Making believe makes a difference

I urge you to watch this TED talk, as David Eggers, now activist as well as author, gives a funny and inspiring history of 826 Valencia, his after-school tutoring and publishing company.

I came to educational research from the arts-education non-profit world, having spent eight years working for the DreamYard Project in the Bronx, NY.

DreamYard places artists, of all disciplines, in public schools for yearlong residencies, where they collaborate with subject teachers to co-design, co-plan, and co-teach art projects that support the teachers’ curricula. In my time with DreamYard, I saw how the arts could transform people and schools. In many ways, my time there was an ideal preparation for working on epistemic games.

There are currently no fine arts based epistemic games in development (many of the games, however, do involve design, writing, publishing, and presentations). But there are a few principles that DreamYard Project, and 826 Valencia and the other locations inspired by it, have in common with epistemic games.

For one, they all recognize that schools, as currently constructed, are not doing the job. There is a need for creative alternatives. There is a need, as Eggers says, to make school not like school.

They all seek to connect children and their schools with external professional communities (hello, Mr. Dewey). DreamYard and 826 Valencia connect children and their schools with local artists. 826 Valencia is an actual publishing company with writers and editors working in the same space that the community kids work. DreamYard artists work in their own theater and dance companies, run art studios, and publish and perform their work; to the best of their abilities they attempt to recreate these communities in public school classrooms. Epistemic games simulate the practica that are the gateways to professional communities. In the past few years, engineering, journalism, urban planning, and local government games have been implemented in schools, after-school programs, and summer programs. It’s so important to give young people access to the world of adults. Adults are, after all, what we will eventually need them to be.

They all give the students a platform to share their work with the world. 826 Valencia publishes books of their students writing that can be purchased on Amazon. DreamYard students have performed at Lincoln Center and had their work hanging in Sotheby’s. Players of epistemic games have published their news stories online, and presented plans and proposals to their city’s mayor. The important lesson here is that students are motivated when their work matters.

They are fun. 826 Valencia is also a pirate outfitter. DreamYard, although set in classrooms with rigorous academic standards, still focuses on creative play and expression. And players of epistemic games consistently talk about how much fun they have when they play, despite the hard work. A key ingredient to a fun program is how seriously it is taken. The little touches, the minor details, are what make the game or the program more motivating. The details may be whimsical, like a vat of eyeballs to replace ones lost at sea, or practical, like the business cards that players of epistemic games use. But ultimately, the more complete the world created, the more exciting it is to be a part of it.

Of course, the epistemic games research group is not a community based organization, so the scale of our operations and our priorities are necessarily different. But it’s exciting to see these different movements taking on the challenge of imagining alternatives, creating possibilities for kids from the ground-up. I can only echo David Eggers’ plea that everyone get involved with their local young people, either through schools or separately, and offer kids a glimpse of what kind of adults they could be.