We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
Henry David Thoreau
To the intrepid adventurers of the Gary K. Herberger Young Scholars Academy:
Today we made new connections. Today we forged a new path. Today we figured out how to get from Ghandi to Britney Spears in six clicks. We laughed. We played. We learned. We shared a Snuggie and a snack. Today we redefined school.
Our adventure over the next year will not always be easy. As we continue to push against boundaries and tired paradigms, there may be those who won't believe that we, in our little school, can make a difference in the world. But we can and we will.
While on our journey, if you are faced with negativity:
remember that people, at their core, are good.
handle your victories with honor and your defeats with grace.
trust your team.
know that any experience can be good experience.
listen to others so that you may heard.
If there is one thing I have learned in my years it's that it is hard to go first, but someone has to do it. When we are brave, we are rarely alone.
“In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.”
Johan Huizinga
Before organized school was implemented, how did children learn? One doesn’t have to look very hard to find the answer. Anthropologists have been documenting instances of “informal” learning for decades. And guess what? It looks a lot like what we call fun and games.
Clearly, playing with other people is natural, and in fact, the preferred way for us to learn. These boys learn to be hunters by observing their fathers hunt and by playing hunter. Through this play they hone the physical and social skills they need to successfully participate in a real hunt.
Whenever I say that play is a big part of learning here at the Herberger Academy, I am often met with a raised eyebrow and crossed arms—a non-verbal accusation of educational witchcraft, to be sure. Still, I contend that while play and games have been criticized as trivial and frivolous, they are at the center of what makes us human.
What is play? Everyone knows what play is, even if everyone can’t agree on what play is. Play is something we come programmed to do, and although it is an innate ability, it is hard for us to define.
In everyday language, the word itself has many uses:
We play musical instruments and we play a song.
We gamble by playing the odds.
We play with toys and we play games.
We can be clever and engage in wordplay or wear a playful scarf.
We can let a smile play on our lips and we can play on someone’s emotions.
We go to the theater and enjoy watching a play, but if there is too much play in your steering wheel, you may need to have your ball joints replaced.
The anthropological study of play has given us a range of definitions, from something as simple as “activities with no conscious point” to “activities accompanied by a state of comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power and the feeling of self-initiative.” In other words, “I can’t really tell you what it means, but you’ll know it when you see it.”
If we understand play as a mechanism that imparts meaning, we can see that play is an expression of a system--whether we mean the social activity of hunting rabbits in Ghana or the steering system of a car--play is defined by the relationships guiding the functioning of the system in which it is contained. For every action by a participant, there is a reaction from the system and vice versa. Play is a kind of free movement within a structure; it exists because of the structure but also in opposition to it. Through this movement, meaning is both questioned and constructed.
This is the kind of play we mean to foster at the Herberger Academy. It's meaningful play. Play with a purpose. In essence, it's learning the way we were designed to learn: through making choices and taking action within a context that provides feedback about the quality of those decisions. Each action creates new meaning and affects the participants, and sometimes, even the system itself.
Sometimes when play occurs, it can overflow the system in which it resides and can have unpredictable results--a change in rules, if you will. Sometimes, play can become so powerful it doesn't just occupy and oppose the space in a system, but actually transforms the space as a whole. Anthropologists call this transformative play and it has an important role in shaping culture. For example, sometimes a slang word becomes so common place it eventually makes its way into a dictionary, thus becoming part of the larger construct that it originally resisted. Or, perhaps it could be as simple as the idea that a school can be built on the notion that meaningful play is a better way to learn a complex subject than completing a worksheet.
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust
I get a lot of questions about the "curriculum" of the Herberger Academy. Some adults have voiced that things around here will be "too fun," or "not academic" because of my heavy application of functional play and game-like simulations to deliver a learning experience.
So, let me be the first to say:
the game is not the learning experience.
As human beings, our existence is constructed from a series of events. Everything we have ever seen or felt is an experience and we remember these events by recalling experiences. Typically, the more emotionally impactful the experience, the better it is remembered, whether negative or positive.
I wish I had some magic that would enable me to create an experience out of thin air, but I don't. Functional play enables the experience, but it isn't the experience in and of itself. A game or a simulation enables me to create a sensory-rich experience in a controlled environment so that we can achieve certain learning objectives. This is sometimes a hard thing for people to wrap their minds around, but I don't think it is because it is a foreign concept; I think it's because it is so familiar.
We have all heard the ancient conundrum:
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
The answer, it turns out, depends on your definition of sound. If we define sound as "vibrations that travel through the air or another medium," then yes, the tree makes a sound. However if we define sound as "vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's ear," then the tree makes no sound because no one is there to hear it. With this definition, the tree is only a vehicle--a means to an end.
What happens when we twist the conundrum a little? What if we replace the tree with knowledge? If there is no one to hear it, does teaching take place? If we define teaching as "to show or explain information," then yes, teaching occurs. Clearly in that definition, I can teach without anyone or anything experiencing it, I am only a vehicle of knowledge. However, if we define teaching
as "to show or explain information to someone," then teaching doesn't occur because there is no one there to hear it.
As an educator, I don't care about the tree and how it falls, I care only about the experience of hearing it. And, if no one is there to hear it, then no one cares about it at all.
