Throughout the course, we discussed how the emergence of new, digital technologies can revolutionize the classroom by changing our pedagogies and enhancing students’ learning. One of these technologies is video games. Many teenagers and young adults play video games, so it makes sense to find a way to connect a common, pleasurable activity into the classroom.
However, this is not to say that instructors need to incorporate actual video games into the classroom. Instead, video games highlight how instructors can change how they approach their teaching and how their students learn. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, Gee discusses how many video games have experienced both critical and commercial success by being challenging and long. In fact, no matter how frustrating or difficult the game can be, gamers still voluntary keep trying until they beat the game. However, in the classroom, many schools make their curriculums “shorter and simpler” for students, because students do not put in the time and effort to overcome long and challenging situations – which are hallmarks of successful games. Based on students’ voluntary decision to undergo these challenges, Gee argues that video games contain “good learning principles of learning built into its design” and facilitate “learning in good ways” (3). Thus, classrooms need to find ways to incorporate these principles into their design.
One aspect that can be highlighted in the classroom is play. People play video games, which suggests that participation in this long and challenging medium is pleasurable. However, the idea of bringing play into the classroom would not be a new experience for students – quite the contrary actually. Ian Bogost argues that “play” refers to children’s activities (which often involve exploration and discovery) where teachers allowed students to blow “off the necessary” steam that has built up from long stretches of learning or working. However, as students get older, play disappears. However, whenever we play video games, the process makes something that is challenging and long both enjoyable and familiar. It creates an association of childhood pleasure to something challenging; in other words, it allows students to find some pleasure in exploring and making discoveries in the context of a class.
However, incorporating these ideologies are not anything new in education or composition. While video games are a newer medium that have yet to become a mainstay in classrooms, the idea of incorporating fun, exploration, and discovery are rather old ideas that have disappeared in the classroom. Colby and Colby argue that student-directed assignments under instructor guidance is reminiscent of “the early writing process movement” (306). During the early writing process, students were encouraged to pick their own assignments, their own genres, and worked individually with the instructor. However, while I do believe that the expressive ideologies of the early process movement has its merits, I do not argue that this model must displace current pedagogies. Instead, like Colby and Colby, this ideology must be adapted so students can practice how to use writing in a rhetorical situation, rather than the “expressivist,” “writing-for-the-self” model that was popular during the movement. Additionally, Colby and Colby argue that classes should be “front-loaded,” in which instructors expose many of the rhetorical tools and strategies early in the course, so students can effectively explore and make discoveries in a meaningful way (306).
This goal of this post was not to give instructors any assignments or bits of curricula that utilizes these ideologies. I feel that would be a cheap shortcut that does not fully integrate the ideology into our pedagogy. Instead, the goal was to encourage instructors (or aspiring instructors) to find a way to restructure and rethink how they can encourage students’ learning processes.
Works Cited
Colby, Rebekah Shultz, and Richard Colby. “A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 300-312. Web. 6 November 2013.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 117-140.