It's How You Play the Game
1997; Project Innovation Austin; Volume: 118; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0013-1172
Autores Tópico(s)Education and Critical Thinking Development
ResumoAfter reading Roy Schwartzman's article on using gaming as a model for the educational process, I initially said to myself, a convincing metaphor, although I certainly would never have thought of it. After some additional reflection, however, I realized that I had not only thought of it; I had put into practice. What caused this moment of cognitive dissonance? Well, I had never connected games and education in my serious professional life as a college English professor. But I had made games an integral part of my pedagogy during the several years that I taught Great Stories from the Bible to seven-year-olds in my synagogue's religious school. And some of the lessons I learned there can illustrate both the usefulness and the potential pitfalls of the gaming model that Professor Schwartzman is advocating. Every time we began a new story in my religious school class, we first read it together and discussed its significance. A craft activity inspired by the story would follow, and then we would engage in various games meant to reinforce the moral Of the tale. The serpent of the garden of Eden became a reversible puzzle that the students had to rearrange to transform him from a being with limbs to one condemned to crawl on his belly. A card game modeled on Go Fish had as its object acquiring a hand that contained male-female pairs of four animals that accompanied Noah on the Ark. After manufacturing slingshots which fired small rubber balls, the Children emulated David by attempting to hit the bullseye on a poster of Goliath. Secreting a cutout Jonah either behind the picture of a whale, a ship, or the city of Ninevah, each student in turn identified with the man who fled from God and the Creator who always knew where Jonah might be hiding. Periodically there were more formal competitions, quiz bowls with teams, to measure how much the students were actually learning over the course of several weeks. Some of these games involved group problem solving, some employed a series of paired contests, some resulted in individual success or failure independent of the performance of other classmates, and some produced one overall winner. Despite my desire, especially given the religious context, that group co-operation and ethical enlightenment should be the primary byproducts of this gaming, my students decisively favored the most competitive James, delighted in exulting in their victories, and gloating over the defeats of others. They preferred games that resulted in material awards (candy or small trinkets) to those that merely produced a feeling of accomplishment. And students fiercely vied for the right to be the scorekeeper, to chalk up those wins and losses on the blackboard. I always found their response to one particular game particularly troubling, in that I had designed the exercise specifically to teach cooperation and respect for others. After they had studied the enslavement of the Israelites by Pharaoh in Egypt, I would, through drawing numbers, pair off the students. We would go out onto the playground with the following charge given. For five minutes the first child in the pair was a boss. He or she could require the second child to perform any tasks he or she chose, within the bounds of safety, e.g. gather sticks, run laps, etc. But the first child was to be aware that the tables would turn for the second five minutes, and his or her erstwhile slave would then be boss. I cautioned them to consider the consequences of either ill or good treatment under those circumstances. In far too many cases, however, both members of the pair couldn't wait to put the other through rigorous paces; even some initially kind bosses were abused when the tables were turned. Professor Schwartzman very carefully delineates all the potentially negative connotations that gaming can have as an educational model. He distinguishes the kind of behavior my seven-year-olds favored from educationally relevant gaming which is cooperative, with students and teacher teaming up against their sole opponent: ignorance. …
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