Blended Learning at Simmons College

The False Dichotomy of Work and Play

An Interview with Professor Mary Jane Treacy, Simmons College Boston

Play, Work, and Learning

Can I say something about play and college life? I think we really have to break that dichotomy of play and work, so if you're a student and you go and you work at your classes and play is something that you do afterwards. And I really think that that's a false dichotomy and we need to change that, so I'm gonna have to bring those together. We first have to do that among ourselves, the faculty. Because one of the difficult things when you're developing games and for people who don't know me, mine is a six-week game, a game book of 200 and some pages and an instructor's game book of 250 pages, so no small thing.
But when I say to my colleagues, "Oh, yeah, I'm working on my game.", they look at me and they say, "Oh, that's so nice. My little Roger, he played a game in third grade and he really liked it. It was the -" I don't know, what's the color of apples game, or something, tic tac toe, and we're not talking about that. So I think we need to infuse the kind of joy in learning that comes through play and to understand that that is in fact really work, and I don't want to break that dichotomy so we have to change ourselves.

About Mary Jane's Game

It comes from Barnard College reacting to the past initiative that they've done at Barnard. Mark Carnes is the leader of this group of a new way of thinking of history. He calls it history as contingency and what he has done is asked different scholars to create games of certain historical periods where there are great intellectual debates going on and to bring the students back, to give them roles in that period, and give them, of course, readings that are going to help them understand those roles and help them articulate their view in the debates.

My game is called "Greenwich Village, 1913, Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman." And I'm focusing just in the pre-war period when Americans who are of Anglo decent mostly were moving into these areas in urban areas, these actually run down areas. These were artists, writers, intellectuals who wanted to get away from small town America to rethink what America could be and to do it in the freedom of these Greenwich Villages, and San Francisco's, and all these other places that we now know as sort of bohemian in nature.

So the goal of the game is you're a bohemian, you're a suffragist, or you're a labor organizer. If you're a labor organizer or a suffragist, you have to convince the bohemians that your position is right. If you're a bohemian, you may want to follow one of these groups or you may want to say, "Wait a minute. You're not talking about me. You're not talking about art. You're not talking about my worries about freedom, about sexuality, about marriage, or about women in the workplace, so maybe I'll vote for you, maybe I won't. And if I don't, then I could maybe form my own faction and win, and if I do, I might ask you to make changes in what you see as your agenda."

I didn't use Web CT in this class because I wanted to get away from the class-based format, but I did like wikis and I thought wikis were great fun, and easy to use, and good ways to put in different kinds of materials, and so I thought of them as more as graffiti boards in my own head, right?

So what I did was I set up three wikis. Two of them were closed wikis for the faction members, the suffrage faction and the labor faction, and that was a place where they could strategize if they couldn't get together in person and they were - no one else could look. I could peak but no one else could, and they could feel free to do anything they wanted. And then I had one that I called Polly's Bulletin Board because the restaurant where this is taking place is Polly's Restaurant on McDougal Street, and I thought in 1913, this basement restaurant probably could have had something like a bulletin board and people may have come in and posted things like come to the big ball at Webster Place. Those are the kinds of things they did.

So I envisioned this as sort of a technologically advanced bulletin board and people could throw in anything they wanted and they did. They threw in pictures. They threw in YouTube materials. They threw in songs of The Little Red Songbook. They put in nasty comments, good comments, vote for us, whatever. They just used it as a bulletin board and so it felt like it kept with the game, if you will.

Tips and Design Process

So I think the first thing that the interested colleague needs to do is to get some likeminded people or to go to some likeminded conferences and actually play a game of the type that he or she would like to do, to feel what it's like and to feel what you need to do it. So that's the first thing I would say. Knowing by doing is in game world, I think, central.

I think then the second thing I would say is to do some pilots, to set up your game as much as you can and to work with some good students. By good I mean game students, students who don't want to have everything perfect because they're not going to be perfect. You're going to find out that you didn't give someone the information they knew to be successful, or you forgot some other little thing. So you see the game as a process that you keep refining, and refining, and refining until it really is workable.

I think it's sort of like a beta when you're talking about technology, right? I mean you put one out, and then you get feedback, and then you tighten it up, and that's the exact same process that you have to do.

How did I design it? Well, the first thing I designed is what are the debates that I needed to have students consider, so I just mentioned in sort of very big chunks bohemia, suffrage, and labor issues. Within that, I wanted to make sure that the students were nuanced in their understanding of those issues, so I had to make sure I had all the debates clear in my pages, and pages, and pages of the debates, and then I wrote character roles that included those debates.

And then, and this is what I think is really important to make it a game, you've got to hide the goals in some way. You're not giving them a - what do I want to say? A road. You're not forcing them to believe. You're not forcing them to assimilate a whole lot of information. You have to create a game in which there is a pathway or many pathways, but you have to give students the information to go down those pathways and then the freedom to go down whichever pathway they want.

Why Is It Worth It?

I think it's better teaching because on the one hand it's hidden teaching. It may look like there's no direction. That is so not true. My game is scripted in my mind practically every minute.

If you looked in the game book for the instructors it would say here's the class, Class 4, let's say. These are the goals for the class. These are the things you can expect to happen. These are ways you can counter turns that you don't like. Here are a group of between three and five options for you to take this class in the direction you need for your particular course and for the particular class that you're dealing with.

So let's say you have a shy, quiet class. These are two activities that will get them active. If you have a boisterous class with one group trouncing the other because they're just more energetic or whatever, here's how you can counter that and balance the playing field. So I have it written out so all you have to take your map and just use it, and that's why I think my game is really well constructed, because I've thought of all the problems that can come up.

But for the students' view, they don't see that. That's hidden from them in their professor's manual. They only see that they're in charge of this activity on this day and these are their roles, and so they are running the class. They are invested in the class and they are invested in one another doing well in the class, and it's not for you and at some point it's not for the grade. It's for themselves and that's, I think, good teaching when you can push that on to them, the engagement and also the responsibility.