I am currently attending the IATEFL conference in Birmingham and have come to the end of my first full day here. I went to my first talk at 8 a.m. and attended my last talk at 6 p.m. with another five spread across the day. I enjoyed all of these immensely for different reasons – topics ranged from tips on getting published in a peer-reviewed journal (Graham Hall, editor of the ELT Journal), to Alan Maley emphasing the importance of not forgetting about ‘past’ great educators (many of them heroes and heroines of mine like John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori but also some who I am not familiar with like David Horsburgh and Sylvia Ashton-Warner) to the benefits of using meditation in the ELT classroom (Monique Simpson, International House John Haycraft Classroom Exploration Scholarship winner). In between talks I circled the event and spoke to a number of fascinating teachers from around the world – one of my main reasons for attending the conference in person.

All in all this day represented a very successful learning experience and I was ‘fully engaged’ throughout. But at the end of my last talk the only thing I wanted and felt I was still capable of was to crawl back to my hotel room and to shut out the rest of the world for the remainder of the day. This made me remember a quote by Alison Gopnik, an American child psychologist, who I have recently become interested in:

If you want to know what it’s like to be a baby? It’s like being in love for the first time in Paris after three double espressos. […] It’s a fantastic way to be but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three in the morning.

(taken from a TED talk: What do babies think?)

Based on her own and other experts’ research, Gopnik sees children/babies as the “research community of the human species” with babies’ brains being “the most powerful learning computer on the planet” (same TED talk as above). From a lay perspective as a mother and someone who has worked with children a lot over the years I would tend to agree. I also believe that education (language education included) should aim not to destroy this capacity for learning as deep engagement with a wide range of stimuli (which I think might be happening at the moment) but rather to create spaces that allow us to return to this state throughout our lives. I feel lucky enough to have developed ways to achieve this from time to time and for having opportunities come my way to make this happen, IATEFL being a case in point.

Admittedly some of my engagement might have been fuelled by actual espressos! However, I think this quote captures very well the intensity of the experience of being fully in the moment, of interacting with your environment (especially an unfamiliar one) on a deep level. It takes a lot of energy.

Throughout my MA studies as well as at the conference I have heard it emphasised again and again that engaging our students or creating engaging materials should be one of our main aims as teachers. And overall I very much agree. However, my conference experience has reminded me of what it is we are asking of our students and that it is not always possible and especially not for all of our students at the same time to muster the energy needed for full engagement. What we should not do, is to think less of our students for refusing to engage or of ourselves for having failed to come up with engaging lesson content!

Cube, Pixabay.com

I just came across something rather exciting that I must have known once: the Latin word ‘ludus’ means ‘school’ and ‘game’! I was reading ‘Ready Player One’, a novel by Ernest Cline about a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMUG), and there it was (p 69). The main character in the story, Wade, suddenly has the same revelation and this marks a turning point in his virtual game quest.

This made me think about why these two meanings, which seem very different from each other today, were once seen as closely connected. An internet search unearthed this book: ‘Games: Purpose and Potential in Education’ edited by Christopher Thomas Miller. So far I have only had the chance to read sections but the following quote is particularly interesting in this context:

“[W]e mentioned the Latin word ludus, which was used for institutional or performance games. A most interesting finding, perhaps even shocking to some readers, is that the same word belonged to the world of education as well. Teachers were in fact called magister ludi (literally, Game Master) and what we could today call schooling was called ludus (literally, Game). […] education was the means to groom children into real men and citizens of the nation, through the tutelage of a wise teacher, as in the case of Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle. In this sense education or schooling (ludus) was an institutionalized means to engage youngsters in autotelic activities meant for the development of a free person. While historical differences are great and would require hundreds of pages to be accounted for, the ideal aim assigned to the education system is strikingly close to our perception of what schools should be made for.” (p 17)

The expectation  that some readers might find it “shocking” that the concepts of ‘game’ and ‘school’ used to be covered by one word in the civilisation we often see as the origin of our own, shows that we are now conceptually quite removed from such an understanding.  Maybe this historical connection accounts to some extent for our continued interest in using games for educational purposes?

By the way, if you like me struggle to get your head round the concept of MMUGs (and do not want to become a player to get a clearer idea), give ‘Ready Player One’ a go…

References:

Cline, E. (2011) Ready player one. London: Random House Publishing

Miller, C.T. (ed.) (2009), Games: purpose and potential in education. New York: Springer

I have decided to start this blog with a quote that a Facebook friend recently shared with me: firstly because I wholeheartedly agree with it and therefore it can help the reader ‘read’ me and decide whether I might be the kind of person they want to engage with.  Secondly, I think it fits nicely within the context of ‘learning’ and therefore, by extension, ‘learning materials’, i.e. TE714, the module I am writing this blog for.

“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play”

Alan W. Watts

Like Watts I am fascinated by Eastern philosophy and believe that being ‘engaged’ means to be fully present in the moment. This is how I try to go through life and this is how I have attempted to approach my MA course at Brighton uni (I am a part-time student of MA TESOL with ICT in my second and hopefully final year).

As a teacher I would be thrilled to see this level of engagement in my students! Sadly that is, of course, very rarely the case. However, I believe that by leading by example and by creating interesting activities and using engaging materials I can maybe, hopefully, bring about conditions in the classroom that make my students temporarily forget they are there to ‘work’ (that seems to be most students’ interpretation of ‘learning’). And that they, at least occasionally, find themselves having fun in a lesson, with learning just happening almost accidentally.