Live Action MMORPG: Alien Invasion Week

This is an idea for promoting collaborative storytelling. The activity begins with a plot seed--a world-establishing event that will provide a common frame from which the story proceeds. Each day, the class meets and each student describes his or her action in response to the initiating event. These actions have consequent reactions based on an overall narrative arc, an element of which is introduced in each subsequent class meeting. The nature and type of the reaction is a function partially pre-determined by a detailed physical map of the activity's area (the school building, for instance) containing various objects, obstacles, valuables, tools, etc--think dungeon master's guide--and partially determined on-the-spot by an instructor, a board of editors or even by coin flip or dice roll.

My dream scenario would be "Alien Invasion Week" in which several major cities have been destroyed over the weekend--the plot seed--and we begin with huge uncertainty and fear. As the week progresses, there is a gradual shift in school policies to reflect obedience to our new alien overlords. Students have to figure out whether they'll go along with the rules or try to subvert the new order.

I have a lot more to say about this. More later....

Educational Philosophy Statement

Education isn't the process of putting knowledge into students' heads. There are no knowledge quanta. We don't exchange information by engram. Teaching and learning are complicated processes that we barely understand.

I love Vygotsky's scaffolding metaphor. His Zone of Proximal Development and focus on praxis best describes my concept of what teaching is and how it works. We reach students by recognizing how each of them grasps for us. We're all teaching and learning as we approach mutual understanding. If we assume that the density and richness of this scaffolding is directly proportional to the resources available to sustain it, then we have a dilemma. With finite resources, we cannot hope to achieve perfect understanding. Teaching is learning how to work within these limits to achieve the highest fidelity for every student in each classroom.

But what do we hope to accomplish? What is an educated person? How do we recognize success in our work? These questions imply the big one: Why do we educate our children? I'll throw out one possible answer (there are other answers, but I think this is a useful one): We educate our children to maximize their happiness (both emotional and economic) and, through this, to create a richer society (both culturally and economically).

This presents another dilemma: We are in an unprecedented period of accelerating economic and social change. The resulting uncertainty obviates the utility of any discrete set of knowledge, tools or tricks as a guarantor of security — economic or otherwise. Yet, if we're going to make education compulsory, we have an obligation to make it useful. Therefore, we need to teach students to embrace complexity and uncertainty. An educated person must know how to see, how to understand what he or she is seeing and how to act on that understanding.

In an English classroom, this might mean knowing how to interrogate a text for meaning and then how to explain how these revealed factors elicited his or her response to it. This skill requires language facility sufficient to explain complicated things to others — ideally, to a variety of types of others. It means helping students achieve things that are hard so that they develop the confidence to do new things. It also means teaching students the value of failure, how to learn from it and how to integrate that knowledge into new and better strategies.

There is no knowledge without communication. Innovation is a conversation. Our accelerando culture emerges from an ongoing conversation about what the world is, what it's made from and how it works. Participation in this discourse is enriched in proportion to the acquisition of particular knowledge and skills. Paradoxically, this expertise reduces the size of the discourse community. The educated person is an expert able to see, understand and act within, outside and between his or her specialty and other areas. He or she draws on specific knowledge, sees analogies and connections to other areas, and has the ability and courage to communicate this understanding to others.

Karaoke in the Classroom

Consider this an explanatory footnote to an article entitled "An Argument for a New Emphasis on Rhetoric in High-School English/Language Arts Instruction" which contains the phrase "karaoke in the classroom".

There are several benefits to be found in using Karaoke or other, similar activities that share performance characteristics. Properly overseen, it provides a safe opportunity to confront performance anxiety and, with universal participation, promotes the critical skills that emerge from being an attentive and empathetic audience member.

Performance before the class could be a confidence-builder for individual students and, properly overseen by an attentive instructor who enforces a respectful atmosphere, a useful way to construct a community of trust.

In addition to singing in front of the class, other possible exercises could include poetry and dramatic readings, skits or short plays--basically, any activity in which a student is demonstrating something prepared specifically to perform before the class. The audience specificity is key, because it forces each student to examine and tune his or her psychological models of the rest of the class in the aggregate and as individuals.

Performance skills and the confidence to speak publicly are a foundation for skills useful in any future endeavor and should be considered a high priority in any rhetoric-oriented curriculum.