No apologies - this is a work in progress. As I look forward to the start of a new academic year, albeit facing challenges created by COVID-19, my mind has been turning to how my teaching methods can adapt to give students the best possible environment in which to enquire and learn. I am building on experiments in various directions - see some examples, below.
In this case, however, I am going full NERD. I love card and table top games, including variants on Role Playing Games. As I thought of things I could do with my students, and things they could do ‘at a distance’, I thought of card-based games. Card games have been used, and studied, in pedagogical literature, but all I will say is that their discussion and application can be a little specialised. I wanted to take the key features of card based gaming, and make the most of their ability to structure a process, to help me teach and help students enquire and learn. The text below is taken from my note book, and is a work in progress. See what you think.
Objectives:
To engage students in subjects they may feel intimidated or ambivalent about.
To encourage students’ participation in teaching and learning activities, especially when learning asynchronously and at a distance.
To help students to construct academic submissions that add complexity, reflexivity and nuance to initial ideas.
To incorporate sensory, aesthetic and poetic elements in traditionally ‘stale’ social science topics.
This teaching idea builds on work that I have done in higher education and social research. Previous examples include a Childhood and Early Years Studies booklet providing visual scenes with reflective questions as ‘ways in’ to so-called ‘difficult topics’, a School Space tool which helped looked after young people talk about how to feel safe through selecting statements, and a dice activity that generated critically reflective questions for Children’s Services professionals. All three (and many more) share some common features:
All activities are easy to ‘start’ with a prompt question or simply a response to artefacts in front of people.
All these activities, in different ways, materialise thinking (i.e. they made thinking visible through artefacts and images).
The activities are, in different ways, practical, exploratory and sensory - that is they incorporate heuristic / playful elements.
They involve selection (e.g. of elements of an image, of artefacts) and choice.
They make the process of constructing meaning explicit, and structure it, so participants can reflect or narrate.
They make enquiry a shared activity, as artefacts become shared objects of reflection and action.
I want to continue to take these ideas and combine their most effective elements (as I see it). Ideally, I am designing a flexible framework for learning that can be adapted. To help me do this, I am thinking of two different courses I will be teaching in the second semester of academic year 2020/21 (January-May 2021), one being a third year (UK level 6) undergraduate course on Leadership and Collaboration in Children’s Services, and the other a second year (UK level 5) undergraduate course which supports students to develop a research proposal. These are useful courses to design this activity for, as I have found that students perceive (and face) challenges linked to circumstances such as:
The subjects are new to students, prompting a range of emotions or placing students in a range of ‘positions’ relative to the subject that are not conducive to participation and learning. These include: feeling intimidated, feeling ambivalent or disconnected, or confused by the amount of content.
Studying modules whilst doing ‘other things’ - an enhanced sense of distraction linked to anxiety, semester two workload, part time work or care responsibilities or, currently dramatic changes to the teaching and learning environment linked to COVID-19.
It is with these two challenges in mind, as well as wanting to build on previous developments I now think of this particular idea. I have been interested in how educators can adapt game mechanisms to teaching and learning activities, partly because many types of games address the sorts of features I have listed previously (e.g. thinking is made visible, there are shared objects of attention, selection and personalisation is often a feature). I also am thinking very much of students who may feel isolated and ambivalent about my third year module, and want to support their engagement and confidence in it as much as possible.
The idea in development
In summary:
Students select, personalise and construct cards that are raw materials, inspiring a ‘story’. The cards, then, are the ‘actors’ or ‘elements’ (human and non-human) in a developing scenario.
Different categories of ‘element cards’ will include people, policy, actions and places. Using these cards helps students think about the situated and applied nature of the ideas and issues they want to focus on. They also support active relating of theory and practice elements.
Each card will have descriptive categories that need completing (think of Top Trumps, or role playing games involving cards) - so students do not simply have a card saying the name of a theory (for example) but they should add characteristics in prompted fields. So, for a particular theory card, fields might be things like; historical context, focus, key claim, questions asked. For a professional actor card, fields might include; focus, priorities, knowledge, approach...and so on.
The cards are created / collected week by week as the course progresses. This can be a collective effort if I can create a shared library of such cards on my e-learning platform (BlackBoard Ultra). So as students learn (independently, or via taught sessions) about what ‘things’ feature in the topic, they can build their set.
At the start of the module, students are presented with a ‘starter set’ of cards to illustrate each category.
The growing collection of cards will not automatically configure into a story, so students are presented with a storyboard tool which provides a place to layout their cards (“who or what is important”) and a (several?) basic plot structures, as well as a template that would allow them to create their own.
This modular structure (individual cards, a scenario of multiple categories, then a storyboard / plot structure) allows students to (literally) collect and build up their understanding, and to fit this together in increasingly complex ways, i.e: 1) individual cards, 2) multiple (and increasingly complex) combinations of cards, 3) plot or scenario structures, THEN 4) authors’ narration.
Stage 4 is the point at which students begin to shape up their academic argument, as narrative cards (added last) describe, explain, justify, theorise, argue, defend and so on. These provide the authors’ voice and critical argument.
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