I've been thinking about it for a while but reading Gee (2003) has given me the ideal opportunity to talk about a problem of video games and other constructivist learning environments.

As much as I love his book for providing a practical perspective on the insights we gained on the Understanding learning course, I will, for once, make myself an advocate of traditional schooling.

I'm not being particularly smart when I'm saying that video games are quite expensive to create (although there are authoring tools which we'll be looking at later). Given the current constraints in the field of education, we may not even be able to systematically apply Gee's principles of good design to more traditional educational resources  and pedagogy.

 

 

Luckily, Perkins helps us in:

“when knowledge is not particularly troublesome for the learners in question, well, ... Teaching by telling may serve just fine”

(2006, p. 11)

The critical issue then becomes to choose constructivist approaches for threshold concepts, while transmitting may be fine for "the rest".

Returning to Gee, such threshold concepts should be tackled via environments exemplifying situated approaches. To the objection:

“'But we cannot teach children everything … in ways that make sense in terms of situated meanings and embodied actions”,

he replies that:

 

“There is no other way to make sense”

(p. 87)

His criticism of school sounds fair until we return to his definition of embodied actions:

“When I talk about a person's embodied experiences in the world (virtual or real), I mean to cover all the perceptions, actions, choices, and mental simulations of action or dialogue”

(p. 82)

The point of this whole post is that, in my opinion, most things that school teach actually are embodied when it's needed: although students seldom go “out of the classroom”, most teachers do situate meanings through experiments and, most importantly in higher education, examples - which are the most common form of "mental simulations" used for formal or informal teaching.

Of course, they don't necessarily do so spontaneously but average teachers always use examples upon requests  (be they verbally or physically – wide open round eyes – formulated).

 

 

 

 

Writing this post has taught me to distinguish between:

• threshold concepts which do require constructivist designs, even if they are costly: video games are powerful tools very suitable in such cases.

• otherwise troublesome concepts that may be tackled equally well using cognitive approaches, processes including widespread methods such as the use of examples

And I think this consideration has made me change my mind – a little – on the quality of our traditional education.

 

Having said that, I still agree that some teachers definitely need to improve in distinguishing what represents a threshold concept to their students rather than assuming that as long as they understand it him/herself, it can simply be told. With more and more research supporting the helpfulness of video games, good teachers may then use them for teaching such difficult concepts.

References:

Gee, J. P. (2003). Learning and identity. What does it mean to be a half elf? In What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, Palgrave Macmillan: pp. 51-71

Perkins, D. (2006). Constructivism and troublesome knowledge. In Overcoming barriers to human understanding: threshold  concepts and troublesome knowledge. J. H. F. Meyer and R. Land (Eds.). (London, Routledge): pp 33-47