Oh hello. Been a while. What have we been up to at the Profs at Play Headquarters? Like you, dealing with post-Covid, getting back to normal, adjusting to the new normal, trying to pretend the past few years did happen. In short, recovering. Rebuilding. And also, finishing the Professors at Play PlayBook. We are beyond excited to share this resrouce with the community. And with that done, now we get back to work–the Playvolution never rests!
We spend a lot of time talking to faculty about their playful techniques as well as coming up with our own. But sometimes you just look outside the classroom and find all kinds of play you can borrow! I was talking to a colleuge the other day about something fun to do in a workshop for a few people. And I remember this funny game and app created by the fellows in the band OK Go. It’s nothing more than two people tryiung to come up with the same word at the same time. Funny. Fun. Playful. Check it out: https://okgo.net/2013/05/09/say-the-same-thing/
by Lisa K. Forbes
Someone recently asked me: “What makes you a different kind of learner?” Upon reflection, I told them that I am a different kind of learner because I am a neurodiverse and disabled learner. As a student, I struggled throughout my schooling. I experienced a rigid education system that valued only certain forms of intelligence and this led me to believe I wasn’t smart, nor that I could achieve. But, what makes me a disabled learner also makes me an effective professor. My educational journey instilled a desire to provide a different kind of learning experience for all students, not just those who, like me, feel devalued by education. It turns out, my experience as a disabled learner is one of my greatest assets, and is something that now informs my approach as an educator.
Because my history as a learner was something that gave me stomach aches, I always begin with the intention of making my class enjoyable. I believe the learning environment is most effective when students are provided opportunities to become engaged, encouraged to be passionate, and believe they are a valuable member of the learning community. I have always been interested in getting people connected, engaged, and co-creating knowledge. I want all the humans in the classroom to be invested in the learning process – not just the “knowledgeable instructor” instilling wisdom into passive and empty vessels. To be sure, I have content expertise in my discipline that needs to be taught, but I believe every student in the classroom, through their own lived experience, is also a content expert. And, when given an opportunity to share, each student can become a teacher to the rest of us.
Knowing how a rigid schooling system impacted me, I approach my own teaching with a desire to find a better way to teach and to make learning an empowering endeavor. This mindset led me to explore how the idea of play can be incorporated into the learning process. A playful pedagogy is often dismissed because the term “play” is typically associated with small children. Common misperceptions of play are that it’s trivial, childish, and having no place in academia. But research dispels these beliefs and it turns out that play is an effective strategy for many facets of adult life, including learning. Knowing this, I incorporate play into my teaching in several ways:
Play as a mindset and a way of being. Embodying playfulness is about finding congruence within myself, being genuine, and simply not taking myself so seriously. For me to be playful, I must also be authentic and vulnerable. Coming out from behind my pedagogical theories and teaching tools and showing up as a human, is perhaps one of the most vital aspects of my teaching – one that creates connection, trust, and belonging. I cannot ask my students to be vulnerable (i.e., try something new, be creative, risk making a mistake, be open, etc.) unless I am also willing to model those things.
My discipline is mental health counseling and in my field, it is understood that the therapeutic relationship is the most important and powerful factor to effective therapy. That is, the strength of the therapeutic alliance largely determines the quality of the counseling experience for the client. It is through the relationship that the therapeutic theories and interventions come alive. In the classroom I see the same importance in the student-faculty relationship because from the safety of those relationships, students are freer to openly communicate, take risks, make mistakes, and engage in the learning process. The stronger the teacher-student relationship, the more robust the investment into the learning process. The exact ingredients necessary to instill intrinsically motivated learners. When I embody a spirit of playfulness, I increase my ability to establish a strong relationship with my students.
Play as an activity. Play by its nature is hands-on and interactive leading to authentic engagement and opportunities to think critically. Play in adult education is generally unexpected, so it generates excitement, surprise, and novelty. Play activities create a dynamic classroom where students are pushed beyond their comfort zones and encouraged to think about concepts differently. Generally in higher education, students experience a series of Powerpoint lectures, typical small group discussions, and occasionally other interventions such as video demonstrations. However, small, playful adjustments to commonly used activities can invigorate a classroom. Instead of distributing a simple handout and a lecture of what it is and why it’s useful, I can create a blank outline of the handout and design a game with teams, a timer, and a prize to make the content come alive leading to critical thinking, more engaged students, and more memorable learning. Instead of a typical case study, commonly used in counseling training programs, play helps me create a more dynamic type of case study involving a client that is a giraffe. I begin by reading the children’s book Giraffes Can’t Dance (a story of Gerald the giraffe that is different and gets made fun of and experiences sadness and low self-esteem). After the story, I give the students Gerald the giraffe’s client profile that I have constructed from real facts about giraffes, turning the facts into presenting problems requiring counseling services. Not only is this more fun and novel but also by making the client an animal, it removes a certain level of pressure from the student to “get it right.” Because no one has ever counseled a giraffe, students are freer to think outside of the box and become creative as they apply their theoretical orientations and interventions to treating this “client.”
Play as a philosophy. Play is not just for fun. It can also be about playing with the status quo of traditional learning to be more flexible and inclusive. It can be playing with ideas and current realities or approaches to break and remake learning into something new and innovative. I play with traditional viewpoints on grading and align more with elements of the “ungrading” philosophy. Letter grades hold no intrinsic meaning to students regarding their future careers and lessen students’ desire to learn through mistakes and feedback. Letter grades simply create unnecessary anxiety and a sense of robotically jumping through hoops which both are counterproductive to learning. Instead, I serving as a reader to their work to provide my insights, concerns, and wonderings as a part of an ongoing process of iteration with the goal of deepening their learning – not simply to earn a grade. My goal is for all students to earn an “A” in my courses. This represents my belief that through clear expectations, consistent and frequent feedback, as well as opportunities for students to revise and resubmit their work to apply my feedback, they learn more in the process. My approach to grading is constantly evolving but it’s one way to play with the rigid confines of evaluation which I view as being counter to deep learning.
I question why we do what we do in academia to examine how our norms might hold us back. Because even for people who are adept at coloring outside of the lines, there still exists a strong pull back to the mean. I know I fall victim to this. With this said, however strong the trap of the status quo may be, I believe for education to be most effective, teachers must try to escape it. Much like a fish doesn’t realize the water it swims in until it jumps into the air chasing a fly, teachers often don’t realize the pedagogical water they swim in until something provokes them to jump. The incorporation of play in learning has been a fly for me to chase. It has kept me vigilant to the ways I could become complacent and it fuels me to pursue finding a better way.
The playvolution. This playful pedagogy has become a personal manifesto for a different kind of education which I call “the Playvolution.” The Playvolution is a powerful lens that helps me reimagine what higher education can be by shifting the boundaries of teaching and learning. The Playvolution encourages me to examine the status quos and ask, for example, if a lecture-based modality of learning is always the best pedagogical strategy, and to explore other ways of teaching. The Playvolution inspires me to play with my instruction and dare to be different and playful. The Playvolution re-positions me within the classroom away from the “sage on the stage” and polished professionalism in order to co-construct learning and meaning alongside my students. All this can help me reduce the intimidating and distancing hierarchy between my students and myself because anxiety is counterproductive to learning.
While my expectations remain high, a playful pedagogy provides more spaciousness for students to explore, wonder, critique, and risk failure. I feel a heavy responsibility to teach my counselors-in-training to think flexibly and creatively in an ever-changing diverse society with complex problems and people. The quality of care my students provide their future clients depends on that. Therefore, I must design my classes in a way that allows students to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty, to exist outside of their comfort zones, and that sharpens their flexible and creative thinking skills placing importance on personal growth through community and self-reflection. As a disabled learner, I want to provide my students the learning experience I was denied. I want each of my students to feel empowered to leap out of the water, to chase that fly that piques their curiosity. For it is only when we are free from the imaginary constraints placed on us, that we are able to realize our fullest potential.
So you want to bring a little fun into your classroom and games seem like the perfect way to do it. How do you start?
It might be tempting to Google “gamification” and see what comes up. But let me steer you in a different direction. Gamification has a mixed reputation in the world. For many, it’s a cheap way to paint a little games on your learning content. Ian Bogost has called this approach the Mary Poppins remedy—a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Less generously, this is the chocolate covered brocollii approach. At the worst, it is simply BS.
So while there is nothing wrong with adding points or levels or power-ups to lessons to your teaching any more than it is an issue bribing a class to study with cookies or an early class release, gamification tends to take all the fun out of playing games.
What’s the other way?
I think there are four basic approaches to using games in your classroom:
Let me take each in turn.
PLAYING GAMES
If you want to bring games into your classroom, the easiest way to do it is just pick a game and play it. A game doesn’t have to have anything to do with your teaching and learning domain to provide healthy connection and priming benefits to your students. Play Duck, Duck, Goose. Or a triva game. Or set up a Nerf basket in your classroom and let students shoot freethrows for candy. It will make a difference. And without much effort, you have managed to bring games into your classroom.
But what about play that is directly relevant to what you teach? These days, there are learning games in almost every domain. A little web searching can go a long way. So, for example, if you are teaching coding, maybe you could introduce your students to Code Combat. This game will teach you Javascript and Python in an entertaining package. It’s fun, it’s a game, and it’s relevant.
TALK ABOUT GAMES
Too often, teachers get stuck on the idea of playing games to teach a subject when they miss the obvious—talking about games can be as much fun as playing them. Teaching a class on ancient Egypt? Have the students play Assassin’s Creed Origins—a fully realized 3D world set in a mythical time of the Pharos. But rather than let the game do the heavy lifting of teaching about an ancient culture, let the students play the game then come back to them and have them critique their expereince. What did the game get right? What did it get wrong? What could be improved? What did they learn about ancient Egypt from a game?
I used to teach an urban planning class. And yes, we used SimCity. But it turns out that SimCIty is a terrible game to teach much about planning beyond the idea that there is such a thing as zoning and that cities are complex. In the real world, there are laws and citizens get to vote. You can’t just blow up roads and buildings when you like. SimCity is, at best, a simulation of totalitarian rule. And since I was not preparing the future Stalins of the world, it turned out the game was better as a tool to stimulate conversations about what it took to design and run a city much more than a software platform that taught anything practical to would-be planners.
Games are fun to play. That’s a start. Talking about the experience is a wonderful way to carry that fun forward, directly into the learning objectives for your c lass.
MODIFY GAMES
Closely related to talking about games is the idea if getting your hands dirty and making changes to games. You can do this as a design exercise, having students describe what changes they would make to a game. Or you can do this as an actual making activity—having students break a apart a game and put it back together with a purpose and point.
But, you might say, I don’t teach a computer class. My students don’t know how to program! And fair enough. But who said we were only talking about videogames? Crack open a copy of Monopoly. Perhaps you are teaching a class on social justice. Have the students fix Monopoly to have a socially just message. All the parts are there. All you need is note cards and an imagination. Or have student propose a Fortnight mod that teaches supply and demand. The sky is the limit with modifications.
I used to have student reskin Chess to be about something else. Are you teaching about the Civil War? OK, what historical figures map to which chess pieces? Are you are teaching a wine appreciation class? OK, reskin the graphics of chess to be red versus white. May the best vintage win!
The point of modifying games is to get students engaged in a critical practice where they are thinking about the system of the game and thinking about whatever content you want them to explore. Maybe there are no good games out there in your subject area. But what games are close? What happens when you ask your students to play with games to find that instructional purpose? You end up with play with purpose.
MAKE GAMES
Or, why not just ask your students to make games? Again, you don’t need to be a programmer or a game designer to take a pile of note cards, some dice, a few tokens and lots of imagination and turn it all into a game. Sure, a lot of the games might be more Candyland than Grand Theft Auto. But the practice of making, designing and digging into domain content to create teaching games is a process that rewards with deeper insight. So, you teach the novels of Emily Brontë and can’t find a solid game to bring into your classroom? Great! Give the students a go at creating a game that lets you play in Brontë’s literary university. The World of Wuthering Heights? You might be surprised what your students can do.
CONCLUSION
This quick tour should give you a sense of the different ways to bring games, whole games, into your classroom. Gamification borrows bits and pieces of what makes games pleasurable and too often leaves the fun at the classroom door. By embracing games for what they are—designed systems to invite play and generate fun—and you have unlocked real power of play.
Wow. What a year.
Since Professors at Play is a diverse organization with people from all over the world, we know that what is winter for many of us is summer for others. Some of you are about to celebrate Christmas, others have already enjoyed Hanukkah, the Soltice or even just enoying a break from work. We are all different. But what brings us together is play. And even in face of the ongoing stress of Covid and health issues wiht our loved ones and remote teaching and uncertainties from every corner, we have all found time this year to play.
So whatever your faith or tradition, remember to light a candle and share that warmth. For us, that’s what play is, a small flame that can call people out of the darkness and can build a fire that brings us all together and ignites our common hunamity. Too much? Nope, not even a little. We need play now more than ever.
That is all to say: Happy Holidays and we can’t wait to working and playing with you all in the new year!
David & Lisa
One of the important lessons of play is to take a break. Sometimes fun is just kicking back and not doing anything. As the summer lingers and the fall term approaches, we have been taking time to do just that–relax!
We’ll be back with regular posts and lots of cool news soon. In the meantime, run through a sprinler. Ideally, run through someone else’s. It will be fun. We promise!