To be quite honest
with you all, I am not sure where to begin. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee thoroughly
trumped my expectations. I am not exactly sure what I thought I was going to
get out of the book beside a general argument for why video games aren’t a
waste of time (and I doubted highly that I would even get that). But, I got so much more out of it. I learned a great deal
and have managed to “transfer” all my new knowledge to multiple classes and
arguments. This book really solidified ideas of why video games are so much
more effective for children to learn than the structured “skill-and-drill” means
of education in schools today.
I
especially liked how James Paul Gee talked about learning in science
classrooms. I realize that he was applying this knowledge to all different
kinds of classroom learning, but his examples of the science classroom really
struck a soft spot for me because science was never something that I “got”;
science was always and still is a great struggle of mine. A lot of the time I
felt like the “bad” student because I was never good at spitting out facts
about things that seemed so abstract and so irrelevant to my life—two key
components, Gee argues, that should not be missing in a learning environment. I
never found solid “situated meanings” for words with “images, actions, experiences
or dialogue in the real world.” Gee says, “This is way so many school children,
even the ones who are good at school can pass tests bust still cannot apply
their knowledge to real problem solving.” (pg. 105) He says, “It’s all ‘just
words,’ words that the good students can repeat on tests and the ‘bad’ one’s
can’t. (Pg. 97).
I really liked Gee’s notion that a
“one-size fits all” does not apply to learning. He says, “A good video game adapts
to the level of the player, rewards different players differently (but rewards
them all) and often stays at the edge of the player’s regime of competence.” (Pg.
122). I liked this because, often times, there are usually a handful of kids
(usually the ones who keep quiet) who learn a little slower than the rest. That
doesn’t mean that they are dumb or can’t learn the material, it means that they
just need a little extra explanation for what is going on. When material is
sped through at a pace that “normal” kids learn, the kids who learn a bit
slower are going to be left in the dust and incapable of learning future
problems, as problems tend to build on prior learned knowledge. Rather than
penalizing students who cannot keep up, I feel as though the instructor should
work toward a more positive approach in the classroom, rather than the
reprimanding, red-pen means that is often used. Gee argues that that is one of
the key elements as to why video games are such powerful means of
teaching/learning. He says, “A good video game adapts to the level of the
player, rewards different players differently (but rewards them all) and often
stays at the edge of the player’s regime of competence.” (Pg. 122). It does a
student more harm than good when an instructor reprimands the student for a bad
grade. There is nothing like discouragement to get a kid not to try. Gee says,
“In video games, losing isn’t losing, and the point is not winning easy and
judging yourself a failure. In video games, hard is not bad and easy is not
good.” (Pg. 175).
Another element of the book that
had me quite interested was how video games allow the player to become the
scientist by “encourage learning, hypothesize testing, risk taking persistence
past failure, and seeing ‘mistakes’ as new opportunities for progress and
learning.” (Pg. 37). Gee talks about how video games lower the consequences of
failure, ultimately encouraging the player to “take risks, explore, and try new
things.” So, instead of tossing a ton of irrelevant facts and intangible ideas
at kids, the way to encourage learning for kids is to A) make the material
relevant to their lives and B) let them discover answers for themselves. Of
course, it would be pointless to allow children to run around rampant in a classroom
and have them try to discover answers unguided (because that would be
completely unproductive and waste everyone’s time), but with a guided hand. Gee
argues that children are more capable of learning and retaining information if
they discover answers on their own.
With that said, I was thrilled to
learn about Brown and Campione’s Jigsaw Method of teaching/learning. As soon as
I read about this method I instantly thought back to those science classes in
middle school and high school and thought about how this method would have
helped me so much. Basically, in the jigsaw method, the class is split into
small groups where these groups study very in depth about their given topic,
and once these small groups have mastered their topic, they disperse into
different groups with other kids who have also mastered their topic. Within
this module, these kids are able to teach each other the knowledge that they
mastered. My mind was blown when I read about this. I couldn’t believe I had
never before heard of or seen something that seemed so simple and so effective
enacted in a classroom before. And as I read on, Gee talked about why they
don’t use this method anymore, and it basically boils down to the economy and
money. He said that it was used initially because it was the model in Japanese
schools in the 1980’s when the Japanese’s economy was doing really well.
However, when the Japanese economy fell and the American economy rose, they
quite implementing this method because “the new global high-tech economy called
for lots of service workers in addition to lots of knowledge workers.” (Pg.
207). Knowledge workers, Gee says, are the ones with the more specialist and
technical knowledge, and the service workers are one who do the manual and
industrial work. Which makes me really sad.
I’ll end
this long post with one of my favorite quotes from the book: “The key is finding
ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don’t
fall back on learning only what is simple and easy.” (Pg. 3). Gee mentioned in
the end of the book that his purpose for writing this book was not to convince
school systems to use video games as their lesson plans, but rather, his
purpose in writing this was to display his observations of video games and how,
in his opinion, are “well supported by research in the learning sciences.” (Pg.
218). How we will find the answer to
making “hard things” appear more appealing, I do not know. But I think that
video games provide an answer that sets us on the right path for the future of
learning.
