Guerilla Pedagogy

Games are everywhere. Now I know that may seem obvious and kind of empty to say since games are the largest growing entertainment medium in this moment, but really think about that. We’ve got all sorts of game systems (which let’s be real are pretty as distinct as Pepsi and Coke) like the Xbox and Playstation, not to mention old fashioned PC gaming rigs. But more than this we see games on our phones. Games for entertainment –Among Us, Call of Duty, Minecraft. Games for daily routines – Habitica is an app that gamifies everyday activities to encourage habit forming and countless apps turn exercising into games with rewards for performance and effort. Games for learning languages – as DuoLingo likes to advertise, more people are learning a language with it than almost any other system. When we think about it, games have become one of the dominant modes of engaging with our social world.

Media theorist McKenzie Wark, in their 2007 book Gamer Theory, makes the argument that our social environment has become a  ‘gamespace’ where so many of our social interactions are being gamified and that this has dramatic impacts on our lives, communities, education, politics, and pretty well everything (philosopher Steven Shaviro offers a good review here and you can access the original online conglomeration of Wark’s notes here). According to Wark, social life under capitalism has become a game where the political economic structure and algorithmic make up of our social medias has conditioned the way we experience ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’. Rather than fully autonomous, we are limited by structures that make our false choices – like a two-party political system, brand loyalties, or literally any interaction in a ‘market’ etc… – appear as ludic features rather than restraints.

I used to play many more games than I do now and I stuck mostly to real-time strategy games like Age of Empires or role-playing games like the older Elder Scrolls series and was considered a nerd in the more denigrating sense at the time. I haven’t found myself plugged into a lot of the new wave of games that are everywhere now (he tells himself despite name-dropping LOTS of games in this post and being way too into game and media theory), but certainly my DuoLingo buzzes at me all the time. Wark’s work makes me wonder not just about educational games and their use in the classroom, but also about what we as teachers will need to reckon with as games increasingly become one of the most prominent kinds of texts youth are engaging with. In particular, I wonder about the gamification of education in general. The messages that achieving badges or points for accomplishing particular educational tasks sends is that an institution beyond our democratic control has decided what counts as ‘right’ and that this is ok and in fact good. And we gobble it up for the endorphin rush of the reward. Well hell with that I don’t want Sal Khan to tell me what matters about history.

In the classroom I can see many potential uses for games. Games like Portal run on such sophisticated physics engines that any physics or maths class would benefit from exploring it as a multimedia entryway to different topics. By creating this kind of entryway to the more esoteric side of physics becomes concrete and material for students which is a very effective way to show the impacts it has on peoples lives, and what they can do with the knowledge. Likewise, there exist games that could be used in social sciences such as classic city builders and strategy games like Pharaoh. This said, we do need to be conscious of the ludonarrative dissonances and messages in games, that is, the way gameplay features and narrative combine (or diverge) to tell particular stories or serve particular social and political functions.

The most striking example of the video game as text that concerns me is Europa Universalis IV, an incredibly popular game that puts you in the place of (usually) a European power from the 15^th through to the 19^th centuries.  This game turns the period of colonization into a condition of winning the game and while you can play as some Indigenous nations in the so-called Americas or other non-European nations, the bulk of the purpose is to colonize the world like Europe actually did. While its gameplay may provide potential students with insights into the challenge of managing trade over the centuries for a burgeoning nation-state, narratively, it condones a teleology of conquest and imperialism without engaging in questions of justice or how these forces continue to impact people today in the real world. Ditto all this for games like the Civilization series.

Games as text, in classrooms or outside of them, are not only changing the way we interact with each other, our communities, and political and economic institutions, they’re changing the way we learn about those things. By all means games can be useful entry points for topics from all subject areas, though it strikes me that they fit the STEM and English/Writing fields a bit more than other social sciences. Critical engagement with games as texts cannot be separated from games as learning tool, nor can we effectively separate it from games as a material commodity in the structure that makes them. One great use of them is to facilitate conversations exactly like I am having with myself now. Being so ubiquitous, how can we use games as texts and metatexts to talk about ongoing injustices and crises in our real world, while being cognizant about how they try to construct a particular reality for us to interpret. And all this is not even to mention the ways that games are being intentionally designed to extract ever more money from players. The free-to-play, pay-to-win (or at least for a massive in game advantage) model of phone games or games like Fortnite is there to target vulnerable young people and mercilessly suck out profits by creating addictions just like gambling does.

So I’ve gone off a lot on this topic, I just read William Gibson’s Neuromancer so maybe that’s why. Suffice it to say that games could be used for fascinating educational purposes.  I love the idea of blowing something up in Minecraft and creating another device that can measure the force present there. I also love using games as texts for interrogation and critical inquiry about story and affect – such as in games like The Last of Us or indie darlings like The Stanley Parable and Firewatch. But the most paramount consideration when involving games in education is the shadow messages being instilled by ludic and narrative constraints.  What options are foreclosed upon by the seemingly ‘free’ choices in a game? And how is our real-world becoming ever more ‘free’ in the same way?

Thanks for falling for my clickbaity title!

Something that always bothered me when I was in high school (and let’s be honest, university too) was the prevalence of homework. I performed well in high school.  For whatever reason I found it easy enough to coast through classes and get good grades based on tests and assignments.  I think I got pretty lucky. I never did homework, and it always piled up for me at the last minute and I’d find myself scrambling to finish things just before they were due. I think a big part of this was because very early on I (perhaps stubbornly, perhaps due to rumbling class consciousness) I decided that homework was bad and should not exist because it takes so much time for people to do, causes undo stress and anxiety, and often doesn’t help anyone learn. And besides, isn’t our home time supposed to be just that, home time? Not time that the school we go to for so long during the day gets to bleed into. How is that fair?

These ideas were floating through my head as we discussed the ideas of flipped learning and hyflex learning during our last class. I appreciate the ways in which both these models seek to create an atmosphere and method of accessibility for students, especially in times of duress such as our current pandemic. Disability, illness, learning needs, and all sorts of other specific accessibility needs of students can be met by combining online and face to face, and synchronous and asynchronous forms of teaching. These tools can be a form of universal design that helps both those in need of it and those who may not explicitly require extra support, which is a liberatory goal we should all be working towards.

However, in order for these methods to truly reach such a potential we need to address two concepts.

• The bleed over from school time into personal time.
• The way in which school is a kind of labour.

Hyflex and flipped learning make space for students to access school material online at home. This could be used as a means of making lessons or lecture style work something to be done on ones own, with support given in the class room, and then homework added as necessary. This risks making lectures and information transmission or exploration something that students do outside of the classroom. The time that students take during the day at school is substantial. We need to be asking ourselves carefully whether or not we should be facilitating more work for students outside the class. We know the effects of sleep deprivation on youth, something that schools are contributing to. Contextually, these methods can be very helpful for students, but we need to carefully monitor their implementation in our classroom and what our student’s workloads look like in their other classes to do so effectively.

The second thing to consider is how school is a form of labour, and students are, in effect, workers. Going to school and learning the skills we need to get along in our world post graduation (be that working or post-secondary and then working. Or, and we won’t get into this, criminalization) means that we are able to produce value or reproduce social necessities under the capitalist system in which we live. From this framework we can see how homework and the moving of formal learning into non-class time manifests as a kind of ‘unpaid overtime’ that begins to normalize hierarchical work conditions and the gig-ification of jobs. Flexibility is no longer a perk of the job, but something we need to make a part of our lives by foregoing hobbies, relations, and the general exploration of life in order to make ourselves available to work so we can survive.

Obviously none of this means that these models aren’t useful in their own ways and in particular classroom contexts, but we cannot dismiss the political economic connections and implications that every model of education has in our excitement to do good on behalf of our students. We need to use the models we have, and of course make more, with justice, liberation, and our shared struggle as teachers and students (workers both) in mind.

And all this still says nothing about the way these models facilitate the gig-ification of teachers in the education system! Who needs teachers with secure contracts and a position in their community when we can have loads of atomized ‘learning experts’ or knowledge guides’ or whatever corporate buzzword gets assigned to people in ever more precarious positions? But that’s for another rant.

I like the ideas of EdCamps.  Collaboration between teachers in order to learn about and seek to address concerns or topics that are pressing. Through a simple, democratic process, co-workers are able to construct ideas and programs to improve teaching methods, cross curricular content, student care, and more. I think that, given the opportunity, programs similar in structure to EdCamps should be a method by which most professional development happens at schools.  I don’t, however, think that professional development should be the domain of EdCamps themselves as presented to us in class.

When we look at the structure of an EdCamp we see that teachers are a part of the conversation, but so are administrator from the school, district, and ministry in equal measure.  In addition to these workers and administrators, we occasionally see community members like students involved, but it is unclear if other community members like care workers, parents, etc… are connected to the program.  I actually think this is a good thing as there are plenty of ways for community involvement in schooling, but staff and students should have their own space without input from parents and other community members in order to freely build their school practice.  For this reason, I am troubled by the inclusion of administration from various levels.

On the face of it, administrators from school, district, and ministry levels will have similar goals for educational development. What remains unspoken however is the distinct differences in workplace power that administrators have versus teachers.  EdCamps, by virtue of including the various levels of administration, are going to implicitly reproduce that power dynamic.  This does not mean that they are bad spaces, nor does it mean that good and meaningful collaborative projects will not occur as clearly there are shared interests in student care and experience.  What it does mean however, is that the political horizon of possibility is dramatically narrowed by the presence of the more powerful employing class.  Can we really collaborate towards an anti-colonial education if we must include members of the colonial ministry in our collaboration and treat their position and institutional interests as equally valid?

Revolutionary Syndicalism is a (often anarchist orientated) form of unionism that rejects electoral politics and institutional reform as effective methods of political change. It also rejects centralized, top-down, bureaucratic unions as limiting workers power and favours federated, decentralized, and grass roots organization and direct action (both of which may look like anything from organizing community events and petitions to directly blocking evictions or starting wildcat strikes) by workers directly in their field and communities as a more powerful and meaningful form of political and social change.

If we want to see the goals of EdCamp style organizing and professional development expand, then we need to take a tip from the syndicalists and put our energies into structures that are not bound by the constraints of colonial institutions. EdCamps have their place certainly, but the goals they espouse may be more powerful and implemented more directly if we refocus on these projects as a part of the greater political and social struggles that teachers, students, and non-administration co-workers, such as custodial workers, face. Centering our shared material and social struggles, we can contest the top-down mandated pedagogies, curriculums, or projects that hinder our collective liberations. With this parallel structure to the idea of EdCamps, EdCamps themselves benefit. No longer being the only place of conversation for teachers and community, our collaboration with administration is no longer on the same totally unequal political footing.

I certainly do not pretend to have an answer as to the perfect model for developing professionally and responsibly adding to our teaching practice, but if we limit ourselves to the bounds of the colonial institutions we operate within then we are failing in our job as teachers to students who are most targeted and harmed by them.

This week we had the opportunity to hear from Jeff Hopkins, former Supernintendo superintendent of the Gulf Islands school district, and now head of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). Prior to speaking with Jeff we were given a glimpse into the structure and pedagogy run by PSII which is entirely based around the idea of ‘inquiry.’ PSII has clearly developed some very meaningful tools for facilitating investigation and learning by youth along with a culture that inculcates the intrinsic rewards of learning rather than relying on external praise or consequence to keep students on track.

Among the most valuable tools I have found was there means of transposing co-constructed, caring, and evolving criticism and assessment into the ministry mandated grade system. Evaluation to a particular standard in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the means by which it is done in mainstream educational structures – grading – is not something that actually helps this.  Grading entirely forecloses on the ways in which people are constantly developing and conditions students into a competitive social relationship with their peers. Inquiry based learning and the assessment associated with it changes this into a moment of reflection and collaboration. It levels the playing field between teacher and student that allows for spaces of challenge and space for the student to exert their autonomy over the conditions of their learning and how it continues or changes course.

Something that does come to mind as potentially limiting in the way PSII runs inquiry-based learning however is its underlying philosophy of knowledge, its epistemology (a theory of how we can know what we know). At PSII students work with teachers to construct questions, figure out ways to refine those questions, devise ways of learning about those questions and work towards figuring them out or finding out how they only lead to more questions. This method makes space for a myriad number of investigative routes and encourages critical reflection on findings.  In this way it replicates the scientific method of knowledge discovery. This method leans towards a positivist orientation, which means it is most concerned with questions of what is ‘objectively’ knowable (critiques of what makes something ‘objective’ are not hard to come by.  I like the takes that philosophers Sandra Harding, Sara Ahmed, and of course old man Marx have myself). While in and of itself this can be very valuable, such as in the STEM fields, it is incomplete without a normative or critical counterbalance.  Normative philosophical approaches begin to ask questions of whether or not the ‘objective’ realities we discovered ought to be the way they are.  Critical theories such as Marxism or critical feminisms go further by unearthing the underlying social relations that may lead to why things are the way they are and what limits they put on our conceptions of reality.

While PSIIs method by no means excludes such philosophical approaches, it appears as though these are not in-built to their style.  For this reason it is incumbent on teachers to bring such approaches to students and encourage their use in critical reflection and the construction of analysis and arguments.  For example, Jeff recounted the story of a student who wanted to learn to run a business. While the approach used by the school certainly worked in terms of allowing the student to explore the necessities of management and business ownership, it does not immediately engage the student with arguments the push against the apparently ‘objective’ reality of business that they experienced.  In this case the teachers need to facilitate the student’s critical reflection on a number of issues such as the power of institutions (like PSII itself) to help certain individuals get started (like getting them free rental space) running a business, while others, predominantly people of colour and those not already with spare capital do not get support. Even more central to this example is in questions of ethics and politics around business such as whether or not the wage labour system is just or if co-operative and horizontal organizations of enterprise should be investigated more.

Inquiry itself is a powerful pedagogical system, but because of the ideological presumptions of our world we need to be careful in its implementation especially when it concerns social science fields or social and political issues in general.  Without careful facilitation of a critical philosophical orientation in inquiry, students findings may well reproduce existing social relations and leave vital critical thinking skills underutilized while simultaneously normalizing the idea that certain social arrangements are to be taken for granted and not investigated.

Screen capture programs were always beyond me until this week.  I understood the idea and how it could be useful, but I never found it very meaningful in a world where you can display a screen for a class to show your actions online, or trust that youth will figure out what they need to do on their own in any given online platform.  Even if students were to miss explanations, the social aspect of a classroom creates space for sharing the instruction amongst students. The shift to online learning that has been required under the Covid-19 pandemic however has certainly shown the merit of having screen capture as a tool for asynchronous demonstrations of online tasks. It has also made more visible the needs of students that were going unmet by teachers not preparing instruction and material that can be accessed in an asynchronous manner using a range of mediums to help students understand.

[I have been trying to insert a ScreenCastify here to demonstrate what its value is, however I have been unable convince my antivirus that it is not trying to steal everything off my computer and as such it will not run for me. I was able to run H5P though!]

I find the SAMR model of technological integration quite useful to address this.  Its taxonomy is simple and lends itself to critical questions not just around what kinds of technology can be integrated and how, but whether or not one even needs to or indeed should integrate it into their classroom for whatever reason.  As a tool, substation, augmentation, and modification lean into principles of universal design that help meet the needs of everyone by creating a more accessible classroom, content, and method for delivery.  Redefinition however needs more critical engagement.  Though it is certainly true that using particular platforms or applications will allow for an ease of communication and engagement with distant or different topics or communities, ‘redefining’ education through the use of technological integration comes with hidden social relations.

Marx argues that technological development both conditions social relationships and is one in itself.[1]  What this means is that while the use of different communication devices or technologies (for example – though Marx focused on means of material production rather than means of social reproduction) help create new social relationships between people, they also condition the way those form because they are the material form of a social relationship themselves between their users, and the owners of those applications and their material interests. For this reason, when looking at technological integration in the classroom we, with our students, also need to carefully explore and critique the ways in which those technologies encourage us to engage in learning.  What subtle aspects of the application force us to use particular forms of analysis? What restraints in social, cultural, or political expression does the form of technological implicitly hold us in? What ideological presumptions are embedded in the ways it functions and the ways we are able to use it?

Engaging with these critical questions is how we build strong students that can unearth the buried social relationships behind our material world. Uncovering these, and interrogating their formation and justness, is vital to using technological developments towards collective liberation.

[1] Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume 1, Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976,