My five-year journey through the Master of Arts in education program at Sonoma State has afforded me an important period of learning and reflection across multiple fronts of my life, academic as well as personal. While I was learning what it is to be a good educator, and what it means to apply theory and pedagogical practice to curriculum and educational goals, I was dealing with family challenges and tragedies, as well as educational and professional challenges and successes. It is only through the consistent support of a vibrant learning community of peers and mentors that I have been able to find a successful path to this point, where I stand on the precipice of my culminating masters project. For all of the help I have received along the way, I am truly thankful.
Drawing a through-line from the beginning of my journey to now, I feel as if I have grown significantly as an educator and as a person. I have moved from an understanding of teaching as transference of knowledge from a ‘sage on the stage’ to a passive educational audience, to my adoption of a constructivist and discovery-based approach that places the educator as a “guide on the side” who shepherds the participants in co-developing knowledge in the context of a community of participation. My focus on what makes a well-balanced curriculum has shifted from a viewpoint of academic success being the primary goal, to an understanding that academic success is only part of the story – social/emotional maturity and fluency, personal fulfillment, and strong self-esteem are equally a part of a meaningful educational experience. I have also moved from a naïve presupposition that education is an objective practice that focuses only on facts, to one that understands that education is at base a political activity and can never be free from bias, no matter what its factual content might be. As we help others learn, we are sharing our worldview, either directly or indirectly, and it cannot help but influence those we endeavor to help educate. Knowing this, we must be careful about what we pass along, and hold our position with great responsibility. We are not just creating the minds of the future – we are creating the hearts and souls as well.
Developing an Educational Philosophy
When I began my studies in the MA program, I had studied no previous educational theory or philosophy, but I had a distinct and non-traditional goal in mind; I wanted to find a way to use the practice of tabletop role-playing games as a pedagogical tool to increase motivation and engagement in students and lead them towards academic success. I had my personal narrative as my motivation, and I had heard my own experiences echoed in the lives of others similar to me. I knew first-hand what RPGs could do, but I didn’t know to what extent and how best to make use of their power. In my first semester I decided to take an undergraduate upper-division course on Educational philosophy: EDUC 417 – School and Society, in which I was required to write about my own educational autobiography, which made me consider what worked and what didn’t work in my own experience and gave me empathy towards other younger learners that may themselves feel disenfranchised by the educational system in their environment. Reviewing this piece from 2014 has reminded me why my methodology and efforts are so important today, both to reach children that are disenfranchised, but also to provide a strong self-visualization for those children that empowers them see themselves as responsible, heroic, and powerful.
In EDUC 570 – The Reflective Educator, I considered several philosophical approaches to education, and found an affinity with the community-based educational model of John Dewey and writings of Joel Spring, and began to see the strong relationship between a constructivist, learner-centric educational model, and the intrinsic activities related to playing and running tabletop role-playing games. I also became inspired by Pablo Freire, and the consideration of power relationships in various educational models. The game master (educator) is a guide that sets out an environment and poses questions through situational frames, but the actions and the directions followed are completely dependent on the actions and desires of the players (learners).
In EDCT 560 – Instructional Design Technology, I added to my philosophical awareness the ideas from Constructivist theory (Bruner), Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, and the concept of Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger, 1990), and began to understand my work in the context of anchored instruction (Bransford, 1990). RPGs are simulations by nature, and learning is contextualized by situation and setting – problems posed are ones that simulate realistic situations (or at least ones that follow a consistent set of rules and understandings), and require consideration in terms of those realities. On the meta-level, learning to play is done in increments and mastery is achieved only through consistent practice.
In EDCT 585 – Curriculum Development Theory, Practice and Evaluation I explored other models of curriculum design and became attracted to the work of Kathy Short and Carolyn Burke, as well as thoughts put forth by Pablo Freire and William Pinar. These writers reinforced my desire to break away from a traditional top-down “banking” model of education (Freire, 1968), and instead to focus on educational practices that were transactional and peer-based in nature, and that promoted a “learning-centric curriculum” (Short & Burke). I began to understand the learning process as preparatory for present and future living, not only in its content but in its context. This lent a further justification for my conception of using simulations and role-playing games as “situated learning” (Gee), and the subsequent creation and leverage of a community of practice around the constellation of skills and knowledges needed to be an active participant in collaborative storytelling or role-playing games.
Exploring Education and Society
In EDCT 552 – Educational Technology praxis, we explored the intersection of technology and education, and I was able to explore and articulate the relationship between technology, pedagogy, and content. The most important insight I gained through my explorations was that student engagement was a key factor to the educational efficacy of RPGs and games, both as a technology and as a practice. In harnessing the motivational power of the Participatory Culture (as coined by Henry Jenkins, in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Education for the 21st Century, 2006) around RPGs and games, an educator is able to create and sustain a collaborative, bi-directional learning community. This community has the important feature of inspiring its participants to gain proficiency and mastery in a collection of related skills. These skills can be referenced by the content of the games, such as knowledge of science, history, naturalism, or even physical skills such as archery or race car driving, and exploration of these skills as concepts creates a motivation for learning about these concepts in the abstract, or to actually engaging in said skills in the “real world”. Other skills are transcendent, appearing through engagement in the activity of playing the games themselves, such as learning to collaborate, communicate, coordinate action, plan and execute plans, think critically about situations and problems, come up with creative solutions, etc. In addition, there are myriad related supportive activities associated with the games, such as creative writing, crafting and painting, drawing, modeling, etc.. As in the case of the computer game Never Alone, these communities of practice can further not only mastery in technology and approach, but also can further the goals of preservation of values and culture for those in oppressed communities. In my piece, “Using Role-Playing Games for Educational Purposes: Examples of RPGS in Curriculum and Pedagogy” written for EDUC 570, I explored several examples of RPGs used in education that showed not only the power of engagement these tools provided, but the existence of wider communities of practice and participatory cultures that encircled these activities. I also explored the thoughts of educational philosophers such as Henry Giroux and began to consider how the act and methods of education can be the agents of social change.
Through my work, I became inspired by the power of creating visions of success in communities of the disenfranchised, and committed to furthering the social justice of equalization not only of access to technology and engaging activities, but also of access to a world in which dreams and visualizations of personal power and mastery are commonplace. My later work in EDCT 556 – Technology, Pedagogy, and Society helped me consider the effects and implications that technology, and more narrowly the technology of games and RPGs, might have on specific sociocultural communities, and how the work I am doing is situated in a larger context of digital media, mobile devices, and a wide culture of distraction. Later, my work in EDSP 430 – Introduction to Special Education gave me an opportunity to consider not only how my work could be used to help those with specific learning challenges, but also how “classroom” structure and associated culture I establish can serve to be inclusive and empowering for all students, despite their specific learning preferences, facilities, difficulties and needs.
In summation, I think that my greatest evolution of thought across all of my coursework has occurred in my understanding of how education, access to education, the form that education takes, and the agency and ownership of the learners in the process heavily influence opportunity, and how privilege and intersectionality of discriminatory practices can control the educational, professional, and societal destinies of differing communities in our society.
Researching and Developing Game-Based Pedagogy and Curriculum
In EDUC 417, I had the opportunity to attempt for the first time to create a role-playing simulation game (“Dewey Know How To Learn?”) that taught about the power of community-based learning. For our final assignment, one in which we imagined our ideal school, I postulated for the first time what it might look like to create an entire educational curriculum around my imagined methodology. Later, In EDCT 560, I adapted a classroom simulation RPG game my business partner and I had written to teach the American Industrial Revolution to a Learning platform (Moodle). I did this to show how we can use communities of practice and participatory culture to co-create knowledge around a core idea, and how we can allow for a pathway through learning that is not linear in nature, but instead follows a game narrative, and that allows for individual freedoms of exploration and creation in the process.
Throughout my work, also I began to engage with the tension between allowing the learners to guide their own educational pathway and the perceived need to use standards and summative assessment tools to ensure educational equity and effectiveness. This tension persisted throughout my coursework in the MA program, continues to influence my work, and will most certainly play into my cognate project. In EDCT 560 I explored the concept of using instructional design models for curriculum and became attracted to those that considered motivation as a principle concern. Models such as ARCS, MOM and SUCCESS help reorient the process of creating curriculum to focus on engagement and motivation and provide an alternative lens to using only standards and summative assessment to determine efficacy of curriculum. In EDCT 585, I was exposed to the work of Short and Burke, and through their lens of a nine-way grid of assessment tools, I have been able to consider a wider set of methods for assessment that more accurately determine proficiency and fluency in skills and concepts than summative assessments alone.
In EDCT 585, I was able to apply much of what I had been learning in analysis of another project that my partner and I were engaged in, namely the creation of a simulation role-playing game designed to teach both life skills and Spanish in a high school vocational Spanish class, “El Juego de la Vida”. Applying what I had learned about understanding and conducting educational research in EDUC 571 – Research Paradigms in Education, I furthered this analysis in EDCT 586, where I analyzed the results of several survey instruments given to the participants of our game throughout the year and was able to draw important conclusions about efficacy and engagement that have influenced my opinions and work. In particular, it became strongly evident that in order for a games paradigm to work, it must be voluntary – requiring students to play a game, no matter how fun it may be, turns the game into an assignment, and the intrinsic motivational power of the activity is damaged or destroyed. Also, there is a balance to be maintained between the educational efficacy of a game and the playability/fun of that game, and neither can be sacrificed for the other without consequence.
In conclusion, my pathway through my Master of Arts in education program at Sonoma State University has not only taught me a great deal and has evolved my thinking on a number of fronts. In terms of educational process, methodology, pedagogy and philosophy, my work has given me the tools to effectively articulate the meaning and efficacy of the particular learning model I’m seeking to promote. I have also had the opportunity to create a number of game prototypes, test them out in the classroom, and then analyze the efficacy of those prototypes in the context of university-level scholarship. I have had the benefit of master teachers and skilled professors to guide me on the way, and hopefully in my cognate project, I will create an effective training program for those who wish to learn and practice using role-playing games in educational contexts.