Participactor, -student

Here goes - a new blog every couple of months, not so bad I guess. Bad.

I had some trouble deciding whether this one belonged here or in my Icelandic blog on education - it landed here and will therefore be

well at least in English.

I recently had a very interesting artistic and spiritual experience participating in Djöfulgangur, a piece of participatory theatre by the group Kviss Búmm Bang. I have been looking around to see if anything resembling Larp is ongoing in Iceland, and this is the closest I could come.

This will not be a blog on the piece which was very interesting.

Anyways - I asked them afterwards about where their inspiration came from and they mentioned Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, he coined the term in the title. An interesting interview with that fascinating character here above.

Finally in connection with my work on my master's thesis on games in education I discovered a little system by Icelandic education theorist Gerður G. Óskarsdóttir where she analysis classroom work according to the level of teacher vs. student control and correspondingly whether projects are open ended or have single given solutions.  Finding in Icelandic schools a huge predominance of teacher control and closed assignments. Naturally.

Now - I wonder why when very strong tendencies in art, theatre and education point towards increased democratisation and power to the audience / student -  traditional art contexts, theatres and schools remain so thouroughly autocratic for the most part? And (very ironically) participatory forms are avant garde and in some sense form a kind of elitist minority on the fringes of both the world of art and education?

I have some ideas, but still it is mind blowing that a hundred years after Dada and Dewey things have not really changed that much....

More in two months.

Or less.

Or more.

Entering the World of Darkness

Had my second RPG experience with experienced GM Helgi Már Friðgeirsson and four enthusiastic colleagues last week. He used the World of Darkness system to set up a situation where we were on a plane, which was then (predictably?) hijaacked and crashed - I actually, more or less successfully, managed to land the plane. This system differs in significant ways from Dungeons and Dragons. The setting for play is usually closer to the so - called 'real' world. The mechanics of the game, the use of dice is much simpler. The characters are more realistic; the basic traits of vampires and werewolves are human and the goal of the game is to try to maintain your humanity.... but the game we played was entirely with purely human characters and (it's not quite finished) as of yet no supernatural elements have emerged. The concept of each character having a 'virtue' and a 'vice' and the fact that indulging your vice can boost your 'willpower' is an extremely interesting one. You also have as a character a scale called 'Morality' or 'Humanity' and this increases or decreases according to actions you take.  Example of a character sheet.

I've been thinking about how to apply this sort of thinking to teaching literature to the uninitiated with maybe not too much time. My latest idea, which would not involve too much effort on my part, would be to teach the idea of the structure of characters in this system, and simply get the students in groups to create sheets for characters in the work we're dealing with, and possibly ideas for how to apply events in the work to a game setting. This could be an interesting and creative approach. I like the idea of quantifying certain character elements, and clearly this is an excellent way to boost emotional and psychological vocabulary.

I'm thinking about developing a new game session for kids in DnD, and my plan is to translate most of the stuff into Icelandic to make it a smoother experience. I also need to consider my equipment - I've got plenty of stories in mind, no problem there.....


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Blogging

Now I've been quiet for a while here, I read this one and was inspired to open up again... Seven reasons why teachers should blog  and decided to get going. My blogging has been complicated by the fact that I started another blog www.menntamannsi.blogspot.com where I blog in Icelandic and intend to stick mostly to educational matters.

Well, another post on deschooling by Mr. Wheeler who seems to be a very interesting blogger. I recently also watched this fascinating talk by Astra Taylor on the same topic. Now I'm a teacher in a very traditional school and my career has been quite far from these radical ideas. Nevertheless I feel pulled towards them.... and it occurred to me today as I listened to talks at the University of Icelands Centennial Symposium , Kofi Annan and Carol Carmichael in their appeal to universities to prepare youth for future leadership; for an ethical turn in attitudes and a commitment to sustainability, that perhaps a dose of deschooling is exactly what we need. To find a new focus and to foster passionate commitments we need to relax the formalism of education, and most importantly in the secondary schools and higher education. Richard Rorty defined a university as a place where you could find a book on any subject and someone to discuss it with.

I spend a lot of time in a very traditional setting in classrooms, but I also teach distance education and I've slowly been expanding my practice there to try new things. Now I've started blogging (more than before anyway) and I have a highly anarchic Facebook group for all my students and so I'm possibly opening up new venues for learning and curiosity.... I don't honestly know... but if Wheeler's on the right track then so am I....