Having outlined the salient features of the
landscape in which a philosophy of teaching and learning will fit, I will now
sketch the rudiments of a philosophy-in-the-raw. Once this is achieved, I will
begin to use the language common to the discourses that we find in literature
relating to on-line learning in an attempt to more clearly define my
philosophy.
In his chapter Life as Narrative, Jerome Bruner explores the notion of how we
structure experience. For Bruner, narrative underpins how we interpret
experience and provides a means of coding that experience into a replicable
structure that may be exchanged with others (Bruner 1994). He takes a
constructivist view of narrative, where making
the world is a central function of the mind, so that stories are
constructed in people’s minds and do not occur in the real world. This idea is
embedded in my rough philosophy of teaching and learning, which is itself taken
from narratives that were used to create worlds.
The role-playing metaphor
As a young teenager in the early 80s, I
played role-playing games with my friends. These were popular in the 1970s and
1980s, before computing caught up with imagination and was able to replicate
the worlds we created in our minds. The most popular title was Dungeons and
Dragons, based on Tolkien’s now ubiquitous mythos, yet then denigrated by the
American Christian Right as a dangerous cult that led young people into insanity
and devil-worship (see http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
).
Role-playing games involve a group of
people sitting in a room with paper, pens and some dice , a rule book and a
pre-designed game (with maps, descriptions of people, places and events). All
but one of the people in the room creates characters whose strengths and
weaknesses are based on a series of rolls of the dice and by choosing a moral
viewpoint. These characters are recorded on paper, given a name and a back-story.
Throughout the game, the players assume the role of their character – very good
practice for budding actors – and try to work their way through the game to achieve
goals. They may have their own goals, or choose to submit to a group’s goals: players
have free will and make decisions in real time. The remaining person in the
room is the dungeon-master – he, or she, is privy to the information in the
pre-designed game, describes the scene, plays all other (non-player) characters,
referees and keeps the narrative going.
I stopped playing RPGs when I was around fourteen and for a long time forgot all about them. However, in my
early thirties I was working as a TEFL trainer in Ireland, training graduates
on short, intensive methodology courses. We were discussing detailed lesson
planning and the nerves of the first lesson and how it was that experienced
teachers seemed to be able to let a class flow. Many of the graduates were
having trouble with too-strict adherence to their planned lesson. I needed a
metaphor to describe my view and all of a sudden I found myself talking about
when I was the dungeon-master.
When
I was a dungeon-master, I was the only one in the room who could see the whole
narrative before we had played it through. I knew which rooms were dangerous,
where the special treasure was hidden, who to talk to and who to avoid. I knew
all this but didn’t know what route the players would take and what unique
events would happen on the way. It was my job to describe what things looked
like wherever the players were, but I never made the choice to turn left or
right. I knew the rules better than all the people in the room and by knowing them
didn’t have to keep looking things up, so the game would run smoothly with few interruptions
and fewer arguments. Despite all this, the real key to being a dungeon master was
that I played the game too. I took on the roles of all the other characters and
engaged with the players as though I was that character.
What has this got to do with teaching and
learning?
The role-playing metaphor can be applied to a learning environment:
learners come with narratives of themselves, back-stories created and re-created;
they have different strengths and weaknesses and adopt moral viewpoints. They
have different goals, which may or may not correspond to the aims of the
teacher or the other learners. The curriculum is the pre-designed game – the final
outcome is a shared objective but the passage to get there is still unknown.
The teacher is the dungeon-master and so is the narrator, the referee, the
role-player (friend, enemy, teacher, figure of authority, fool etc.), the
content-expert and the methodology (rules) expert.
Successful game playing
takes place when all the participants suspend their disbelief and are engaged
in the narrative process. Successful learning outcomes are the result of that
same willingness to have your narrative-building facilitated by others and
thereby engage your world making function
of mind.
Bruner, J (1994) Life as Narrative. In
Dyson, A. & Genishi, C. (eds) The
need for story: cultural diversity in classroom and community pp.28-37 Illinois:
National Council of Teachers of English
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