Some more time to digest the lessons of Baltimore’s TLC, and I’m coming back once again to a big theme (for me) about how we use simulations and games.
At several points during the conference, I found myself pondering how we reconnect sims and games back into the rest of our teaching practice, or even whether we do that at all.
The argument I’d make (and I made) is that sims are essentialisations of the world: they take some aspect – an event, a relationship, a dynamic – and places it front and centre, stripped of all the other stuff so we can see it more clearly for our edification.
That essentialisation gives us the core of the gameplay of the sim. The mechanism we want to focus on logically also informs the choice of how we focus on it. So if we want to understand voting dynamics, we build a sim with voting in it, plus whatever elements we want students to consider as factors.
None of this should be controversial – it’s how all teaching works, in practice. We draw attention to something, to allow us to think about, discuss and learn about it.
Sims are just a more overt example of this.
But that essentialisation also implies a need to have an active reconnection, post-activity.
It’s why we talk so much about debriefing: we are trying to draw lessons out of the activity, back into the other modes of teaching we use, both within a course and more generally.
By definition, active learning places the locus of learning within the student, so to know what they have learnt, we (as teachers/instructors/facilitators) have to work to pull that out of them.
But what does that involve?
Typically, when we talk about debrief we are looking at ‘what did you learn?’ type questions. Asking students to vocalise their understandings and experiences in a more-or-less structured manner.
Obviously here, we can cover all the usual bases of substantive knowledge, practical skills and broader socialisation into communities.
However, the whole essentialisation process means we also need to ask a different type of question too: ‘how did this experience match up to the actual thing you’re studying?’
One of the first papers I wrote on sims was about realism and the ways we can make our sims versimilitudinous [sp?], but sims are always approximations to reality and we need students to be both aware of and thoughtful about this.
In essentialising, we strip away ‘the other stuff’ because it’s not that important to our objective. But ‘not that important’ doesn’t mean ‘unimportant’.
So part of our debriefing needs to ask students whether and how the simplifications of the sim distort our understanding of what matters. To go back to that voting dynamics exercise I mentioned earlier, if we exclude a particular element, do students now think that element isn’t relevant?
One way I’ve tried to explore this is being asking students to come up with ways they could make the sim work in a more realistic manner: and often I’ll use that the next time out. This process invites either constructive additions or thoughtful reflection about why something can’t be included (and the impact thereof).
None of this is to say that sims aren’t any good; only that they are imperfect tools (like all pedagogies) and so we have to ensure that students recognise and reflect on that.