Work v.s Play: (re)Defining the Pleasure of Learning - Todd Snyder

Work v.s Play:

(re)Defining the Pleasure of Learning

In the second chapter of At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric, Dr. Albert Rouzie (our professor) begins with a discussion of America's long-standing fear of play in education. Some educators worry that allowing elements of play in the classroom will set up an expectation that "the hard work of literacy should be fun" (Rouzie 25).Education as entertainment??

Others simply cannot bring themselves to see play as anything more than a stage in cognitive development (as evidenced by the picture on your left).

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Conservative Educational Philosophy

v.s

Progressive Educational philosophy

**Live on Pay-Per-View**

********************************************************************The Tale of the Tape

- the work/play split privileges work

- the work/play split is not universal

- some view play as detached from the political realities of our everyday lives

- attempts to introduce play in the classroom are often viewed as fluff work

- the institutionalization of this split has perpetuated a work/play dichotomy in English Studies

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"The Split between work and play in our culture has continued to contribute to our alienation from creative connection to both work and play" - Rouzie

Dr. Rouzie's brief history of the work/play split in English Studies reminds us that our field has a long history of defining literature against the everyday realities of rhetorical expression, popular culture, and journalistic writing (33). Thus, teaching college writing courses came to be seen as nothing more than "alienated grunt-work" (Rouzie 34).

The Birth of Current-Traditionalism??

Luckily, the expressivist camp emerged on the scene! Scholars such as Walker Gibson and Peter Elbow began to advocate the need for play in the writing process. Enter:

Free - Writing

The Personal Essay

Process-Pedagogy

This, of course, is not the end of the story. Social-epistemic rhetoric, with it's focus on raising the political-consciousness of students, would change the game. As James Berlin points out in "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Classroom," proponents of this social-epistemic brand of rhetoric were "brought together by the notion of rhetoric as a political act involving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer with language and the agency of mediation" (488). Enter:

The Political

The Socio-economic

An attempt to awaken critical-conciousness

Unfortunately, something was lost in social-epistimic rhetoric's rejection of expressivism - play. Social-epistemic scholars have long been critical of the play of language emphasized in what Teresa Ebert calls "ludic postmodernism," claiming that it has no political impact because it is inherently nonrhetorical (Rouzie 26). These attitudes have caused some to wonder why pleasure and fun must be absent from serious-minded academic work. Can play be serious?? In "Healing the Work/Play Split: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric for English/Composition Studies," Dr. Rouzie promotes what he calls a "serio-ludic" brand of rhetoric. Serio-ludic rhetoric blends the goals of expressivism (a freer rhetoric) and those of social-epistemic camp (critical-conciousness) without ignoring the communicative possibilities of emerging technologies -- or society's inevitable shift toward the visual.

"Serio-ludic play has the potential to help suture the work/play gap by opening up a space for reflective, social, rhetorical, and unalienated creativity" - Rouzie

The rise of technologies such as the home computer, the internet, blogs, wiki's, Moos, and video games have opened up the possibility for the sort exploration Dr. Rouzie is looking for. Serio-leudic rhetoric resists the accepted (linear) conventions of academic writing. According to Dr. Rouzie, this emergent textuality

• is informed by the postructuralist play of language, assuming a destabilized text;
• is open to aesthetic impulses;
• brings together poetic and rhetoric;
• features a dramatic sense of role play grounded in the multiple susbjectivity of the composer and/or the collaboration of multiple authors;
• is purposefully and strategically liminal and hybrid
• embraces fragmentation, associative thinking, conflict, dialectical tensions and experimental forms as part of a rhetorical/aesthetic strategy;
• the juxtaposition of conventional and experimental forms and expression to explore the rhetorical qualities of each;
• the promotion of hypermediacy as a means to focus on media effects;
• the use of parody, satire, and humor;
• an electronic component that engages students in the creation of serio-ludically conceived hypermedia projects, probably done in collaborative groups;
• experimentation with texts whose rhetorical impact is altered through visual arrangement and invention, whether electronic or nonelectronic;
• integration of process into the product; and
• the use of found objects to be repurposed through bricolage (Rouzie 53).

Two scholars that have taken up the challenge of mending the gap between work and play are James Paul Gee and Geoffery Sirc. Let's check out Gee in action ...

In "Good Video Games, the Human Mind, and Good Learning," James Paul Gee argues that video games are a good place to start when trying to think about human learning. If you are looking for an embodied experience, Mr. Gee Recommends the following titles: Half-Life 2, Rise of Nations, Full Spectrum Warrior, The Elder Scrolls III, Morrowind, World of WarCraft.

"Am I the only one that senses a video game bias here?" - me

Do others wish that Gee would have written a little more about "Bad" video games?
Gee argues that the value of video games resides within their ability to allow the player to interact within the virtual world created by game designers. In good video games, players are able to test the consequences of their actions. What constitutes an embodied experience - interaction?

"Players must carefully consider the design of the world and consider how it will or will not facilitate specific actions they want to take to accomplish their goals" - Gee

For Gee, video games help to facilitate effective thinking. This is because such thinking is built from an individual's ability to perceive the relationship between the world and their own physical and mental abilities.

How might video games be used to educating youth and training future workforces?

doctors, scientists, military forces, police forces, automobile makers, automobile drivers, athletes, astronauts, rhet/compers.. ....... ..... ..... ...

* Side Note* Video Game Systems that I have owned

• Atari
  
• Nintendo
  
• Super Nintendo
• Sega Genesis 
  
• Playstation
  
• Playstation 2
• Playstation 3

Remember - I didn't own a computer until I was 20 years old 

Gee reminds readers that gamers do not want short or simplistic games. Instead, video game designers are forced to find new ways to challenge their audiences.

What separates the mindset of the gamer from that of most classroom learners?

Gee suggests that video games tap into "profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning" (29). This is because video games both challenge and entertain us on an intellectual level. Perhaps we, as educators, should pay attention to this style of learning. Can hard work be entertaining? This does not mean that Gee wants us to simply allow workers and students to play video games. In fact, technology is not always the answer.

This is why I love James Paul Gee. His goal is to steer the educational masses away from skill-and-drill / scripted / standardized instruction. He wants to move toward something more / fun/ entertaining / challenging / satisfying. In doing so, Gee hopes to create an academic space where empowered learning can take place. Hence:

The James Paul Gee Principles of Empowered Learning

1. Good learning requires learners to feel like active agents - not passive recipients
2. Different styles of learning work better for different people - we need choices
3. Deep learning requires an extended commitment (for more principles turn to page 32 of Gee's essay)

Here is another clip of Gee discussing how video games help facilitate learning...

Dr. Rouzie and James Paul Gee are, of course, not the only scholars calling for a more playful classroom environment. In "Box-Logic," Geoffery Sirc argues that electronic composition has opened up the possibility for composition students to move away from the linear norms of the past. Sirc begins with a discussion of Marcel Duchamp's (a French avant-garde artist) Green Box (1934) - a collection of personal notes he made to himself while working a piece titled Large Glass. Sirc is inspired by Duchamp's project because

- it is a prose catalogue of sorts

- it is a collection of interesting/powerful statements

- it models what a daybook for writers could look like ....

Does the concept of the author as collector open up the possibility for true creative/emotional/passionate work?

"True connection with one's composition is when the work has a strong life in the writer, when it's part of an on-going project, which means it continues growing, appearing in variant versions. Thus, no draft is ever finished, especially in teh arbitrary scope of an academic semester" - Sirc

The two basic skills that Sirc focuses his courses around are practicing search strategies and annotating material. For example, Sirc's "Rap Arcades Project" asks students to read and analyze the online texts of hip-hop culture.

1. A Textual Journey - an intense study of search engines and strategies: various databases for articles, images, statistics, chat groups

2. Turning the internet into an arcade - Freedom to collect and explore 

Does this require us to (re)Define text?

Is this the end of the long reign of the strictly analytic?

"As composition teachers, we mount exhibits, prize certain works, neglect others, and in doing so, lead our local patrons through a tour of form, content and larger questions of cultural ambiance" - Sirc

Have we become Academic gate-keepers ??

This brand of pedagogy does, of course, bring with it a new set of problems ... this is especially the case when considering copyright laws...

If you haven't already ... check out DeVoss and Webb's "Grand Theft Audio"

How do copy-right laws hinder our ability to allow students to peruse the digiatal arcades of the internet?
The work of teaching new media (literacy) / the new essay/ is not always an easy task. 

Many contemporary students are able to use these emerging technologies ...
Some are able to effectively analyze them ...
Unfortunately, few are given the opportunity to produce/compose/original products/ rhetorics/ using these technologies. The work of Rouzie, Gee, and Sirc ... ask us to become .... active agents in our own learning ... to apply these rhetorical concepts / good rhetorical stratigies / to these new mediums.
And in doing so ... they ask us to ...
lighten up a bit ... (re)consider how we learn ...

Works Cited

Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom." College English. 50.5 (1998): 477-494.

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games and Good Learning. New York: Lang, 2007

Rouzie, Albert. At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Leudic Rhetoric. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2005. 

Sirc, Geoffrey. "Box-Logic." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 111-146.