The Legend of Zelda

     The first installment of this prolific series has had long lasting effects.


     I remember when I first received the game.  It was donated from one of my father's friends.  I can't be sure now who it was, and the mystery of this previous owner only added to my sense of purpose.  The cartridge was silver and relucent, so starkly different from the muted gray of every other game I owned.  And inside the weathered box was a map, the signs of use in the wrinkles and tears mended with stotch tape.     Most importantly, there were notes scattered around the map: I could find meat hidden here beneath this rock; the entrance to another dungeon across this bridge, 100 rupees to buy the raft to get from that bridge to the other shore---beneath this bush.
     I was continuing an unwon quest.  The map contained every screen of the over-world landscape.  It did not show the under-world, the dungeons.  On the back of the map, there were spaces for the player to complete their own maps of these dungeons, and only a few had been filled in by this mysterious ancestor player.  It didn't matter that the notes were sometimes wrong.  This only added to my belief that I would be the one to complete this journey.
     I didn't complete the journey; not in my parent's basement anyway.  This game required an immence amount of patience, and the tasks were not always clear.  The player must be prepared to wander, and search with no results.  Added to this was the unpredictability of NES cartridges after several years of use.  My friends and I never assumed that we would play the game we wanted on the first try.  Part of the experience was getting it to work.  We would run through teh list of cleaning methods we had accumulated: No, you must blow this way; No, you must put teh cartridge in this way; No, it isn't the game---It's your system!  (That one always hurt.)
     I took my NES and games with me to my freshman dorm.  And surprise! I wasn't the only freshman nostalgic for the original Nintendo.  A friend of mine finally beat the original Mario, and I beat it myself sometime later (believing now that it was possible).  And with my map, I completed Zelda, guided by the notes of that mystery owner, the notes I left as a child, and the notes I filled in as I completed the game.

My Gaming History

From our discussion on the the eight myths of gaming, there were a few points that stood out to me.  Although I enjoy video games, and have a long personal history starting with the first Nintendo, and dispite the fact that I embraced the potential for gaming in education, I still avoided writing this reflection, and I at most skimmed through the articles related to this theme.


?So, the question I present to myself here: Why would someone with a stake in this topic resist considering it?  Furthermore, what must be done to include those ardently opposed in this conversation?


There were a few points brought up by our discussion as we considered What must be done to change the conversation about gaming?  Here are a few of points that stood out to me:


      -Language: We must develop a language for discussing what games do, and what gamers do when playing.
      -Are video games art: We must develop a critical means of discussing good and bad games.  After all, we don't question the validity of film every time a sequel to the Saw series comes out.  
      -Puritan fear of addiction: The Puritan belief that goodness can only result from hard work, and anything less is a sin and must be shamed.  The prof. suggested the example of early American resistance to gambling.  
           This fear of addiction rang painfully true to my understanding of myself as a gamer.  I know that there are certain games that when I start playing, I will not be able to stop.  When I have a free moment, I will be playing, until I have completed the game.  This is the reason why I have resisted buying any of the new Zelda titles for Wii.
          This is a lot like AA's approach to drinking: One must recognize that one has a disease.  One must avoid all triggers of the disease (Including friends and family who drink, and all situations where drinking is present). 
           


For me, each of these elements maintained a sort of quiet apprehension to gaming.  I couldn't talk about what was good or bad about particular games, or what happens when I do play, and I maintained a fear that I couldn't play "responsibly."


        

Value of Social Media: Continuing the Conversation

After our last class, discussing the Media Education article, I had a few remaining questions and comments.  When social media is used in the classroom, the conversation doesn't need to end when class is over.


-My discussion with Wei:
     1. In Singapore: Schools are replacing books with iPads.  Wei described this as "replacing the old washing machine with a new washing machine."  And I agree.  I think this shows a lack of careful thinking on the part of the schools, a naive over-endorsement of technology for technology's sake.  I have seen this in my student teaching with the use of SmartBoard, which seems to just be replacing the white board with digital markers, and transparencies with slide shows.  Here, there is no student application of technology.


     2. Technology can lead to a degradation of language:  Wei observed that in discussion boards online, posts and comments are often unreflected outbursts, sometime inflammatory, and unproductive.
     -I would suggest that the same concern could be applied to class discussions with 7th graders (or adults), with no instruction of the necessary skills needed for meaningful discussion.  Students shout out their thoughts without consideration for what has been said. These skills must be made transparent, valued, and practiced.

Media Education for the 21st Century

-Some responses to Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins, et al.


! Some reservations: This article provides an excellent examination of the many skills that can be applied and developed through Media Education, and offers many examples of how those skills have been successful applied in particular programs.  However, it is important to note that this article is intended to inspire educators and administrators, and does not necessarily offer methods for application in the classroom.
     -There is the suggestion that young people, through pursuing their own interests connected to media, have developed this core set of skills, and were readily capable of applying those skills to classroom learning.  With the example of Sam, the baseball card collector, the article states:
     "On another level, the cards provided a scaffold, which motivated and shaped his acquisition of other forms of school knowledge. ... Sam developed a sense of himself as a learner."
     ! He did not develop his sense of self as a learner, until an educator made clear the connections between baseball cards and school subjects.  It is far more likely that teachers and other students reinforced the notion that baseball card collecting is a "hobby," a free-time activity, and less important than math homework.  I'm not sure that I have ever encountered a student at any age who was able to connect life learning to class learning.  If I were to ask Sam in the classroom, as the article states, he would say he was "having fun." 
     -There are several elements that must be developed under the guidance of the teacher:

1. Meta-Cognition of learning styles or process, strengths and weaknesses.  Sam must be able to discuss how learning or understanding takes place, and which terms best describe his style.
2. Identification of the skills applied in baseball card collecting or trading, and understanding of how those skills were used.
3. Identification of the skills necessary for the academic subject, for example: architecture, 20th century American history, and map-reading (subjects identified in the article).  
4. A familiarity with the subject:  When a teacher identifies the skills necessary for map-reading, for example, these skills will most likely remain entirely abstract, unless the student has some experience reading maps.

My point here is not to suggest that this is impossible.  And I admire the zest and enthusiam for Media Education projected in this article.  However, it is naive, and perhaps misleading, to suggest that life-learning and academic learning is inherently transferable.  And perhaps this is not because of a lacking on the parts of the students, but rather the result of a education culture that prioritizes particular skills (math and reading, for example) and stigmatizes others (almost every subject of Media Education).

I would like to point to a particular example with Graphic Novels in Language Arts education.  With the increase in publishing and availability of graphic novels, teachers have seen struggling and resistant readers eagerly consuming books with images.  The assumption often made here is that reading comics will increase readers' interest in reading texts.  There are several problems here:

1. This reinforces the hierarchy of texts over comics.  The comics those reader love are devalued when treated as a stepping stone to texts.
2. This fails to consider the many cognitive skills necessary for understanding and making meaning from comics, as well as the skills necessary for text reading.  

I suggest instead, that the teacher must make transparent the process of reading comics and reading texts.  Where are skills supported with the other?  What are the potential limitations of each medium?  A comic reader must be able to see herself as a comic reader even when reading texts.

-"...researchers such as Black and Henry Jenkins have argued, the new digital cultures porvide support systems to help youth improve their core competencies as readers and writers."

1040 Metropolitan (Third Space)

-Very much a first attempt at connecting Education Theory for Social Justice, some of the artists we spoke to at the open studios, Understanding Comics, and my own work (writing and linoleum print-making).

• Kelly Lycan (Video Instillations):  The video I watched displayed only text, asking questions and giving instructions to the viewer, centered on perceptions and emotional connections to color.  The first questions focused on the immediate surroundings, color we could see and touch.  The questions began moving from seeing to visualizing or imagining.  We were asked to imagine a color we could not see.  I tried to imagine purple.  (This discussion of her work is really lacking without being able to quote the film.  These instillations are new works, and are not posted on her website.)

! The experience of the video relied heavily on the participation of the viewer, and my efforts to imagine, for example, the color of my favorite cup, and how the color affects the taste of my drink.

! I thought of the poem Cloud Piece from Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's book of poetry in the form of instructions.

This particular poem was the inspiration for John Lennon's song Imagine.  Like the questions and statements appearing in Lycan's video, the viewer is asked to imagine objects and the immaterial, and then perform some mental work with it.  (Lycan's video asked us to drink from our favorite cup, and note the change in color as the drink is consumed.)

Last spring I taught a lesson on Lennon's Imagine to my class of adult ESOL students.  Almost every student was at least familiar with the song, and the class was generally excited to be reading the lyrics and listening to the music.  In researching for the lesson, I read about the connection to Ono's poem (Cloud Piece).  I had been unsure how I would address the themes of Lennon's song, namely the suggestion that conditions for peace depend on the erasure of religion and national identity:

Imagine there's no Heaven 

It's easy if you try 

No hell below us 

Above us only sky 

Imagine all the people 

Living for today 

Imagine there's no countries 

It isn't hard to do 

Nothing to kill or die for 

And no religion too 

Imagine all the people 

Living life in peace

This song has been performed by numerous popular singers at international events (such as the Nobel Peace prize award ceremony.)  For my lesson, I didn't want to minimize the controversial elements, which often seem to be lost in the bitter-sweet melody, presented with sentimental optimism.  After reading Ono's poem, it seemed clear to me that Lennon's lyrics were in fact instructions.

So I asked my students to imagine.  I asked them to imagine a word with 1) No heaven and hell, 2) No countries, 3) No religion, 4) No possessions.  This, I felt was the most fair way for students to accept or reject his claims.  A student with a deep personal connection to his faith or her national origin, could describe a troubled world in the absence of these identities.  

This discussion failed utterly.  It didn't matter how I rephrased the instructions, the students did not engage.  I failed to recognize the difficulty of imagining.  My lesson depended on the students' ability to imagine different worlds, before I confirmed that they could at least imagine different weather.  I think the greatest strength of Lycan's video was in her scaffolding: discussing color first concretely with the objects around us, before we were asked to imagine a color we have never seen.

 

The success of Chrisostomou's work also seems to depend on the participation of the viewer.  He described his interactions with Richard Serra's sculpture.  Before moving to NYC, Chrisostomou had only seen Serra's sculpture from photographs.  Of course, viewers' engagement with Serra's massive iron sculptures depends entirely on their presence; they must stand dwarfed before the sculpture's impossibly heavy facade, and walking through the impossibly graceful curving of the walls.

 

When I look at a photograph of Serra's sculpture, I can't engage with it as I typically would with an image.  The giftshop postcard in my hand can only offer me the promise of a future experience, just like a travel ad.  The image of cascading hills and valleys under the bluest skies invites no sense of calm or reflection.  The image invites me to imagine my presence there, drawing me into an imagined world, drawing attention to everything that is around me,  discovering knew dissatisfaction with every corner of my kitchen--how cluttered the table and how tacky the tiles.  

This is the space that Chrisostomou seems to be working in.  

Wasted Youth

The scenes he constructs invite me in with the sense of familiarity, achieved by his painstaking attention to detail.  And at the moment I that I enter, I'm confronted with the unreality, pushed back out.  I see the soft light reflecting from the cabinets.  The kitchen of my childhood looks nothing like this, but that light draws me in to early evenings in the summer, helping my mother prepare dinner.  And then I see the giant eggs that threaten to break through the counter, discolored and spotted, maybe rotten, stamped with the cage number where that giant hen must be held.

The result of this is not quite fantasy.  Fantasy authors, directors, or artists make every effort to remove the mediation.  Tolkien created new languages to the reader for the express purpose of immediacy, every aspect of Middle Earth carefully constructed for readers to lose themselves.  But the more I look at Wasted Youth, I begin to find new disconnections.  That's not a tiled floor; it's a plastic simulation warping and lifting from the base.  

It seems to me the success of Lycan's and Chrisostomou's work lies in the dissonance and the unfulfilled.  Chrisostomou's kitchen reveals it's unreality, and Lycan's instructions grow increasingly impossible.  Works like these depend entirely on the viewer.  The product lies in the thoughts and imagination of the viewer, suspended and unresolved.  These works demand a lot from the viewers; they must construct their own experience.  Serra and Tolkien has done all the work for us.  With Wasted Youth, the viewer can't just show up and stand before the photograph and be overcome.  However, this increase in expectation of the viewer, also indicates to me a profound level of trust and faith the public's intelligence and creativity.

Notes for future edits:

1. How does this "third space" connect to my beliefs about education?
2. How can Lycan's and Chrisostomou's approach be applied in the classroom?
3. How does their work connect to my own?
4.