Reading Notes: Active Learning (Gee)

“If learning is to be active, it must involve experiencing the world in new ways.” James Paul Gee

One of the  strengths of What Video Games have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy is how systematic Gee is about the “learning principles” he espouses. Yet, as I read, I find myself jumping on sound-bites such as the sentence above. Such statements end up being the seeds for thinking about how those principles might actually play out in an online class, or a f2f class for that matter.

This sentence got me thinking about f2f classes. How often do we involve students in experiencing the world at all, let alone in new ways? Freshman, I think, get a lot of that. In fact, they are hit in the face with how different college is than high school. When they move into a major they are introduced to a new discourse, what Gee calls a “semiotic domain.” They learn how to think in a certain way, for instance, how to think about literature or political science or psychology. If Gee is right about “active” learning, then when they are introduced to a field of study their learning is active; it requires them to experience the world in new ways. Later, when they’ve come to understand how the field works, their learning becomes passive, focused on simply adding more content. They know how they are supposed to experience the world.

I know this is a radical critique of our current system. I want to mull it over for a while; if it’s true, (IE sufficiently describes our experience) then we have to design each class like another level in a video game, so that each class might build on the previous class—while at the same time involve new ways of experiencing the world.