There’s a risk in reading a book with, or showing a movie to, my kid: Depending on how compelling the story, he’ll ask you to “play” it over and over again in the week or so after. In the picture for this post (from 2007), for example, he’s building the Trojan Horse, having just finished reading a children’s version of the Trojan War.
As a grad student, when asked about a new book or topic or whatever, like many people I’d say, “I don’t know: I haven’t written about it yet.” If you ask my kid the same question, you might well get, “I don’t know: I haven’t played it yet.” I don’t think this is unusual in any way. In fact, Stuart Brown has recently explained in Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Invigorates the Imagination, and Opens the Soul, it’s how children figure out the world:
Play’s process of capturing a pretend narrative and combining it with the reality of one’s experience in a playful setting is, at least in childhood, how we develop our major personal understanding of how the world works. We do so initially by imagining possibilities–simulating what might be, and then testing this against what actually is.
Though this may be seem to be a primarily childish trait, close examination of adult internal narratives (our stream of consciousness), reveals something similar. Our adult imaginations are also continually active, predicting the future and examining the consequences of our behavior before it takes place. . . . The genius of play is that, in playing, we create imaginative new cognitive combinations. and in creating those novel combinations, we find what works. (36-37)
Brown’s research suggests that adult play can drive learning in ways that conventional tasks may not. And so I’ve become more and more interested in building out space for play during the semester. Two examples:
- Here’s how I have my students play an interpretative game (developed at UVA), called Ivanhoe. Even though most students have played the simplest version of this game, they still have used it to write richer papers than I was getting in the pre-Ivanhoe days. (Alex can probably speak to this a bit.)
- About a year ago, Dan Cohen tried an “experiment in scholarly crowdsourcing,” in which he asked his Twitter followers and blog readers to identify an artifact. (Part one and two.) In classes where everyone has an iPod, I’ll sometimes do an in-class version of this experiment as a game.
Whether your point of reference is Miss Havisham or Lacan’s superego, there’s something a bit paradoxical about requiring students to play. And yet, I have found that having assignments that are marked off as “games” can free students to think more alertly about class material. The game format frees them to make connections or to try arguments in ways that would seem uncomfortable in a formal paper. And in semesters where I sequence my assignments properly, the game comes first, so that students can use the skills they’ve developed in the game to begin to write in a more formal way.
How about you? Do your classes incorporate play? Have great game tips? Let us know in comments.
Image by me. Do you know what kills me about this picture? That we’re reading The Iliad AGAIN right now (in the Fagles translation), switching off halfway through each book. He’s 6, and has heard that translation in its entirety three times, plus various children’s versions, such as Black Ships Before Troy, multiple times as well. He’s obsessed with Homer–has even written his own version of The Iliad. If I thought there were going to be jobs in the humanities in twenty years, maybe I’d encourage him to be a classicist . . . .
Comments
1. Tona - February 22, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Does a simulation count as play? Especially since I have no predetermined outcome? This term we're "playing" at being Congress every other week or so for the entire class session (course in US history since 1945), and I've been intrigued to see that people role-play without me trying to get them to. In other words, I didn't ask anyone to pretend they were a red-baiting anti-Communist during the Eisenhower administration era, and I got a few. (It could be that they really do think that way, but I don't think so - and their act got some chuckles from classmates). I see them playing, or experimenting I guess, with legislative ideas and even language/phrasing - very unlike the comments they make in regular lecture discussions. Those sessions are very free-form and open-ended, I tend to vanish into the cinderblock except only to moderate who has the floor and to regulate points of order. I think it's freeing for everyone that our simulation doesn't have to remain true to what really happened - which allows us to play with historical contingency.
2. Mark Sample - February 22, 2010 at 01:49 pm
Thanks for the introduction to Ivanhoe. I can't wait to try it out. In general, I'm a big fan of more playful exercises (and I'd say that simulations count as play -- and learning).
My videogame studies class begins with a game called 1,000 Blank White Cards, in which students design (and play) their own card game from scratch. In my literature classes I've been experimenting with Zen Scavenger Hunts. This is essentially a reversed-engineered scavenger hunt. The hunters go out and find ten or or so items and only afterward do they receive the list of the items they were supposed to be scavenging for. The participants have to improvise a series of hacks and demonstrations to prove that their items perfectly match the list.
The most faithful pedagogical analog to a Zen Scavenger Hunt is having students write about anything using any format or style, and then give them the question they were supposed to be answering. The students next have to persuade me (and their classmates) that their essays do indeed answer the question, perhaps via footnotes or annotations. The bulk of creative and critical work on the students’ part comes in at the second, performative level, in the rhetorical act of proving by whatever means necessary that their essays match -- and in fact have always matched — my question.
3. Erin Templeton - February 22, 2010 at 08:41 pm
I love these ideas! Thanks to you all for sharing them. I think I might try to work up a Zen Scavenger hunt for at least one class this semester.
4. William Patrick Wend - February 23, 2010 at 04:12 pm
In Comp II, I inadvertently ended up having some play because so many students had laptops. Sometimes, when discussing an author, I would be unsure of a fact/date/etc. Three or four students would quickly look it up and end up racing to see who would get to tell me the answer first.
5. GLG - February 25, 2010 at 12:55 am
Forget playing; get that boy to a Greek class!
6. Rob MacD - March 13, 2010 at 08:20 pm
Great stuff! Thanks for the Ivanhoe tip, and thanks, Mark for Zen Scavenger Hunt. I am stealing those both!
I am blogging this month about Playful Historical Thinking, at perhaps too much length, on my own blog, here: http://www.robmacdougall.org/
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