Creating Relevancy through Meaning and Metaphor

“In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.”

“In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.”

-Alan Lightman, from Einstein’s Dreams

Exercises in metaphor pervade our history, whether it is Sir Isaac Newton’s revelations concerning the physics of our universe from his experience with a small apple, or Christ’s ability to paint parables for his disciples that illuminated the word of God. Metaphors allow us to explain the sometimes unexplainable, as the early mythologies were less religiously intended as opposed to a necessary way to explain the terrifyingly inexplicable events that surrounded early man, such as bolts of electricity falling from the sky.  In his excellent novel, Einstein’s Dreams, Astrophysicist and Creative Writing professor Alan Lightman imagines the dreams of Albert Einstein.  The dreams are not mathematical equations or a blank slate blackboard filled with calculations and diagrams.  The dreams he imagines are the dreams of worlds.  The worlds all vary in one fundamental way, the role that Time plays in them.  In one, he imagines time as a fixed point, in another, a flock of birds.  He then observes the way that people react in those worlds: What would they love? What would they fear? These nightly meditations eventually lead him to his truth, that to understand how time works in our world, he merely needs to observe how the people around him behave. Like his non-fictional counterparts, this Einstein has learned through the power of metaphor, and a strong reliance on the learning principle of Meaning.

Meaning requires an emphasis on bringing relevant and engaging experiences to students. “The more meaningful or relevant the task or application of information is to the students’ work, the easier it is to learn. The teacher may make explicit reference to students’ personal experiences as a link to connecting content with the students’ lives or they may actually simulate the experience in the learning activity” (DBTC).  In the public school classroom, now more than ever, the diverse populations of students that enter our doors bring with them a multitude of different attitudes, experiences, beliefs and feelings about school.  The typical schema that we expect students to have, schema that represents a more culturally exclusive time, no longer exists in all our students.  For many teachers, the response to this inability to guarantee what students are bringing to the classroom, causes them to simply start over, treating the students as blank slates.  The prolonged effects of this “Episodic View of Reality” (Feuerstein, Feuerstein, Falik, and Rand, 2006) can have devastating long term consequences. A better, more ethical way to combat the diverse schema that students are bringing to the classroom, is to provide meaningful, metaphorical anchor experiences at the start of units, that will pre-load metaphorical and experiential schema for later reference, building relevant and usable meaning into the lessons that follow.

One issue brought forth when meaning is not addressed in the classroom is that there is little to no transfer of skills from class-to-class, or, more insidiously, from grade-to-grade. The episodic view is the result of a lack of connection that the student feels toward the subject matter.  In short, their education is something that is being done to them, not something that they are actively participating in. In some colleges, “Anchored Instruction” is being used to ground certain instructional practices in relevant life experiences.  In this case, a Computer Learning class, where students were learning how to use technology, was paired with a teaching and learning class that used the students own struggles as a basis for studying instruction.  A study of the experiment concluded that ““Evidence from other research projects suggests that a specific emphasis on analyzing similarities and differences among problem situations and on bridging new area of application facilitates the degree to which spontaneous transfer occurs” (Cognition and Technology Group, 1990).” by providing the students with a relevant and meaningful basis for discussion, they were more likely to retain, and later use, the skills they were introduced to.

Another anchor activity our district was introduced to recently was the Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment program.  Based on the theory and research of Reuven Feuerstein, the program consists of simple instruments, such as recognizing pattern, or connecting dots, that are seemingly unrelated to content area studies. “Organization of Dots engages children in projecting virtual relationships in an amorphous cloud of dots to form specific geometrical forms. The resulting products must conform to given forms and sizes in changing spatial orientation. The exercises become progressively complex as the child gradually overcomes the challenges of conservation, representation, and precision” (Ben-Hur, 2006). As you bring the students through the instruments however, it becomes a metaphorical discussion regarding learning styles in general, that can be applied into almost any situation.  To teach us how to use the instruments, we were first tasked with completing them, and the frustration and learning that occurred even in the adults, was eye-opening, and empathy inducing.  We have used this experience with classes of all levels, and it has myriad connections that we continue to reference throughout the year.  Without providing this anchor experience, our ability to tap into relevance and meaning would be greatly diminished.

The ability to create transfer across grades is important, but it can be even more powerful when it is planned through the use of interdisciplinary anchors. The answer is that children learn by mobilizing their innate capacities to meet everyday challenges they perceive as meaningful. Skills and concepts are most often learned as tools to meet present demands rather than as facts to be memorized today in hopes of application tomorrow. Further, daily life is not separated into academic disciplines or divided into discrete time units; instead, the environment presents problems that one must address in an interdisciplinary, free-flowing way, usually in collaboration with peers and mentors” (Barab and Landa, 1997). By connecting experiences and metaphors that breach into different subject area, we increase the capacity for meaningful experiences, that also privilege the concept of transfer simultaneously. Again, the created meaning becomes a common reference point that teachers can refer back to in order to help students facilitate learning.

Lightman’s Einstein envisions a world where time is fixed, and everything that will happen is already known by the people that inhabit it. He describes this life as a series of rooms, with the absence of choice, its inhabitants serving only as “spectator’s in their lives”. Without meaning, a child’s education must feel this way. The student who is tasked with navigating these rooms, only to move onto the next, truly comes to believe as well that each day is “the end of the world.”  We must as teachers be sure to provide relevant  and meaningful experiences for our students.  We must help them to see that they have agency and choice, and we must create for them, reference points that they can use to put their education in the context of their own lives.  Short of taking them around the world, and covering all of the potential references they may need in our diverse curriculum, we can still produce metaphorical anchors that can be used to help students bring a common experience and schema to their day-to-day learning lives.

References

Barab, S., & Landa, A. Designing Effective Interdisciplinary Anchors. How Children Learn,54, 52-55.

Ben-Hur, M. (2006, December 1). Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment-BASIC. . Retrieved , from http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/Instrumental%20Enrichment/hur3.htm

Feuerstein, Feuerstein, Falik, and Rand (2006), Creating and Enhancing Cognitive Modifiability:  The Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment Program, ICELP Publications

Principles of Learning. (n.d.). . Retrieved July 11, 2014, from http://d20uo2axdbh83k.cloudfront.net/20140516/950b5968383aac0612b95267241b6fbb.pd

Saphier, J., & Gower, R. R. (1997). The skillful teacher: building your teaching skills (5th ed.). Acton, Mass.: Research for Better Teaching.

Vanderbilt, Cognition and Technology Group. a. Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition.Educational Researcher, 2-10.

Metaphor through Video Games: Braid

Most people don’t consider video games to be art, much in the same way that television struggled to achieve that distinction, but as the industry becomes more accessible and diverse, and less wantonly commercial, we are beginning to see games emerge that challenge not only our hand-eye coordination, but the way we think about our own place in the world.

Ironically, some of the more simplistic-looking games are fulfilling this ideal.  Braid is a two-dimensional side-scroller, in the tradition of Super Mario Bros. and other early 8 and 16-bit games.  The sprite, or character, moves through the world from left to right in an attempt to solve puzzles and advance through a series of tasks.

Where Braid differs from the norm, and many of the more “advanced” three-dimensional games on the newest hardware, is the gameplay, and how that relates to story and metaphor.

As the title of this blog suggests, the best learning happens when the learner is activated, or for the purpose of the blog, on fire.  As an adult, I find myself becoming engaged by a question, looking into the potential answers, usually through the internet, and when I’m truly on fire, following a systemic pathway of links and articles.  I sometimes even lose track of time when activated in such a way. 

Art should always have this effect on us.  The first time I watched the film Donnie Darko, by Richard Kelly, I was intrigued.  I immediately played the movie a second time, this time with the director’s commentary, even though it was already midnight.  The next night I watched it again with the cast commentary.  I went to the web, and read theories and posited my own.  I made a list of works from the film that were referenced, and went out into the world to get my hands on them.  I read Watership Down again, purchased the book and film versions of The Last Temptation of Christ, picked through the short story “The Destructor’s” by Graham Greene, and learned about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and how it relates to physical time travel.  All of this learning and consumption came about due to a movie about a guy in a creepy bunny suit. This is what good art does, activates us and invites us into the flow of ideas that the author lived in when they were creating; it enriches the art and opens us up to more of it.

Braid is comprised of a series of worlds, and within each world, time functions in a different way.  The function of Time in the game is tied to an overarching narrative that is richly developed at the start of each world.  After completing the game, I began to have questions about its meaning and development, and began to research.  I discovered that the game was based on 3 novels that the developer was intrigued by, The Cat That Walks Through Walls, by Robert A. Heinlein, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, and Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman.  I went out immediately and devoured them. 

Einstein’s Dreams was an unbelievable find.  The basic crux of the novel is the idea that in order to understand how time functions in our universe, Einstein had to see the effect that changes to time would have on the human beings in those worlds.  He then looked at what we value in our societies, and determined how time works in our world based on those things.  It’s a stunning metaphor that shows the power of creative thinking in solving incredibly complex mathematical questions.

Braid’s first world is its best example of the effect that altering Time would have on our lives.  The text at the beginning of the level questions what would happen in a world where we could take back our mistakes.  How would it change the way we live our lives.  The gameplay mechanic in this world allows the player to rewind if they make a mistake.  As a learning tool, this allows for a great lesson to our students about risk taking and success, but it also provides teachers a valuable understanding.

Just because a student is capable of “doing something perfectly” right off of the bat, doesn’t necessitate they “know” anything, they may have simply gotten lucky, and this shows no strategic skill in problem solving per se.  Think of a maze.  A student runs through without making a wrong turn on the first try.  A second student resolves to take every right turn in order to create a system for success, that results in several dead-ends prior to getting through the maze.  Which experience was more valuable?  Which student demonstrated higher order thinking?  The obvious choice is the second student, but how often do our assessments and grades reward the first student with better marks?

Using Braid as a way to access this metaphor, and to begin implementing it into our instruction is, I believe, a valid and worthy exercise.  In what other ways can we create experience and metaphor as a way to help students privilege the journey as opposed to the end result?  As we move toward more 21st Century methods of teaching, the answer to this question should help to guide our instruction as well as our assessments.