Video Games: Chapter 5

I always love a good analogy. I’ll admit that some of the beginning parts of this chapter were a bit over my head, however, things really came together for me at the end of this chapter.  Strong Conservative and Liberal ideologies and influences leave our education system with a somewhat uncommon goal and vision for our schools. Other analogies that I found in this chapter include the following:

“Of course, most of the knowledge, values, strategies, and skills the player picks up in this game, he or she picks up, not from reading the manual, which is, after all, only a small booklet, but from playing the game. The game has a tutorial, hints, and much in its design that helps players learn the knowledge, values, practices, strategies, and skills necessary to enact professional military knowledge and play the game well.”

            To me, this seems like an analogy to phonics and whole language. In the classroom, students need to have their “booklet” and explicit tutorial of strategies to get them started. They also need to have opportunities to practice their skills though and learn through “playing the game.”  Unlike a game though, teachers are there to provide additional scaffolding. Sometimes there is more than one answer that only a human interaction can satisfy.

“Authentic professionals have special knowledge and distinctive values tied to specific skills gained through a good deal of effort and experience. They do what they do because they are committed to an identity in which their skills and the knowledge that generates them are seen as valuable and significant. They don’t operate just by well-practiced routines; they can think for themselves and innovate in their domains when they have to (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993). Finally, authentic professionals welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise. This is the sort of identity one must at least role play in order to play Full Spectrum Warrior successfully. Being a professional is a commitment to being in the world in a certain way with a certain style and operating by certain values.”

            Teachers need to be authentic professionals by this definition. Not operating by well practice routines means veering away from the textbook and using skills gained through experience. I think that cutting edge expertise means meeting an expectation of staying current in research and practices of education. I wish that educators were regarded more as professionals too. Professionals should not be disposable or easily replaced. However, along with this definition, being an authentic professional also means a commitment to being in the world in a certain way.

“As a model of learning, Full Spectrum Warrior suggests that freedom requires constraints and that deep thinking requires a framework. Once the player adopts the strong values and identity the game requires, these serve as a perspective and resource from which to make decisions about actions and with which to think and resolve problems. If there is no such perspective, then there is really no basis for making any decision; no decision is really any better than any other. If there is no such perspective, then nothing I think counts as knowledge, because there is no framework within which any thought counts as any better than any other.”

            I think that this relates to people feeling the need for a Common Core. This perspective resource to make decisions and resolve problems can work for students and teachers. With an appropriate and foundational knowledge base, students can apply their knowledge to other areas in order to learn more. Teachers can use this resource to decide what their students need to know in order to be successful.

Although these analogies may not be exactly what the author was getting at with this chapter they made sense to me. The image at the beginning of my blog sums up how I was feeling as I read this chapter- serious on the outside, Mario running around on the inside. This chapter took video games much deeper than my pervious appreciation for them and took on explaining a “projective stance” of this topic.