Pedagogy & Motivation

A quick overview of the pedagogic elements built into the project might explain how the game elements worked together so well as learning tools. Figure 1 categorizes each game component according to the scales and categories established by educational theorists Benjamin Bloom, Howard Gardner, Jamie McKenzie and Robert Marzano. The game operates as a synthesis of these theories.

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Figure 1: Pedagogic Concepts Embedded Within Core Game Components

[sorry, I have to learn how to insert a table here.]

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Motivation

What follows is a brief analysis of various levels of motivation also embedded within the game.

The Motivation of Independent Responsibility, Social Learning and Communal Work: During these prolonged explorations there was always a balance between individual, small group and whole class project goals. From the first moment that the idea of the game was introduced each student received an assignment for specific aspects of the maps. One extremely withdrawn young man had responsibility for modeling and sharing Troy / Ilios and its peninsula. He was given this job because it added depth to his individual research on Ares; the God of War, a character he remained excited by and attached to throughout the semester. An impassioned young lady asked for responsibility for the Temple of Eleusis, which deepened her understanding of Goddess worship from ancient times to the present. Eventually her interest in the Eleusinian mysteries drew several other young ladies into her project as well. But the entire class, as a whole class, was also responsible for many different aspects and levels of the game as a whole (such as strategy, path laying, trap development, goals & quests, art & question card creation). Because of this balance of individual and group responsibilities there was a phenomenal amount of communication, peer teaching, and cooperation; the class needed to negotiate the way each individual part fit into the game both physically and strategically.

The Motivation of Challenge, Complexity and Relaxed Creativity. The class listened to my initial proposal of this project mutely - it took several days for the class to grasp that I would even extend such a daunting and all-consuming project to them. Although I myself wasn't sure whether the class wanted to participate I kept offering them heaps of materials (art supplies), and information. I spent time showing them artwork about the Underworld, and generally enthusing about how the project might be managed. I never told them what to do or how to do anything, except I did propose that one entire panel (3' x 4') would be devoted to each world - an Underworld panel, an Ancient world panel, and Mount Olympus. I only put two project sheets in their hands; one listed the many things (such as bloodcrimes, quests and oracles) that needed to be included in the game, and one listed various jobs for each class member. Eventually the class began to believe that I was serious.

A crucial piece of their undertaking the challenge was that they gradually realized I wasn't going to rush them through it; their time wasn't going to be limited, and they would be allowed to spend enormous amounts of class time on a complex creation. The combination of challenge, and the comfort of knowing that they would have time to rise to the challenge reassured and inspired them. They realized I was happy to evaluate them based on their prolonged creative effort - that I was excited about their creation. I explicitly described how their creative process was, in fact, learning. I even explained constructivist teaching theory and the neurology of multi-sensory learning. All these reassurances allowed the students to relax into the mysterious world they were creating and to enjoy it, and to enjoy the hard work of it, and the intensity of it, for its own sake. This was a crucial piece that can't be understated or ignored - many students said it was the hardest they had ever worked for any class in their entire school career, and also the most interesting and enjoyable class.

The most important attribute of the class culture was that it was focused, excited and intent on discovery, but also relaxed and pleasant, lacking entirely in tension or anxiety. Students who were more able were challenged, but students with disabilities were accommodated, so they weren't frustrated or intimidated but they were also challenged. The variety of needed tasks allowed everyone to contribute differently - and no task was rated higher or lower than another because they were all part of one glorious and concerted effort. The ultimate goal was not a final exam or a term paper, but a public challenge to play their completed game against a team of teachers, an exhibit that was destined to be as thrilling as a WWF wrestling match, with their schoolmates as onlookers, plenty of party food and a videographer to capture the spectacle.

My role varied from day to day, but during most stages of creation I supported learning by connecting with each and every student. I checked in on their progress and suggested further avenues of research, asked questions that sometimes led them to rethinking or redesigning, asked questions that sometimes led to improved insights or connections. I suggested when they should problem solve or strategize with other students.

From the time that the game was introduced, which was during the 4th week / unit on Heaven & Hell, the class continued processing new information almost daily. We studied hubris and blood crimes, muses and fates, monsters and chimeras, love stories and drama, quests and heroes, epic poetry and the Iliad. Generally all the material that could be covered under the umbrella of a humanities course on mythology was explored. While some works were explored in their entirety, many others were merely tasted, or excerpts were studied. The most important aspect of introducing these materials, whether in whole or in part, was that they were introduced in context of the world that they came from, and just as carefully fitted into the world that the students were creating.

The Motivation of Tactile, Visual, Kinesthetic and Collaborative Learning. Obviously this project engaged all learners in a prolonged and intensive collaborative as well as tactile, visual and kinesthetic learning journey. Students spent hours with crayons, comfortable and relaxed in their collaborative creativity. The exceptional beauty and fascination of their work product was a result of all of the students learning advanced crayon techniques from a fellow student who is an accomplished artist as well as a nurturing individual. As they worked, new mythological information was imparted via slideshows, audio recordings, video excerpts or reading aloud. Sometimes brief lectures or mini-lessons would begin the period and the remainder of the period would be spent in kinesthetically incorporating the new knowledge into the game. Sometimes several days of literature, reading, writing or research would break up the cycle of tactile engagement, but no week went by without at least two solid periods of creative, hands-on work using color and textural materials. Students also found ways of integrating photography, or constructing landmarks for the project. By placing value on this aspect of learning many learners became more comfortable and confident of their ownership in the knowledge that was being elaborated by the class. Learners who excelled at traditionally valued linguistic or mathematical intelligences found interesting ways to render sophisticated concepts into physical objects, such as the way that a team of three young men transformed the whirlpool of Charibdis into a strategic nightmare for any unlucky gameplayer who landed on the squares that led into the whirlpool. Gradually the physicality of the geography was transformed into multi-layered tests of strategy, history, ethics, and quests. The connections between the Underworld, the Ancient World and Mount Olympus were graphic, intense, beautiful, vivid and rich with meaning. Each student could point to any part of the board and explain multiple layers of meaning, history, mythology and story.

Look further down on this lens for more of this essay

Limitations

This project presented an unusual opportunity to explore without constraint a subject in an elective format - i.e. with no standard curricular agenda attached. While this was unusually liberating, some limitations did exist but they were mostly due to students whose intellectual skills had not been sharpened. Most students initially presented to class with very little background knowledge of history, psychology or mythology. What was worse, they rarely indicated that they did not know vocabulary unless they were directly questioned. Their research skills varied but most were extremely poor. They were not reading critically enough to ask or answer challenging questions. Because they were not asking critical questions they were not able to evaluate the sources they chose for research, nor target their inquiry narrowly enough to find relevant materials. In general the challenge of teaching became not what to teach, or how to teach it, but how to teach the skills necessary for the students to begin to learn.

The way around this difficulty was to begin with simple text (like D'Aulaires) and establish routines (such as reading myths every night and writing questions). In addition I picked several target skills, such as questioning and annotation skills, which I could progressively scaffold, increasing the difficulty level gradually as repeated assignments included the skill over time.

In a way these skill gaps limited the literature I would have read with them, but in another way I developed many more techniques by trying to leverage their skills using multi-modal tools and strategies. In the long run, as already discussed in my first section, these students learned phenomenal amounts of material, took great pleasure in learning, and demonstrated remarkable persistence, skills, talents and creativity.

I had no shortage of materials, conditions in the school were safe, clean, beautiful and well supplied, but the students were affected just like students across the nation are, with a kind of disengagement and lack of curiosity that stems from too much information and not enough meaning - in other words information overload. Information overload implies that too much information is contained in the brain, which would make students seem quite brilliant, one would suppose. But information that cannot be analyzed cannot be stored, and so it becomes a burden, crowding the sensorium but not enlightening it.

The cure for information overload is similar to a cure for overwhelmingly messy closets - new shelving, labels and containers, sensible organization procedures, and the implementation of a thorough no nonsense sorting, cataloging, evaluating and throwing away routine. In order for me to teach the many aspects of mythology I wanted to teach I had to develop ways to help students organize the information, help them learn to see patterns and identify similarities, analyze myths according to different patterning strategies (i.e. by mono-myth cycle or by archetypes or by metaphor), and develop a landscape (historic, geographic, metaphoric) where they could embed their stored knowledge.

In the process of this I learned that one of the best things a teacher can do is to teach students where to put information. To do this they need to visualize information as an object that can be worked with. Another handy tool for this visualization is metaphor. Mapping is also most essential: "Art, when it seeks to be realistic and to provide knowledge similar to that of empirical science, turns naturally to geography - that is, to showing the embeddedness of life in an environment or landscape" (Tuan 444). Interestingly, Tuan, a geographer, sees that

Of the three intellectual-imaginative projects - art, history, and geography - geography is the most clearly driven by the demands of survival and livelihood. Knowing places, knowing how to negotiate space, knowing the resources of one's environment, . . . are the sort of mental equipment every human individual and every society must have. (Tuan 444)

In the information age, information mapping and knowing how to negotiate informational space might become one of the defining survival skills. Teachers need to model the shaping of knowledge.

Ironically teaching this class that had fewest curricular guidelines allowed the underlying needs of students to be most clearly seen, considered and dealt with.

Please go to my lens: Deep Learning III for the last sections of this essay