Knowmads, Rhizomes, and Minecraft: Exploring the Edges of Learning in a Middle School Classroom

Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context. Instead of two fixed entities acting on one another, the reader and the text are two aspects of a total dynamic situation. The “meaning” does not reside ready-made “in” the text or “in” the reader but happens or comes into being during the transaction between reader and text (2004, p. 1369).

Reilly: When you don’t know how to do something in Minecraft, what do you do?

Brad: Well, I ask Paul or Mr. Stein.

Reilly: What if they don’t know?

Paul: Check out the Minecraft Wiki.

Jason: I use that and I check out the two guys from England.

Sasha: They are so funny.

Reilly: The two guys on YouTube?

Sasha: Yeah.

Paul: I try to figure it out. I Skype with other players.

Danny: If I can’t figure it out, can’t get help, sometimes I just forget about it.

Rhizomatic

Learning

"Curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions" (Cormier, 2008, p. 3).

And one more thing...

"there is always a betrayal in a line of flight…We betray the fixed powers which try to hold us back” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977, p. 40).

Conclusion

1.Territories and reterritorialization are co-specifying and (in)form teaching and learning practices.

2.Playing gives rise to lines of flight and lines of flight often represent sites of tacit knowledge.

3.Connections within and beyond the school assemblage are rhizomatic. Collisions matter.

Knowmads, Rhizomes

& Minecraft

Background

Theory

Location: NJ public middle school

Mr. Stein, 15+ years as a teacher,

doctoral student & adjunct

at Columbia University

Students: Grade 8 (9 Boys, 4 Girls)

Teacher and students began to use Minecraft as a way to build and interact in the settings of Inherit the Wind and Haroun and the Sea of Stories in December 2011.

Epic & Novel

Learner

as Knowmad

epic is “a poem about the past” (p. 13), “an utterly finished thing” (p. 17). Bakhtin, 1981.

Bakhtin

The school is epic.

Epic Constraints: curriculum, pacing chart, testing, technology use policies, core texts, standardized lesson plans

Bakhtin

The classroom, at times, novel.

Research

Deterritorialization

Timeframe:

• December 2011 - March 2012

Collection:

• Classroom Observations in January, February and March: videotaped or audiotaped.
• Multiple interviews with the teacher and students.
• Student & Teacher artifacts: Minecraft buildings, short stories, notebooks

unfinalizable

Novel: Learning is experienced as emerging

School, Classroom, Teacher, Student are an assemblage

...in a zone of contact with reality (Bakhtin)

Stein says...

Exploring Tacit Knowledge

"It's always an assemblage that produces utterances"

Gilles Deluze, 1977.

I work in a place where experiential learning isn’t valued. I’m so interrupted and find myself stutter-stepping that there’s little continuity in the work that I am doing. Every time I get going in a direction that I think is going to yield really great student learning, I am interrupted. Time to give quarterly grammar test. Time to send out progress reports. Time to send out marking period grades. I’m told, ‘You’ve got to grade, you’ve got to grade. You’ve got to test, you’ve got to test.’ It’s an assembly line.

School on Bergstrasse, Berlin by Raymond Leggott

in a middle school classroom

Community as Curriculum

Rhizomes are produced in the struggle between lines of articulation, which connect and establish hierarchies with lines of flight that disassemble coherence and unity.

In Stein’s class, 'content' is situated and experienced as stable and unstable, bound and unbound. In this manner, tensions are often present and may be characterized as rhizomatic.

Collisions occur inside rhizomatic space.

Knowmad: a nomadic knowledge worker who is a creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere.” Moravec, 2008

These interactions are rhizomatic.

Mary Ann Reilly & Rob Cohen

Ways Students Connect

1. Absent students joined class during the class time from home by playing on the server.

2. Outside of school time, students used the chat feature in Minecraft to discuss homework, sports, day-to-day concerns and interests of adolescents while they built. Their building did not directly relate to the literature being studied.

3. Although the server was limited to the students in the class, extended family members also played, including siblings and cousins.

4. Students joined other servers (public and private) and extended their play and learning.

Stein:

"Our students are so trained to believe that classroom expertise is contained in the teacher and in the classroom. Although Paul will skype to get help with a Minecraft problem, he wouldn't even think of skyping to get help with his writing. It just isn't part of what's done at school."

Why I decided to use Minecraft...

Minecraft begins with...

Minecraft Project

Tacit Knowledge

Stein's Son Built the Server

Introduction to Hillsboro, TN

Stein and his students built the settings for two literary works they were studying: Inherit the Wind and Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Began in December, 2011 through March 2012.

It was pretty amazing watching David play. He first played in single mode and was learning how to survive and build and once mastered he began to explore larger possibilities by replicating famous architecture such as the Parthenon. He studied downloaded images of the structure that showed different angles of the building and then built it to scale. Within a few weeks he had switched to multi-player and was again building structures from the ancient world, but this time doing so with other players. Less than sixth months later he had designed his own server and had players from the North America, Europe, the Middle East. Asia, and Australia on the server. He was 12.

A line of flight is a creative impulse that deterriortializes aspects of the school assemblage...

Stein's understanding of his son's Minecraft play is a line of flight.

'we can know more than we can tell' (Polanyi, 1967, p.4)

Rosenblatt's Poem

Beneath the seemingly banal play of Minecraft, tacit understanding is being composed.

Exploring Haroun

Thanks

@maryannreilly

maryann.reilly58@gmail.com

@rcohen54

rcohen54@mac.com