Part 3: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” As You Like It II,vii,140

Playfulness is common in Shakespeare’s plays. In As You Like It, we are reminded by the character of Jaques that life is a kind of performance and that each of us must take roles and act parts. This idea is taken to extremes in the play when the female character “Rosalind”, disguised as the male character “Ganymede” confronts Rosalind’s suitor Orlando and attempts to cure him of his love for her by pretending to be Rosalind. Confused? Given that all parts in Elizabethan theatres were acted by men (or boys often for women), what we end up with is a boy playing Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind; in social class terms, a lowly actor playing a noble woman playing a nobleman playing a noble woman; in gender terms, a boy playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. What is most striking for me in all these layers is how, as an audience, we are able to sustain our understanding of the complexity of the interaction between characters and how the multi-layered identities of Rosalind (but of anyone playing a part for that matter) are accessible and acceptable to our intellect.

In a previous essay for my MEd studies I wrote about the roles students take in a program my school runs for our Year 9 students in the city. Our students don’t wear a traditional school uniform and in the early days of our program we ran into trouble with students being mistaken for street kids and not being allowed into a number of venues or not being taken seriously by some of the people they met. Our solution was to ask the students to “dress up” into the uniforms of the city – to dress in suits and formal clothes – and the results were remarkable; not primarily in terms of the way others in the city saw our students, but in the way the students saw themselves. By adopting the costumes of business, students started to step away from the parts they played at school and became engaged in the city with a whole new level of commitment.

Research into learning in the “middle years” (for example MYRAD and MYPRAD) tells us that adolescent students lose interest and focus in traditional learning environments and become much more interested in collaborative, long term, project based learning which is embedded in “real life” contexts. Research on adolescent cognitive development highlights the hormonal changes that students are going through and the increased focus on forming identities through social interaction. Gender and sexual attraction become major foci as any Middle Years teacher knows only too well. Our experience of student behavior in the city suggests to me that it is not so much that students need “real life” contexts to work in (whatever these may be) but that they need contexts that allow them to explore the world and their identities in settings other than those framed as “school” where their roles are those of “students”.

The playful environments of computer games offer the opportunity for students to put on a different “suit” and explore the world creatively playing parts other than that of a “student”. I am reminded of a favorite quote which formed the centerpiece of yet another MEd essay.

When children fail at school, drop out, repeat, they are likely to be positioned in a factual world tied to simple operations, where knowledge is impermeable. The successful have access to the general principle, and some of these – a small number who are going to produce the discourse – will become aware that the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable. But the long socialization into the pedagogic code can remove the danger of the unthinkable, and of alternative realities.
Basil Bernstein (Bernstein, 1996, p. 26)

Bernstein’s explication of pedagogic codes highlighted for him the way schools limit the creative possibilities available to students by – to continue my metaphor - dressing them in such restrictive uniforms. Allowing students to creatively and playfully engage with different roles allows them the possibility of engagement in the language of their culture not just as passive recipients, but as active agents.

What I think computers and virtual environments may have the potential to provide to learning that traditional classrooms usually cannot, is the kind of playful engagement with identity that is needed to allow for Bernstein’s desire that students have access to the “unthinkable”. As Rieber et al argue: ‘the time has come to apply what we know about learning, motivation, and working cooperatively given the incredible processing power and social connectivity of computers.’ (Rieber, Smith, & Noah, 1998, p. 2) Like so many of our readings for this unit, Rieber et al argue that computer environments can facilitate a kind of ‘serious play’ that is engaging and empowering for students. Software such as “SimCity” “Civilization III” and “Age of Empires” allows students to engage in a complex and meaningful environment where they must adopt roles quite different to those usually required in a classroom. In these games the computer becomes, in Mitchel Resnick’s terms, a ‘paintbrush’ (Resnick, 2006) with which students can actively explore and shape their environments. Resnick invites his readers to compare the three terms:

Television. Computer. Paintbrush.

And decide which two should go together. He wants computers to be seen not just as passive ‘information machines’ akin to TV, but as a ‘new medium for creative design and expression’; as ‘paintbrushes’ (p.1). Kurt Squire makes a similar plea in his discussion of video games as ‘designed experience’ (Squire, 2006) where he argues that there is a need for a ‘mature body of games scholarship’ which can address the ‘critical study of games as participation in ideological systems, “learning as performance” and educational games as designed experiences.’ (p.20) Squire rightly points out, it seems to me, that it is not enough to critique the ‘text, image and animations’ (p. 21) of games, we need much more complex models for discussing the kinds of roles that students take in particular gaming environments. My view is that the work of sociologists like Habermas may be a good starting point for constructing such models (see my previous post).

For Squires it is what he describes as the ‘functional epistemology’ of games – the fact that learning is about ‘doing’ – that is one key component to their uniqueness. There seems to me to be a strong parallel here with my earlier description of my Year 9 students dressing in suits to visit the city. By changing the script, as it were, for their performance, we seemed to be allowing students to actively play a new part as they engaged with a series of tasks in the city; they were out there doing their learning – not in a classroom having the learning done to them. Quoting Clinton, Squires argues that ‘figuring out “what the body can do in the world is figuring out who you are in that world”’(Clinton. 2004, p.3 in Squire, 2006, p. 22).

Figuring out who you are in any world is a primary concern for an adolescent. Computer games and virtual worlds seem to me to have great potential as a space for safe, creative, playful and meaningful exploration not just of alternative worlds, but of alternative selves. Perhaps then we might see less of:

‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school'. (As You Like It II,vii,146)

...and instead see more engagement and empowerment in our classrooms.

Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London, Taylor and Francis.
Castell, S. D. & Jenson, J. 2003. Serious Play, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 35.
Pusey, M. 1987. Jurgen Habermas. Chichester, Ellis Horwood.
Resnick, M. 2006. Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society. In D. Singer & R. Golikoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (Eds.), Play = Learning: How play motivates and enhances children's cognitive and social-emotional growth.: Oxford University Press.
Rieber, L., Smith, L., & Noah, D. 1998. The Value of Serious Play. Educational Technology, 38(6), 29-37.
Squire, K. 2006. From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience. Educational Researcher, 35(8), pp. 19-29.