A Scary Story

It’s nearing Halloween, so I thought I’d write about something scary this week.  How about “States Demand That Colleges Show How Well Their Students Learn”?  Or “Not enough to graduate college: Now there’s an exit exam.”   Perhaps this will send a chill down your spine:  “Assessment: It’s the Law,” an article on the new requirement in Iowa for annual review of university assessment data by the College Board and the state legislature. 

We’re probably all familiar with No Child Left Behind and the measure and punish strategy it instituted in K-12 education in the US. The demand for “accountability,” with the underlying assumptions that teachers can’t be trusted to do what is best for their students, has been a favorite political theme for over a decade.  While NCLB has largely been considered a disaster by teachers, parents and students, vilifying teachers and schools has been a winning strategy for too many politicians. And nothing succeeds like success, right?  So we’d better be ready.

It would be nice to think this won’t happen, that state and federal busybodies, and the public at large, will take our word for it when we say that we know our students are learning.  That learning is so ineffable an achievement that it can’t be measured by anything other than the finely-tuned instincts of a professor.  Trust us. 

Yeah, good luck with that.  

The only way to head off the ham-fisted efforts of those who believe that anybody can teach, that teaching is nothing more than measuring test results, is to get ahead of those efforts and bend them in the direction we want them to go.  No one is more concerned about the effectiveness of our efforts than we are.  No one.  But without clear, tangible, convincing and continuous evidence to that effect, we’re vulnerable to claims by educational profiteers (financial AND political) who can point to the all-too-real shortcomings in student achievement and then, rather than accounting for the many variables that affect student learning, simply point at us and insist we do a better job.

One big obstacle to a greater understanding of what we do and how we go about it is the solitary nature of teaching.  While it may not SEEM solitary to be interacting with over 100 students every semester, the fact is that the vast majority of those interactions take place in a federally-protected private place, a black box, as far as the general public is concerned.  Students go into the class, and they come out with a letter grade.  And the “trust me, I’m the professor” argument is quickly losing its magic.

The push to develop learning objectives for classes and programs is one recent and widespread effort to counter that “black box” effect.  And assessment reporting can be another, if we make it what WE want it to be, rather than letting some political body define it for us.  If WE define the goals we consider most useful and valuable for our students, and if WE choose the assessment methods we think best suited to demonstrate the achievement of those goals, assessment becomes our process and our achievement. 

But if we want to keep the beast from the door, the only option we DON’T have is to do nothing at all.

Reacting to the Past: Week One

Last week was my first experience with running a Reacting to the Past game.  After a week and a half of preparation, it was time to trust in the system and let my students loose on the material to see what would happen. And it was so great!

Day one was introductions, to ease everyone into the idea of playing a role.  All the students were asked to do was to research their character so they could each give a short introduction to the class.  While a few students are playing historical characters like the industrial reformer Robert Owen and the inventor and capitalist Richard Arkwright, most were assigned types rather than specific people: weaver, blacksmith, magistrate. The roles are pretty generic, but many of the students weren't satisfied with that.  Nearly everyone has chosen a character name. One student decided he was an immigrant from Ireland and did his entire introduction with his best Irish accent.  Another (a quiet girl who rarely speaks in class) decided she was an orphan now sixteen years old, newly released from the workhouse and ready to fight for the rights of the child laborers.  Several came in costume, including one determined student who did extra research to convince me that a baronet's widow might run his estates after his death.  When she arrived in class in a full 19th-century gown, I understood why she was so determined to play a "Lady Farmer" instead of the "Gentleman Farmer" as written.

As the introductions proceeded, the working class grew lively, applauding those who expressed sympathy for the factory workers and hissing the gentry and merchants, who largely maintained a haughty calm.  As soon as the introductions were over, the class exploded into clusters of conversation as merchants bargained

with the gentry to rent land for factories, the vicars and newspaper editors solicited souls and submissions

respectively, and the weavers withdrew to the local pub, The Whorl and Spindle, (the classroom next door) to plot their strategies.  They were tasked with developing a proposal for establishing a minimum wage and

arguing for it at the Town Hall the following class period. In both classes (Tuesday/Thursday day and Tuesday night), the weavers were fired up and ready to fight for their rights and a living wage.  But while the night class had faith that their cause would prevail via legal means, the day class weavers are more bloody-minded.  I suspect Ned Ludd will ride in Manchester before too long.

The second class period of the week was held at the Town Hall, presided over by His Honor the Magistrate. As usual, I found it hard to keep my mouth shut, but I really tried, letting the magistrate run the show, organize and regulate the speeches and determine the rules of the debate.  And they didn't need me at all. It was obvious that most of the students had done their research, bringing up events, laws and statistics that highlighted the misery of the weavers' life or (from the merchants) the promise of industrial production.  The arguments were passionate and the concessions hard-fought. Both sets of weavers won a pay raise, though not nearly what they were requesting.  How will this affect production?  Only time (and the game master) can tell...

So the energy in the class is really high and everyone is "playing along."  My concern that my students would be too cool to commit to role-playing have been allayed. I'd seen the videos from the Reacting to the Past Consortium, chatted with other professors in the RTTP Faculty Lounge on Facebook, and even played a game myself at last January's conference. I knew the games COULD work.  But it's a relief to see it working before my own eyes, with my own students.  More than a relief, actually. I was euphoric as each class ended last week. It was so much fun to see my students so engaged and passionate about class.  About nineteenth century economic and social strife, no less!  That beats a lecture, any day!

Playing Rain

I started a new video game yesterday.  It's the middle of the semester and I needed a mental vacation, so I bought Rain for my Playstation 3.  It's a puzzle game with a visual style reminiscent of French noir films.  A young boy pursues a shadowy girl though the rain-swept streets of a deserted urban landscape, while both are hunted by ghostly monsters.  The game play revolves around the fact that every being in the world is invisible unless bathed in rain. Hiding is as simple as ducking under an awning.  To progress, you have to figure out how to climb, crawl or run through the urban maze, while using your invisibility and cunning to avoid frightening skeleton animals and the primary antagonist, called the Unknown.  The game received largely positive reviews, mostly for the artistry and storytelling.  The only real criticism has been that the game is really pretty easy.  And it's kicking my butt.

You have to understand, I don't play many video games.  I don't like them.  I don't want to play war or be a criminal or a cop. I'm turned off by the misogyny and violence that is packed into just about every game available.  The fact that the pinnacle of video game achievement is expressed in Grand Theft Auto V infuriates me.  I want striking graphics, complex storylines and, most of all, a positive and engaging emotional arc. So games I'll spend my time on are few and far between.  In fact, I've only found four so far I've liked enough to buy: Flower, Journey, The Unfinished Swan and, now, Rain.

So, I'm far from an expert gamer, something that I'm reminded of every time I play. While game reviewers (master gamers all) dismissed Rain as not challenging enough, I'm sometimes brought to the point of apoplexy by my confusion.  Because I don't know the rules.  Not the rules of the game system (push this button to jump, this one to run.) Those are presented clearly at the beginning of the game. And not the rules of the world in which the game exists (monsters will be attracted by footsteps splashing in water, you can track your progress while invisible by watching the litter stirring on the ground.) The game is designed to teach you those things as you play. What I don't know are the underlying rules of how video games are structured and presented to the players.  I just haven't played enough games, racked up enough experience, to know the way the (virtual) world works.

This means I don't see the only possible exit from an alleyway because every possibility looks plausible to me.  Oh sure, it's clear after I've found it (or looked up the cheat to find it.) But I haven't evaluated enough game situations yet to recognize the signs that indicate "important" details from "background."  It took me a couple of hours of play to realize that a shift in camera angle was signaling a significant element in the environment.  Or that the cutscene that introduces each new chapter contains foreshadowing of events to come. How many other clues am I missing as I play, leaving me blundering about hoping to run into the thing I need by sheer chance? How many times have I died in the game so far (dozens!) because I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing?  

Many of our students arrive at college in the same state of bewilderment.  The vast majority aren't master students, and many are first generation college students, venturing into a world as strange and alien to them as the sodden streets in Rain are to me.  They don't know the unspoken rules that underlie our world.  They haven't read enough to know how to distinguish the important ideas in their readings from the supporting text, so they highlight everything...or nothing. They pack up their books as the clock winds down, already looking ahead to what's next, and don't heed those reminders at the end of class that are critical for keeping up-to-date with the work.  They don't see a quick visit to a professor's office hours as the quickest way to dispel confusion.  Of course it is obvious, when you know the way college works.  It seems ridiculous to even have to explain it. But if you don't know how to filter the significant information from the clutter?  Well, at least you don't die, as I have so many times on a dark and dirty virtual street.  But on the other hand, death in a video game is never final.  I can always try again, and again, and again, until I figure it out and move on to the next challenge.  The consequences of a student missing the unspoken rules of college life can be far more permanent.

This is why I'm so interested in how learning takes place in video games.  Because you DO learn the rules of the game as you play, or else you'd never be able to move up to more challenging levels.  And unless you are a hyper-analytical college professor, you're not even aware that you are learning.  You just get better, bit by bit, until the tasks that stymied you when you started to play are now effortless.  Those skills are now so much a part of you that you don't even have to access them consciously.  Nearly every time I encounter a new challenge in Rain, I fail it.  I die.  And it is SO frustrating! But the game doesn't stop there.  I do it again.  And again and again, until I've got it.  I'd like to see our students "play college" in the same way, to absorb the rules as they go, trying and failing and trying again without fear and without penalty until they can't even remember what it was like not to know how to play the game.

Reacting to the Past: Looking Forward

This week I started a new unit in both section of my HUM 205: Technology and Human Values.  Last January I attended a training conference on a game-based pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, and I’m ready to give it a try myself.  I think...

Reacting to the Past is a teaching method that uses elaborate role-playing games set at pivotal points in history to allow students to explore the “big ideas” of the humanities.  There are games set during the French Revolution, the trial of Galileo, the struggle for Indian independence and at the Council of Nicea, over twenty in all.  Students take on specific roles and work to achieve individual goals within the context of the game, by researching the issues and making both written and oral arguments to persuade others of their point of view.

My students and I are playing “Rage Against the Machine:Technology, Rebellion and the Industrial Revolution," set in 1817 Manchester, as the advent of factories disrupts the home weaving industry there.  We’ve already spent seven weeks discussing the issues that technology raises in modern society: the paradoxes of isolation and connectivity, the demands of the clock imposed on the rhythms of life, the rise of the individual over the collective.  Now they are being asked to take that new-found understanding and use it to deconstruct, or rather RE-construct, a time and place where crucial attitudes and assumptions about the relationship between man and machines were being developed.  My hope is that by inhabiting the characters and “living” the issues, my students will deepen their awareness of the complex relationship we have with the technology around us.  I’m especially eager that they recognize that this relationship isn’t something imposed upon us by the technology itself, that the machines are not in control. I want them to understand that this relationship is created from the decisions and expectations that we bring to technology.  And in the next four weeks we will play that out, allowing competing needs and desires to determine the outcome of the game.  Will the weavers prevail?  Or will the merchants succeed in establishing factories that destroy the home weaving industry?  Will we allow child labor?  A minimum wage?  What is best for the artisans who come from the working classes but may secretly (or not so secretly) aspire to the middle class?  How will the gentry maintain control in an era of merchant wealth?  And what will the vicars say about all this in their Sunday sermons?

Some students are thrilled.  They are excitedly discussing costumes to wear or Machiavellian plots they’d like to put in motion to win the game.  Others are confused or disconcerted by the requirement to be someone else, to learn by playing a role rather than through a more conventional means.  A few are skeptical.  But almost all are getting into the spirit of the game, which means taking this all very, very seriously.  After all, a game only works if all the players agree, for the duration of that game, to act as if the results have meaning and consequences.  So this scheme will succeed to the extent the students buy into it and are willing to accept that “playful” does not mean “trivial.”

Tuesday	Thursday
Session 1: Introductions of Players and Agenda- Setting – 10/15	Session 2: Wage Negotiations – 10/17
Session 3: Market Day - 10/22	Session 4: Town Hall – 10/24
Session 5: Market Day – 10/29	Session 6: Town Hall – 10/31
Session 7: Market Day / Town Hall – 11-5	Session 8: POST-MORTEM – 11/7

Here is the tentative class schedule.  On "Market Days," everyone meets at the Village Green to buy and sell, settle accounts, socialize and scheme.  Everyone can (and all students are expected to) make short speeches on the topics of the day.  The two newspapers will also be distributed on Market Day, filled with short (500-word) essays that various citizens have submitted for publication.  (Students must write two persuasive essays for publication over the course of the four weeks, arguing for or against a proposed law, advertising a new machine for sale or positions to be filled at the factories, or on any other topic that might concern their characters.)  Town Hall is where laws are passed.  Everyone is free to propose a law, and everyone can and should speak for or against those proposed laws, but only the gentry can vote.

The game will unfold over the next four weeks, ending with a post-mortem on November 7, and I aim to take the 9x9x25 opportunity to write up my impressions several times as we progress through the game.  I’ll keep you posted!