Introduction
My students are game designers, interactive artists, and digital creators. This comes with its own unique set of instructional challenges – for example, is it even possible to teach someone to be expressive? To be creative? What does it mean to grade and evaluate self-expression? For me, mentoring and educating creators means approaching instruction from a wholly different mindset: I facilitate, motivate, embolden, and empower. We have conversations, not lectures. We creatively experiment, curiously fail, and then reflect on the experience. My role as a games educator is to guide students into finding, honing, and expressing their own voices and artistic spirit, instead of requiring them to parrot mine.
Ultimately, my goal is teaching students how to express themselves intentionally, so they’re able to craft the exact experience they want for their audiences and players. I don’t tell them what they should or shouldn’t be expressing but equip them with the tools and knowledge they need to create whatever and however they’d like. Informed by my own background in ludology[1], I’ve constructed a fundamentally ludic approach to pedagogy to achieve this goal, centered around three core pillars. First, to build a safe learning environment that is playful, personable, and exploratory. Second, to aid my students in finding that vital balance between critical analysis and inquisitive imagination. Lastly, to openly acknowledge and discuss the influence that artists and media creators have within society.
1. Building a playful learning environment
Taking inspiration from both game design and constructivism, I work to create an environment that is both playful and challenging, so that students are inspired to relentlessly experiment without fear of punishment. I do not believe I can teach anyone anything; I can only prepare an environment that empowers a learner to acquire knowledge for themselves. I believe that adopting an experiential learning model means that students feel a sense of ownership over what they learn and can synthesize and contextualize that knowledge within their unique lived experience. While creating a learning environment varies from subject to subject and depends on the class modality, I want to share a few of the ways I’ve built experiential learning environments in the past.
First, taken from my background in Communication Studies, I use the theory of expectancy violations to guide the way I communicate and set expectations for class behavior. If students are to explore without fear, they must be aware of what boundaries they can and cannot cross. These are communicated in the syllabus, communicated verbally in class or in recorded lecture videos, and repeated in every assignment prompt. I also regularly remind students that they are in school to learn and aren’t expected to know everything already. Part of learning means trying and failing. I never use tests in my classes, instead opting for project-based assessments, especially for finals. For example, I give students 3-4 weeks to work toward their final projects. In lieu of other assignments, Week 13 and Week 14 are dedicated to submitting a “draft” of their final, which is graded entirely on completion rather than quality. Students can experiment and gain points for that experimentation, but if they are too far off the mark, I can steer them back on track before their grade is on the line.
Second, while I always design a core curriculum, I allow students to make creative choices within that curriculum so that they feel agency over their learning. This manifests in multiple different options for weekly assignments, or a wide selection of optional resources to explore. For in-person classes, I use activities to illustrate class concepts, allowing students to play and experiment with concepts themselves. For example, when teaching students about rules, I bring in decks of cards, teach them the rules to very simple games like Go Fish or King’s Corner, and split them into groups so they collaboratively add, change, and remove rules. Finally, students play their new ruleset to see how it impacts gameplay. Rather than just put the principle “rules shape player behavior” on a slide and move on, I allow them to discover for themselves how their own choice of rule changes results in gameplay and shapes player behavior. This provides them with a sense of ownership and agency over their knowledge acquisition and understanding.
2. Finding a balance between creativity and critical thinking
I believe that theory and practice are intricately connected with one another, constantly informing and influencing the creative process. With all my classes, I take the approach of teaching students theory or principles, having them imaginatively put this theory into practice through creation, and then collectively reflect on the experience to see how their creative process shaped their understanding of the theory. In practice, this usually works by covering a principle or theory in class through lecture and/or activity. The following assignment serves as a creative prompt, and then the next class focuses on discussion and reflection about how the process went.
Prompting collaborative reflection with peers means that all my students can share and exchange their knowledge with one another, engaging in collective meaning-making. These conversations uplift the voices and perspectives of all my students, and I serve more as facilitator than lecturer in these contexts. My role is to ensure everyone feels comfortable and safe to share, regardless of their identity or expertise.
Within this pillar of my pedagogical approach also lives the idea, which I transmit to students, that the creative process and critical analysis often work best when done separately, rather than jointly. While it is certainly true one can engage in both simultaneously, I find it is best to delineate between the two for newer creators. I tell students not to worry about their work being perfect while they are still in the creative process, and to resist the urge to over-analyze it. I suggest that they instead mindlessly and playfully create, take a step back, and then engage in analysis of their work. One must make “bad” art before one can make “good” art, and school is the perfect place to figure out what exactly that means. This takes some of the pressure off, and results in a more playful environment for students where they feel they can just be themselves.
3. Discussing responsibility
I believe that art and media can be powerful. Most – if not all – of my students will leave school and go on to create art and media that communicate something. While I’ve had students tell me before that they don’t mean to communicate anything with their creations, it just “is,” I respond by telling them that art is a conversation – even if they don’t mean anything by it, someone who views their creations will still engage in meaning-making and try to interpret their work. It is important to understand that art communicates some kind of meaning, and to ensure that whatever message their work is sending is one they actually value and agree with. This ties into my approach of ensuring students create with intention.
This also leads into conversations about understanding implicit biases – we all have them, and it is important to acknowledge we do so we don’t accidentally perpetuate them in our work. I prompt students to reflect on what they believe their responsibilities are as creators. This is done in class discussions or online forums, so students can hear/see what their peers are saying and use that knowledge to inform their own understanding of what their responsibilities are to themselves and others within the context of artistic expression.
Conclusion
Admittedly I struggled to write this, because there is so much that contributes to being a skilled and compassionate educator. I compromised by selecting a few toys from the toybox to discuss: building a playful environment marked by relentless experimentation, finding balance between imaginative processes and analysis, and reflecting upon responsibility. Ultimately, all my actions as an educator aim to help students unlock their potential for expression. I work toward guiding students into connecting with their own playful spirits, uplifting their voices, and empowering their unique imaginations.
[1] the study of games and gaming, especially video games.
Ashley Rezvani 