Whilewe are not all going to be game designers, game design and gaming literacyoffer a valuable model for what it will mean to become literate, educated,and successful in this playful world.
We will all have different roles and ideas about gaming, but it's important that we prepare ourselves and our students for the world as it will be.
“magiccircle,”
We imbue meaning into different objects and ideas during gameplay- what a great way to describe this process.
mischievous double-meaning of “gaming,
I love this- as teachers, we often use "head fakes" to teach one thing while kids really think we're doing another. this is a great way to acknowledge that.
I love this- so much of what we do as teachers is a "head fake" where kids think they're learning one thing, but we're really trying to get them to learn another. This is a good way to acknowledge that.
This is a great concept- we imbue different pieces of our world with greater (and more fun/dramatic) meaning during gameplay.
Maria Montessori also framed her variant of progressive education politi-cally, in terms of the idea of a learning environment that afforded students greater freedom:The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child... [T]he true concept of liberty is practically unknown to educators... The principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy, and therefore, the same principle pervades the school. Ineed only give one proof— the stationary desks and chairs... We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher who, in the ordinary schoolroom, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of scholars. In order to succeed in this barren task, she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their attention. Prizes and punishments are ever- ready and efficient aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those who are condemned to be his listeners... Such prizes and punish-ments are... the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit. (Montessori 1912 (1964): 15– 16, 21
Montessori's shift to education is really interesting. If you happen to have a spare hour or two at some point, I learned so much about educational history from this podcast about her: http://thehistorychicks.com/episode-143-maria-montessori/ )
belongeth to the master to speak and to teach; it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen’
"Children will be seen and not heard" is an outdated perspective on childhood, but I also know that I (like many educators) am guilty of seeking this in my classroom at one time or another for the ease of managing behavior and getting through content.
Supplementing these, the Multiliteracies approach suggests bringing multimodal texts, and par-ticularly those typical of the new, digital media, into the curriculum and classroom.
This feels very meta, because I can absolutely understand this particular text better having watched the intros in video format. What a strong argument for us having the same foresight for our students!
n the case of the first of these ‘ multi-’s, the Multiliteracies notion sets out to address the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain- specific contexts. This means that it is no longer enough for literacy teaching to focus solely on the rules of standard forms of the national language. Rather, communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners become able to negotiate differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another. These differences are the consequence of any number of factors, including culture, gender, life experience, subject matter, social or subject domain, and the like. Every meaning exchange is cross- cultural to a certain degree.
This is a definite shift in thinking among literacy educators- there are many examples (CAN I go to the bathroom vs. MAY) where teaching grammar, language, and communicating is based on just one limited set of norms and standards. What a much more valuable skill to teach our kids to navigate and understand many different contexts and ways of communicating.
The Hill We Climb
I'm so excited to see this on the syllabus- this is one of many contemporary pieces we're using in US history next year with students.