically? Has the time spent staring into a screen shifted the computer from a tool to the medium in which we marinate? I fear this is the case.

Missing from models of educational gaming is consideration of the human body and the physical environment. The game itself is considered to be that environment, the broader context imagined as irrelevant. We imagine students glued to their screens, suspended in a black box, expanding the mind, disembodied. Am I alone in recoiling at this? Adolescents in the United States spend 8 hours per day seated, hours of that staring at a screen (Runacres et al., 2021). How do we lure our children from their shiny objects however? That box gives them compelling and deeply emotional experiences. Artificial limitations only enhance the appeal, as every parent knows; the more computer time is limited, the more desirable it becomes. A more positive approach would be so many vibrant alternatives that computers feel limiting, not liberating.

As commerce builds increasingly alluring virtual realities, perhaps school needs to build a comparably compelling corporeal reality. We need to reinvest in real life. We spend billions on school construction: it seems there’s plenty of capital to work with if we but invest in reality. Here is Franklin Bobbitt, Professor of Educational Administration at the University of Chicago, to whom we owe one of the first efforts to formalize public school curriculum, writing way back in 1918 about two boys spontaneously roving about the ports of Asia that they visited by ship:

Question: To what extent are you and your students trapped in a single classroom?
Question: Even when you are not, how compelling is your physical environment?

6. Health

Research on computers and health often sounds too specific to matter, or delves into issues easily solved without seriously challenging the medium (aggressive behavior: play a different game, ergonomics: get a better chair, eye strain: take breaks...the list is endless). At the risk of sounding old, as holding a battery powered phone or mouse become more and more physically painful to me and as 5G connectivity beckons with ever more powerful electronic emissions, I worry increasingly about the health impact of my computer usage and what we are foisting on our children. Enthralled by the virtual, we march in lock-step towards an abstracted existence without knowing much about the effects on our corporeal selves. We only know that we are getting fatter.

Here’s what this essay is really getting at: we play games, but games are not “play” in the richest, most profound sense. Games are a commodity, play is a fundamental human right.

Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) states:

              1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

              2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.

Games narrow choices, and pre-define processes and outcomes. Play in the broader sense is open-ended and goal and process inventing. It involves fence-less exploration and ceaseless re-negotiation. Games pre-define the context, Play suffers no such limitations. Games promote concentration, Play demands playfulness. Games are rule-following, Play is rule-finding and bending and breaking. Games do offer experiences of tremendous emotional potency: supported by teachers equipped to help students make meaning from the experience, they certainly offer the potential for visceral learning. Play though operates at a higher level: it is what reifies into games. Games define winners and losers: they divide. Play simply identifies players: it builds community. As the Age of Acceleration increasingly delivers situations without pre-defined rules, rule-following loses its utility. What children do from birth will serve them better. Our children need to play freely more than they need to play games. They need to experience reality in a spirit of play, employing games not as the first resort but actually the last. They already do it naturally: we adults might consider provoking or challenging and then butting out.

Play thrives on freedom. School runs on rules. Play is disorderly. School skews towards order. Play is unpredictable. Schools are organized. Play thrives on risk. Schools will rubberize the very earth we walk on rather than embrace risk, elbowed into that stance by lawyers, politicians, and yes, parents. These are the paradoxes that gave us recess, effectively amputating play from the meaty, juicy business of school. What we need is playful learning, and that requires adult buy-in, a certain relaxation of expectation, and that most precious commodity, time.

Consider what our standards enforcement has wrought. The worse you do on tests, the less you get to play. Thus, only test-smart kids get to play, but they are probably studying. All we get is rule-followers. This is madness. If we are truly preparing kids for the future and not some carefully curated past, then we should be bombarding them with exactly what play naturally offers. If we truly seek to nurture activists and not passivists, participants instead of recipients, then let us demand freedom, disorder, risk and most fundamentally, joy.

Let our children play.

References

Baratunde T. (2013, June 17). #Unplug: Baratunde Thurston left the internet for 25 days, and you should, too. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/3012521/baratunde-thurston-leaves-the-internet.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.

Bobbitt, F. (1918). The curriculum. Houghton Mifflin.

Clark, D., Tanner-Smith, E., & Killingsworth, S. (2013, May). Digital Games for Learning: A Systematic Review and  Meta-Analysis. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.405.4312&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Kuschner, D. (2012). Play is natural to childhood but school is not: The problem of integrating play into the curriculum. International Journal of Play, 1(3), p. 242-249.

Runacres A, Mackintosh K.A., Knight R.L., Sheeran L., Thatcher R., Shelley J., & McNarry M.A. (2021 Oct 27). Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Sedentary Time and Behaviour in Children and Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health; 18(21):11286. doi: 10.3390/ijerph182111286. PMID: 34769800; PMCID: PMC8583678.

Sylwester, R. & Cho, J.-Y. (1992, December). What Brain Research Says About Paying Attention.
Educational Leadership, 50 (4), p. 71-75.

Takeuchi, L. M., & Vaala, S. (2014). Level up learning: A national survey on teaching with digital Games. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. CC BY-SA 4.0

United Nations (1989). UN convention on rights of the child. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!