Am I the only one who despises attempts to "make learning fun"? No, I'm certain many of you share my frustration with parents and teachers who have attempted to mask the pain of learning and discovery with the form of a game. Before reading this essay (The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens by Hector Rodriguez), I understood the problem to be primarily one of deception. It felt like a bait-and-switch; fun was promised but learning happened. Now, Rodriguez has led me to think otherwise.
There is no doubt that the educators in question probably understood their own actions as a bait-and-switch. Rodriguez notes this in his example of an educator using play "solely as a vehicle to maximize the 'effectiveness' of teaching". This is problematic for Rodriguez, not because it deceives, but because it misses that "the subject to be learnt is, at least in some respects, essentially playful". For Rodriguez everything in culture, including knowledge and education, is always already part of the larger category "play". The problem is not that education and play are combined but the manor, or form, in which they are combined. An abomination is formed when aspects of play are imposed on a learning situation that do not already exist in, or are not natural to, that particular subject or situation. Once the relationship between the two (education and play) is properly understood, Rodriguez believes that an alternative way can be found where the play aspects already extant in education can be highlighted and explored more naturally and with better results.
If anyone remembers any particularly fun or effective combinations of fun and learning, I'd be really interested to hear about them and see how they compare with all this.
Rodriguez says, 'We do not characteristically play to fulfil a practical task; we play for the sake of the lived quality that attaches itself to the act of playing.'
ReplyDeleteThis is why the Bible game you were talking about last week was so unfulfilling and didn't feel like real play. Games in school, where typing correctly or solving equations was attached to a graphic of a fighter jet shooting an alien ship, are similarly task-oriented. It's not the tasks we find bland (Skyrim is rife with complex, time-consuming tasks, but the game is still immensely compelling), but I believe the presentation and context. The funnest learning games were always the ones that had engaging stories, imaginative click-activated 'easter eggs', and treated the child with respect instead of as a brainless sponge that needed brightly flashing stimulation plastered loosely atop arithmetic in order to effectively learn.