So what if you suck a dodgeball, board games in the class room

How do we know what is important to learn? We have been told by teachers and parents for all of our primary and secondary education that the way to learn, and what is important to learn, will be facilitated by the education system. So we go to school sit in our neat rows and the teachers pour knowledge into our brains and we regurgitate that information back to them so we can get good marks and move on to the next level until we finally reach the end of the government sponsored educational track, Paulo Freire refers to this method of education as the “banking” concept of education. Then what? We have our heads filled with “facts” but have we really learned anything? Are we any better critical thinkers? Have we developed better social skills? Not really, we are better at taking orders, following guild lines and being submissive to authority figures. Even in post-secondary learning the model is not vastly different, some professor will try alternative learn models but ultimately the system is set up for traditional testing and grading which evaluates students on their ability to take the information that has been given to them and repackage it.

Freire makes these connections in his work Pedagogy of theOppressed were he talks about the students as passive “objects,” blank slates and the teachers as “narrating subjects,” holders of official knowledge In this way using subject and object we can see what Freire means when he talks about oppressor and oppressed in regards to education and how This Banking concept of education ignores any form of inequality. In this way it is applied in society to maintain and further enforce the dominate ideologies.

I was at Hal-con, a local science fiction and fantasy convention, over the weekend of October 27 and I had the fortune to attend a quick seminar about board games in the classroom by John Gallant, He talked about how board games can be used as an alternative method to engage people in learning, in an interactive way, creating a place were the learners are required to use critical thinking and planning skills to navigate the structure of the games, both competitive and cooperative. It is also a system were the learners not only learn from the facilitator and the game but also from other learners. While this method of educating still has many of the symptoms of the banking concept, like as Freire states “the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;” (p.73). The learners have an opportunity to flex some creative muscle and come up with unique solutions to problems that they will face in the game, these solutions and interactions that can facilitate true learning as Freire suggests “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the relentless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 72).

References

 

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.