Projecting ourselves

Things are finally beginning to slow down (at least in terms of travel) after a very busy March and April, but many ideas from this year’s DIGITEL workshop (in Taiwan) and AERA annual meeting (in Chicago) have continued to bounce around in my head and in several different on-going conversations.

The first of those ideas is understanding the long-term effects of play and learning. At DIGITEL, Mike Eisenberg spoke about toys and play as central to intellectual development. For instance, years into his architecture career, Frank Lloyd Wright continued to talk about how his play with blocks and toys – as far back as kindergarten – helped to shape his desire to become an architect. Even very simple toys can help kids project themselves into different worlds, with different constraints – blocks-as-cities, large refrigerator-boxes-as-caves, origami-as-zoo – and the worlds that kids create influence their interests years down the line. Ana Paiva spoke similarly about the projective quality of games and virtual worlds. Right now, her daughter creates imaginative stories about a glittery pink pencil which has been transformed into a magic wand that can cast spells and bring people luck. But as virtual worlds become more ubiquitous, kids will have more opportunities to create – and even realistically build out – similar kinds of fantastic stories and imaginative places through technologies like computer games, digitally-enhanced movies, and machinima.

The second big idea involves the importance of building models for learning. At AERA, I heard a group of math educators present a series of qualitative studies describing the processes of learning in several successful classrooms. In one setting, the question was what approaches helped students to better understand algebra? In another, how did a specific sort of classroom ecology help to foster productive learning? To me, though, the most interesting part of the session was the discussion, given by Ann Renninger. She pointed out that we, as education researchers, have many useful methods of thickly describing what happens in educational environments, but relatively few ways of understanding and theorizing about those happenings beyond the immediate context of that environment, this teacher’s approach, or those students’ work.

Both of these ideas got me thinking about my own work in epistemic games. When our middle-school kids come to play an epistemic game, they take on a projective identity as a journalist, or a biomechanical engineer, or an urban planner. While these identities are not fantastical, they are imaginative in that they let kids role play and act in ways that they never would have access in the real world. For example, very few kids ever get the chance to plan a city or interview a scientist about a topic of their interest in the course of their normal lives. Epistemic games give kids opportunities to create stories about themselves, their interests, and their possible future aspirations – and identities from which they can see the world in a different way.

Part of the interesting thing about all of this, though, is that letting kids step into an unfamiliar identity gives us as researchers an opportunity to build a better model of thinking and learning. We can begin to see what parts of the practices of engineers or journalists kids need to know about in order to successfully play that role – and how those things, epistemic frames, come together in at least a mostly consistent way across contexts and practices.