Presumably, the way the human animal learns stays more or less constant. Still, reformers, policy makers, and curriculum designers fight over what’s best for our schools. That’s because, although the mechanism of learning is static, subject matter is dynamic. That body of knowledge through which we think critically about our world can (and does) change immensely from one century to the next. Each change requires new teaching tools.
Digital technologies in general, and video games in particular, can help teachers overcome one of the hardest challenges involved in teaching today’s complex body of knowledge.
Most advocates of edtech talk about digital literacies and STEM skills. Or perhaps they talk about the precision with which digital tools can perform non-invasive academic assessments. Maybe they mention scalability, access, and socio-economic equality, citing the lower costs involved in digital content delivery.
While new learning tools can certainly be helpful in all of these areas, it is narrow-minded to focus only on these benefits. Instead, we should consider the ways in which edtech can help the next generation develop the capacity to use cognitive and academic skills to create a better world--how edtech can be a tool that enables better teaching of critical thinking, uncertainty, creativity, empathy, etc.
Let me start with a story about my own classroom...
One of my students interrupted me. I was in the middle of describing the activity I had planned. It was the same activity that I have been using to teach Thomas More’s Utopia since I first started teaching at Temple University. I customize the activity slightly for each new group of students, but the general design remains constant. Thomas More’s classic text serves as the foundation from which we talk about many of the abstract philosophical concepts that underlie modern understandings of freedom, justice, value, and worth.
I was giving instructions, writing the details on the whiteboard. Suddenly, a woman at the far end of the room stopped me mid-sentence.
“Can we talk about Syria? It just seems kind of important. ISIS and all that.”
I took a deep breath. She caught me off guard. What could I say? I immediately abandoned my lesson plan.
I spent the rest of the class period facilitating a full class discussion. Wide-eyed and engaged, the students expressed confusion and fear about international politics. Some understood the conflict better than I did. Others barely knew anything about it. But everyone was interested.
That was three weeks ago.
This week all of my students handed in mid-term class evaluations. I asked them to evaluate both their own performance and mine. I asked them what’s working best for them and what’s not working at all. Almost every student wrote that the discussion of Syria was one of their favorite classes; in the future, they would like to see more class time dedicated to current events.
I pat myself on the back. I congratulate myself for being so flexible, for letting them lead. But I also know that I really can’t take the credit. The student who interrupted me did my job for me that day. She pushed us in a direction that made it easy to contextualize Thomas More’s work. Thanks to her, we were able to easily explore questions about the inherent dissonance between economic and spiritual epistemologies; we were able to discuss the way these tensions manifested at the time of the Protestant Reformation and how they manifest within the current epoch (which historians have not yet named). We took an abstract philosophical discussion and made it relevant. Although they found Utopia to be “boring,” nobody asked, “Why do I need to know this?”
Students often do the most important part of my job: providing context.
I suspect that contextualizing academic content is harder in today’s world than it has been at any other time in history. Our knowledge has gotten so sophisticated. Well, “sophisticated” is only one word we could use to describe the current state of intellectual pursuits. Alternatively, we might choose “precise” or “specialized.”
No matter what we call it, we’re referring to the qualities of what the ancient Greeks called ἐπιστήμη (Epistêmê). Epistêmê refers to that kind of articulating, or bringing forth, that humans accomplish through the use of language and thought. Epistêmê is distinguished from τέχνη (technê), the root from which our word “technology” originates, which describes handicrafts, the kind of bringing forth that happens through making.
Our modern epistêmê, or ways of making sense of the world, have gotten so detailed, unambiguous, and specialized that, although they serve as the foundation of our modern technê, they hardly apply to our common everyday experience. For example, I’ve never seen an atom. I’ve never encountered the double helix of genetic code. Yet, I’m expected to know something about the way these things work. I have been educated in the λόγος (logos)--the logic, or organizing structure--that underlies these meticulous descriptions.
Frankly, it seems kind of strange to live in a world that requires so much knowledge about things that I’ll never directly encounter, things that are so far away. But I acknowledge that it is important.
Still, I suspect that the curriculum of the past was more immediately practical. The context was more obvious. History, for instance, was probably not about remembering the details of past geopolitical transitions, but rather about understanding how we got to now. Students learned to comprehend the causes and geography of human migrations that happened, only yesterday, to a generation that likely lived in the same house as the student. Context was simple, readily apparent, closer at hand.
Likewise, in a world less dependent on determinate precision and binary algorithms, algebra may have been more easily contextualized within the accounting and strategic planning needs of an agrarian lifestyle. Engineering was simpler and all about building better systems for a family business or community infrastructure. Philosophy and literature enabled young people to participate in the adult conversations--to understand a system of shared references.
Today things are much different. For example, we take an absurd division between vocation and knowledge for granted. We constantly reinforce the mistaken dichotomy between thinking and doing, between the abstract and the tangible, between academic and commercial. This is partially because of the industrial revolution.
The piecemeal work of the assembly line model intentionally separates the labor from its context. It mechanizes the practical and the concrete. It understands that humans are more efficient when we ignore the conceptual and theoretical foundation of our own actions. It is good for business, but it robs humans of their dignity; they no longer participate in their own world. Like horses wearing blinders, or Uber drivers chasing the next fare, content without context allows us to see only the objective immediately ahead.
The most devastating impact of this industrial epistêmê has happened in our schools. It has infected our schools (public, private, and charter) with the viral high-stakes testing and comparative grading that contextualizes knowledge as piecemeal facts that make us more “solution oriented.”
That’s supposed to be a good thing, being “solution-oriented.” Our employers tell us all the time, “come to me with solutions, not problems!” But they’re wrong. They’re asking us to be piecemeal thinkers. On the contrary, problems and questions are precisely what drive human creativity. When Henry Ford said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses,’” he was telling us that the skill was in identifying the problem, not the solution. A faster horse was an appropriate solution to their familiar problem. The issue was that they hadn’t identified new questions yet; they had only a piecemeal approach to an established paradigm--they couldn’t see the larger context.
Ford presumably believed “the masses” weren’t capable of contextualized thinking; and he built a manufacturing system that kept individuals in their place: isolated, divided, solution-oriented. His thinking soon permeated our schools, designed to train piecemeal industrial employees. So much so that our current way of thinking about education, with its regurgitation, examination, and multiple choice questions, still only reinforces a non-creative, solution-only, piecemeal mentality.
Luckily, video games can help us fix this in a fun, engaging, and equitable way. Video games can make me small enough to encounter an atom and understand how it functions in the context of its tiny world. Video games can make me into a nanobot navigating the microscopic world of cellular biology. Check out this trailer from a game called SimCell from Strange Loop Games and Amplify Learning.
Games in the classroom, when implemented well, will encourage students to understand subject matter in context — as part of a system. In contrast to memorization, drilling, and quizzing, which focuses on facts and solutions in piecemeal isolation, game based learning force players to interact with problems in ways that make context readily apparent. Students understand how the equations they are solving fit into the world. The question, “Why do I need to know this?” is rendered obsolete. It is more than just subject matter, more than just content. There’s immediate context.
The immediate context of our sophisticated, precise, and microscopic epistêmê can never be established with just a chalkboard and an instructor. We need high-tech interactive simulations that are capable of giving immediate contextualized feedback. We need animations that take us to the center of the earth and to the farthest reaches of outerspace. We need to understand history in ways that show us how, metaphorically speaking, the major players still regularly join us at our dinner tables.
Leveraging the power of games for the classroom, if done well, will move us away from an oppressive pedagogical paradigm that veils the world around us. Games have the capacity to nurture critical thinking skills, uncertainty, creativity, empathy and human dignity.
