6
votes
What it felt like: If “living history” role-plays in the classroom can so easily go wrong, why do teachers keep assigning them?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/05/history-classroom-role-playing-games-slavery-holocaust.html
At some point there's going to need to be a different word choice for this sort of thing.
And I'm hesitant to accept any criticism of k-12 teachers whatsoever when their salaries, funding, and workload is what it is. Be thankful they're trying anything to get kids to learn, and don't get pissy over the small stuff when the bigger issues are right there.
i mean, you can recognize that we pay teachers shitty salaries and fuck them, but also recognize that this:
...is probably not the best way to teach students, especially younger students, about some of the gross inhumanities that have been perpetrated by people unto other people in the name of equally gross causes, given that these exercises often veer into insensitive-at-best and malicious-at-worst territory. the two are not mutually exclusive ideas, and while i'm staunchly in favor of blowing up the current system in favor of one that doesn't actively run teachers into the ground, i also don't buy that teachers are absolved of everything they do just because they work in the confines of a shitty, exploitative system.
Yup. We can be saints or we can be sinners, and our competency with any issue, be it cultural or pedagogical, is going to run the gamut from terrible to fantastic, just as it would for any other slice of the population. We're not some special class of person that's immune from bad judgment, ignorance, or mediocrity.
That said, we're also not a monolith, so certain individual teachers making newsworthy gaffes is not necessarily indicative of the teaching practice at large. Stories like the ones mentioned here tend to have more influence over opinions about education than they should because they fill the space left by the absence of positive news about the mundane successes of everyday education. Nobody writes news articles about the millions of teachers all doing a good or even great job every week, because that's expected. Unfortunately, that means when even a single teacher steps out of line, you'll see a bunch of articles indicting the entire profession as if that particular individual is at all representative.
This very article falls into this exact trap. If you read it at face value, it makes it sound like experiential learning in history classrooms is common and education is rife with misguided, incompetent teachers creating awful, traumatic learning experiences for children. It even cites a study where 12 out of 14 lessons had "significant problems in execution." That's 86% of lessons! An outright epidemic! The article lays out its stance that this is some sort of horrible trend right in the subtitle: "why do teachers keep teaching them?"
And the answer is, um... they actually don't? Not at large, at least. The author of the article conveniently leaves out the fact that the study they referenced used a body of 438 lessons and that they had to limit their selection because "only 14 involved experiential instructional techniques". That's only 3%! And 3% is a lot less exciting and inflammatory than 86%.
There's nothing to see here other than some bad-apple picking being used to discard the entire bunch.