Mini-Essay Two

In chapters three and four of “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” Gee is primarily interested in identity and it’s effect on pedagogy (though chapter three is more directly related to identity, while chapter four focuses on situated meaning). These chapters, more so than the first two, seem to be more closely tied to actual teaching methods and Gee’s critique of them.

In “Learning and Identity: What Does it Mean to be Half-Elf?,” Gee notes that “debates about education . . . tend not to engage with issues about the identities learners bring to school and how these identities relate to motivation and effort (or their lack) in relation to specific sorts of pedagogies” (58). The specific sort of pedagogy that Gee believes is most beneficial to students is the one that utilizes a psychosocial moratorium, or an environment “in which the learner can take risks where real-world consequences are lowered” (59). In previous chapters Gee discussed the need for “failure” or mistakes to take place in order to allow true understanding to occur, and we expanded on this idea in class on Monday. It is this need to make mistakes and “learn from them” that the projective identity is more helpful in fulfilling, as it allows one to learn about his or her own limitations in a less prohibitive and high-stakes environment. (Failure and mistakes are rarely acceptable in a typical classroom.)

It is on this note that Gee moves into his chapter on “Situated Meaning and Learning: What Should You Do After You Have Destroyed the Global Conspiracy?” in which he continues to deconstruct traditional methods of learning and teaching. (Methods that, as he pointed out in previous chapters, often lead to a memorization of facts rather than an acquisition of actual knowledge.) The idea that traditional methods of teaching lead to fact memorization rather than usable and applicable knowledge can be summed up as Gee writes: “General, purely verbal meanings, meanings that a person has no ability to customize for specific situations and that offer the person no invitations for embodied actions in different situations, are useless (save for passing tests in school)” (83). This idea leads Gee to the “probe, hypothesize, reprobe, and rethink” model of learning. In this type of learning situation, a student (or learner) is able to form his or her own hypotheses and potentially make mistakes—a valuable learning tool, despite the negative connotations “failure” has in typical classrooms and learning environments.

One of the most interesting arguments Gee proposes is that there are no “masters” of particular subjects; rather there are expert practitioners who are able to expertly traverse a given semiotic domain. Because there are no “masters” of semiotic domains, but only learners of different levels, the idea of failure takes on a new meaning—one in which failure is not necessarily a negative thing, but a learning tool. Students, in this model, are not “bad” students, but rather students that have yet to have an embodied experience with a given semiotic domain. Gee’s example includes the instructions to Deus Ex: though the instructions make literal sense, one cannot really understand them until he or she has played the game. Having played the game, the instructions make sense. Perhaps after a few such experiences, a player (or student) will be able to read an instruction book and make abstractions about a similar but never-before-played game. Gee believes that the same holds true for those who take part in learning any subject. He calls this idea the “Situated Meaning Principle” which notes that meanings of signs are situated in an embodied experience. Furthermore, this idea is continued in his discussion of tools that hold knowledge. We discussed briefly in class that it’s nearly impossible to memorize a complete set of facts, but there are (in the real world, though perhaps not in many classroom settings) tools that can hold facts that perhaps one has not committed to memory. The ability the student has to find, use, and synthesize these facts seems to be the most important aspect of “learning” (though, with this in mind, perhaps the typical definition of learning is not useful). Gee speaks of this idea by saying that it’s “good that the material environment and objects in it are part of your intelligence” (107). This, I think, is one of the more radical ideas of his book so far, at least as far as typical classroom learning is concerned. As Gee points out, using outside materials in a typical classroom is “cheating” rather than tapping into one’s own intelligence resources.

Though Gee makes many good points throughout these chapters, the idea of classroom teaching and learning actually becoming similar to his model seems to be far-fetched, particularly in states that are primarily interested in standardized test scores (e.g. South Carolina). Classrooms and schools such as these leave little room for Gee’s “Material Intelligence Principle”; therefore, I am particularly interested in seeing if Gee has a plan of action in the coming chapters.

Questions:

1. I mention at the end of my post that I’m interested in seeing how Gee’s model of teaching can be utilized in actual classrooms. What ways do you see this model being used in the future?

2. Since we are all teaching in the Fall: What ways do you plan on using Gee’s model in your own classroom? How will you do the “repair work” Gee imagines needs to be done? (See page 57).

3. In graduate school, any grade below a B is considered failing. How does this contradict Gee’s learning/teaching model? Basically, what’s up with that?