Dishwasher as Pedagogy?

 Does your staffroom have a notice similar to the one below?

 















Is your staffroom bench filled with dishes?
Do you find other teacher's empty coffee cups in your classroom?
Do senior students walk around the school at the end of a week / school term and collect up empty coffee cups?
Are the dishes often left and done by our office administrators?

Yes to any of the above questions?

Then I'm wondering....
We talk about the importance of well being, building school culture and being culturally responsive. We prioritise energy for professional development on this thing called 21st C  pedagogies. We talk, plan develop around the importance of the Key Competencies - a capabilities curriculum to prepare for the future of work and  know in our hearts that our values and beliefs do transfer to our students and colleagues.

So, here's the gritty bit...
Why are we not cleaning up after ourselves?
Why are we leaving our cups on the bench?
What assumptions about the world underpin our actions?
Is the framing of this issue compatible with the way we see the world?
How can we work with others to shape and re shape this issue?
How does this issue shape and reshape us?
What is gained if all teachers sorted their dishes?
What is lost if all teachers sorted their dishes?

What if... tomorrow every teacher in New Zealand put their coffee cup in the dishwasher? . We know the future requires us to focus on human capabilities. That capability starts in the kitchen.

Two days ago, our year three student teachers were preparing for their final practicum. I said, your values and beliefs tell your story - know how to load and unload the staff room dishwasher. I am less interested in all your fancy pedagogies if you do not understand what it means to be human in community with others.

Why Game Design?

William Wyllie The Sloping Deck 1871. Oil on card.

Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, presented by the family of James Jamieson 1932

Christchurch City Art Gallery Exhibition: Reading the Swell

Where in our learning spaces is the success of a task based on the diversity of the group? Where, actually, the more different the members of the group are the better the outcome?  And.. to push these questions a bit further, to simultaneously…..  engage in real world complex problems?

I have been thinking about Game Design for a few years now. When I started engaging with Game Design in the classroom, I noticed student's learning pathways change. Students who were usually on the edges of classroom conversations and learning started moving into the middle. Students who were ‘consistently below standard’ started to shine. Students who were successful starting to reframe who they needed to work with to be successful.  I kept wondering what the heck was going on and why. Students were totally engaged and I  was hearing something in the classroom that I could only describe as ‘the humm’. It was a sound I had not heard in other learning areas.  The humm was  across all 40 students! When you hear  a humm and you have no idea what is going on, you have to start noticing.

Game Design a 21st C microscope?

It is quite possible, that Game Design supports us as educators to see things in teaching and learning that were not previously visible. Riel Miller in his talk  Enlarging the Field of Futures Studies. The Emergent Discipline of Anticipation discusses the function of the 20thC microscope and how over a period of time the microscope has enabled us to see things other wise unseen things and in doing so we are able to act differently in the present. In his discussion, Miller encourages us to explore and identify the microscopes of the 21stC.

At present,   I’m playing with the idea that Game Design just might be one of the 21stC microscopes.

So what is it about Game Design that enables us to see what may have previously not been visible?

 

• Teacher role shifts. Teachers shift from being the source of knowledge to setting the conditions for epistemic curiosity
• Knowledge moves. It’s not primarily what students know that is valued, but what they can now do with what they know.
• Requires multidiciplinarity. All learning areas and Key Competencies are required in Game Design.
• Learning in Public. Students and teachers are encouraged to ‘fail fast’ and not only  that - do it publically.
• Idea Improvement is the touch stone to success. Ideas become separate from self so students and teachers can critique. Where we can start really think hard with others.
• Diversity of student Interactions. Students develop new social learning pathways within the classroom
• Diversity of student groupings. Students become self motivated to seek to work in groups with people different to themselves in order to create and achieve a successful game.  Check out  Key Competencies for the Future for more information about this idea.
• Embodied Learning. This is where students must engage their mind with their body. In order to be successful all aspects of self participate.
• Real world contexts and considerations are debated. A space for real disagreement. Where idea improvement can frequently be tracked and has value. The thing with Game Design is there is enormous value in the process.
• Building student Intellectual Capacity. Guy Claxton considers intelligence as the ability to respond to a variety of situations and contexts. Game Design is a process where  teachers and students need to be able to think hard about what is the  best thing to do next. Not only that, invariably in game design the next best thing ‘to do’ is in relation to and with others.
• Building student capability to work with uncertainty. Students and teachers work together with uncertainty and certainty within Game Design.  Working with uncertainty are often the places where we feel uncomfortable or there appear to be no answers. Game design is  a practical way to start to engage with the complexities of a problem. To be able to work with uncertainty and consider complex problems (as discussed in Key Competencies for the Future  as wicked problems) is to set conditions to be able to  imagine different scenarios.  To imagine different scenarios are steps towards what Riel Miller refers to as being ‘Futures Literate’.  It is quite possible that the ability to imagine different scenarios is the pulse of Game Design.
• Builds capabilities for the Future of Work as outlined by  Ross Dawson @rossdawson

 

Never Alone - The Game

Game: Never Alone 
Twitter: @NeverAloneGame
Web: http://neveralonegame.com/

Never Alone keeps me awake at night.
It's not that I constantly get killed by a bear, (which by the way occurs because I am a totally hopeless gamer and forget how to use the functionalities)  It keeps me awake as this game evokes an unrelenting curiosity within my myself. There is a quality  in the game that I find difficult to capture and express in words.

I was introduced to this game by Rachel Bolstad @shiftingthinkng a couple of years ago. 
I attended a CORE Education Breakfast. @coreeducation
I recall my school could not afford the whole morning session but $20 was doable. Believe me - my $20 bite size morning PD was ample! (I wonder if most PD should just be short and sharp and to the point where we interact with the essence.)

Never Alone is the game that totally convinced me there was something in this thing called Games for Learning. So this game... we play.. for what purpose?

People are some what polarised about the use of games for learning and games in the classroom and actually just digital games full stop.
I hear very few conversations about what is gained from creating & playing digital games.
I hear a lot about what is lost and a fear of loosing face to face  interaction. (what I think of as the warmth of human interaction.) 
I hear about schools in NZ who have filtered out students having access to YouTube.

When I talk to colleagues about Games for learning, more specifically the engagement with creating and playing digital games, seriously, I feel like I'm pushing drugs.

Some how in the game  Never Alone...

1. I'm interacting with some thing like a collaborative process, where I'm inside shared knowledge that by the actual interaction and lived game experience I am contributing to building shared knowledge.
2. The actual learning in the game is taking place without conscious awareness
3. I'm interacting with increasing levels of complexity and improvement
4. Although the game has a 'learning / educative' thing going on there is some thing about a bigger purpose going on.
5. The building of an understanding in the game is non linear, a bit confusing and messy at times, often slow and for me difficult.

This game keeps reframing what I think of digital games.
My own knowledge, perception and reality of digital games keeps colliding.

There are swags of seriously inspiring communities and individuals surfing this thing called Games for learning
- Never Alone

Humans and the Future of Work

I'm inspired by this info graphic. I have been looking and thinking about it for some time now. When thinking of the future of work and the purpose of education, this is my go to.

Tomorrow I'm going to print this out and stick it in the inside cover of my copy of the New Zealand Curriculum.
Ross Dawson on twitter @rossdawson 

A playful approach to language: WordWanderer

Word Wanderer...

I've been playing around with word wanderer for a while now. I'm particularly keen to play with it in relation to Game Design. I am thinking that Word Wanderer has the capacity to assist us to see ideas from multiple perspectives. To focus on a process not on an end point. Inviting us to play a little with interlocking meanings and associations. 

I'm wondering if by using word wanderer to look at Game Design this may assist us to see Game Design from different perspectives and set the conditions for enjoying uncertainty.

 

"The intent behind the WordWanderer is to develop a more playful approach to language that can be characterized by the notion of wandering as an open-ended movement."

Marian Dörk and Dawn Knight

Click here for an introduction to WordWanderer 

Click here to take WordWanderer for a spin!

Click here to follow Marian Dörk on Twitter

The text I used for the WordWanderer examples below were taken from 

 a Meet Up that was part of Gameful Praxis

Thinking...

What do you notice about your self when engaging with WordWanderer?

What text did you use?

Why did you use that text?