teachers as game designers: using a game in formal learning in a singapore primary school
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Teachers as game designers: using agame in formal learning in a Singaporeprimary schoolRichard Sandforda
a Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UKPublished online: 04 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: Richard Sandford (2014) Teachers as game designers: using a game in formallearning in a Singapore primary school, Educational Media International, 51:1, 66-78, DOI:10.1080/09523987.2014.889410
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2014.889410
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Teachers as game designers: using a game in formal learning in aSingapore primary school
Richard Sandford*
Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
(Received 20 October 2013; final version received 27 January 2013)
Researchers have offered, in recent years, compelling reasons for considering thepotential of digital games to support learning and in response policy-makers andeducators around the world have demonstrated a commitment to exploring theirpractical use in school. There remain, however, many questions about howgames can best support learning, particularly in formal education. This paperexamines the implications of formal game-based learning for teachers developingtheir own digital learning games, exploring two guiding overarching researchquestions. What strategies are employed by teachers to manage intergenerational,technological, operational and pedagogic tensions in the classroom? And to whatextent is the notion of being a “designer” visible in their professional practice?The paper suggests that there are multiple ways of “being a designer” for teach-ers, and that the notion of “designer” may be a more problematic representationof teacher agency and identity than currently visible in the literature.
Keywords: digital games; formal learning; design research; teachers asdesigners
Introduction
This paper draws on data generated through working with a group of Singaporeprimary school teachers to make use of a digital game in their classroom teaching, aproject which is still ongoing at the time of writing. It explores the way in whichthe role of “designer” might be included within teachers’ professional identity,through an exploration of the experiences of two of the groups over the course ofthe project so far. In doing so, it seeks to trouble homogenous representations of“teachers as designers”, drawing attention to the multiple ways in which “designing”takes place in the classroom. It raises the possibility of looking again at “design”approaches in education, with the notion of “designer” being more problematic arepresentation of teacher agency and identity than much of the literature assumes.
Digital games in formal learning
Researchers have offered, in recent years, compelling reasons for considering thepotential of digital games to support learning. It has been suggested that the skillsplayers employ are particularly suited to the needs of twenty-first century society,with entertainment titles requiring the collaboration, systems thinking, creativity, and
*Email: [email protected]
© 2014 International Council for Educational Media
Educational Media International, 2014Vol. 51, No. 1, 66–78, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2014.889410
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problem-solving demanded by contemporary knowledge economies (Gee, 2008;Klopfer, Osterweil, Groff, & Haas, 2009). Others have drawn attention to the wayplayers within digital games are said to participate in the active construction of newknowledge and authentic challenges (Williamson, 2009), or the opportunities gamesoffer players to take on new identities (Shaffer, 2006). Within the education commu-nity more generally, the notions that games are a uniquely engaging medium, or thatthey bridge a perceived generational divide between educators and “digital natives”(Prensky, 2001), continue to hold wide currency, even in the face of critique fromresearchers concerned to represent young people and their media practices in a less2D fashion (e.g. Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008). In many societies, the use of dig-ital games in formal education has been seen by policy-makers as a technologicalinnovation capable of contributing to national efforts to remain competitive in aglobal economy: in the light of these motivations, it is unsurprising that the practicaluse of games in schools continues to be explored (Koh, Yeo, Wadhwa, & Lim,2012; Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004; Ulicask & Williamson, 2010).
There remain, however, many questions about how games can best supportlearning, particularly in formal education. For teachers, the use of games in a formalcurriculum setting can present practical and operational issues, as well as surfacingmore fundamental tensions: between generational expectations of games and tech-nology, between home and school identities, and between pedagogies associatedwith accounts of games as learning tools and those more commonly embracedwithin the context of formal schooling. As far as practical challenges are concerned,the technical logistics associated with using games in a classroom setting can bedaunting for teachers unused to teaching with ICT, and even for those with experi-ence doing so, the processes surrounding the use of the game – logging in to schoolaccounts, resolving issues on individual computers, finding something for studentsto do while progress bars gradually fill and so on – can be an extra burden. Forthose classes not used to working in a computer lab, the new venue can be a sourceof excitement and loss of focus, requiring teachers to give their attention to class-room management. From an operational perspective, using games is rarely less workthan using more mundane software (Felicia, 2009; Sandford, Ulicsak, Facer, &Rudd, 2006).
More fundamentally, the use of games at all can reveal tensions between homeand school identities. Pelletier (2009) describes some ways in which digital gamesare often framed as being from “out there”, beyond the school domain. For someteachers, the engagement and motivation that they feel students show when usinggames in a school setting might be attributed to the sense of transgression or noveltythat accompanies the use of a medium thought more properly to be used in a domesticsetting (which raises the question of how motivating such games would be if their usein school become customary). In other cases, differences between the two settingsmight be less visible to educators, though no less influential in shaping the learningexperience. The way in which a game is played is likely to be very different in eachcontext: the way challenges are faced by players at home might be different to theway students are expected to apply themselves to challenges in a school setting, forexample as might the proportion of playing time allotted to particular tasks, or theway in which attention is distributed among game priorities. The place of experimen-tation and “messing about”, and the place of seemingly anti-social behaviour, will dif-fer too, to the extent that understandings of what constitutes appropriate language andbehaviour will vary across domestic and school settings (Itō et al., 2009).
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This last notion points to another source of potential tension when bringinggames into the classroom. Understandings of games – what they are for, what itmeans to play or succeed when playing – vary across generational lines. Teachersmight assume that games are inherently engaging for all students, or that studentsare accurate judges of their own abilities, or that skill in one genre means skill inevery genre, or even that teachers and students share a sense of what it means to beskilled at playing games (Sandford et al., 2006). Negotiating different ideas of whatconstructive play is, for example can be a challenge for teachers, and one thatdemands a degree of engagement with games and game play to succeed: however,the majority of teachers, in the UK at least, claim little experience with digitalgames, and do not yet describe themselves as “gamers” (Williamson, 2009: thismight be expected to change as more teachers are recruited to the workforce fromthe generations who grew up with games).
Being aware of these differences in expectations and tensions between domesticand school uses is a pedagogic challenge, and to an extent one faced by teachersusing digital media more generally (Buckingham, 2007). The use of games in formalclassroom learning gives rise to one particular pedagogic issue in particular, whichcan be observed in the absence within the literatures arguing for games as “learningengines” (Gee, 2003) of any role for a pedagogue – what Sandford, Facer, and Wil-liamson (2011) characterise as the problem of the “invisible teacher”. The kind oflearning that is claimed takes place when gamers engage deeply with well-designedgames is very different to the kind that is often most visible within schools. Indeed,in many cases, the pedagogies seen within games are celebrated precisely becausethey are not the kind of learning seen in schools, part of a general tendency to char-acterise schools as having been in some way “left behind” by technology and socio-technological practices. For teachers working in formal settings, the use of games, inwhich players are represented as learning through failure and through collaboration,and working towards goals set by peers and game designers rather than externalexamination authorities, has the potential to give rise to contradictions that are hardto manage.
Teachers as designers
In managing the tensions that arise through changing professional contexts, teachersare increasingly asked to construct themselves as “designers”, mobilising their pro-fessional knowledge in the creation of new strategies and practices that enable themto negotiate these practical and pedagogical challenges (e.g. Foo, Ho, & Hedberg,2006). Over the past decade or so, a range of different models of teachers as design-ers have emerged through the work of researchers addressing questions of technol-ogy, policy and classroom practice. Scaife, Rogers, Aldrich, and Davies (1997)discuss teachers as “informants” contributing their experiences to the process ofdesigning educational technology, alongside other stakeholders such as psycholo-gists, graphic designers and young people. They suggest that teachers have a role inspecifying the learning goals of an application, relating the intended outcomes tocurrent education practice, and assessing the extent to which a prototype might bean improvement on existing methods. The approach, as described, defines teachersthrough an external construction of their professional identity: within this identitytheir expertise and authority is recognised and respected, but there is little opportu-nity for them to enlarge it. Teachers are asked for feedback on projects that were
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initiated outside what is reckoned to be their domain: the momentum of the designprocess belongs to technologists and researchers.
In contrast, Towndrow (2005), writing in a Singaporean context, offers a moreteacher-centred account of how teachers might be considered as designers. Arguingthat there is a need for teachers to be central, rather than peripheral, to the use ofICT in classroom contexts, in order to make good the missing detail in policy aspira-tions for education technology, he suggests that teachers already act as “task design-ers” in schools, shaping “every twist and turn of classroom interaction” throughtheir decisions regarding the time to be spent on activities, the degree of agency andchoice offered to learners, the modes of managing and sharing information to beemployed, the creation of opportunities for learners to reflect on their learning andso on. Towndrow suggests that this sense of design as an existing part of teachers’professional practice might be useful in supporting teachers to move away fromimagining their role to be delivering knowledge through externally approvedresources, which (he offers) works against their using ICT in a meaningful way;Kimber, Pillay, & Richards (2002) offer a similar argument for making use of the“teacher-as-designer” identity to ease the transition to the student-centred, technolog-ically literate pedagogy supposed to be demanded by a global “knowledge econ-omy”. Carlgren (1999) describes the kind of active professionalism that Towndrowasks for, but that is absent from Scaife et al.’s representation. She identifies too a dif-ference between educators as implementers of others’ designs, and educators pre-pared to actively develop and construct resources to support learning. However, shesuggests that, at least in Sweden, teachers being asked to act as designers is a noveldemand, imposed externally through shifts in the way school reform policies repre-sent teaching, and at odds with existing understandings of professional practice.
The degree to which lesson planning and management within existing teachingpractice may or may not be claimed as “design” is not the primary focus here. Whatis relevant is the “turn to design” that these authors identify and contribute to. Thenotion that design ought to be considered a core aspect of teachers’ role, particularlyin the context of learning technology, is encountered elsewhere in recent literature(e.g. Klopfer and Squire, 2008), and is increasingly current within education dis-course outside academia: the concept of “design thinking”, originating within thedesign agency IDEO and proliferating throughout the corporate world, is increas-ingly visible in the professional development resources,1 offered to teachers by non-profit and commercial agencies. In some respects, the current visibility of “design”as a frame for constructing professional teaching practice may be as much a productof greater interchange between education and corporate discourses as an authenticreflection of a change in the demands made of the teaching profession (both Kimberet al. and Carlgren draw attention to the ways in which traditional teaching tasksmay be simply redescribed as “design tasks”).
Whatever the role of agencies outside education in promoting the idea that teach-ers ought to be considered designers, within education this notion of “design” bor-rowed from the workplace has been used to manage understandings of complex andinter-connected domains, particularly in the context of multimodal resources and theformation of new digital literacies (Kress, 1997; Luke, 2000; New London Group,1996). This concept of “design”, here understood as a process of activelyconstructing meaning in response to previous understandings, following a broadlyconstructivist epistemology, has been mobilised in support of a particular approachto education research, one drawn upon by many researchers addressing the complex
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intersections of technology, pedagogy and culture. In the next section, the notion of“design research” will be briefly outlined and its role in informing the methodologyof the study described.
Methodology
“Design research” is a broad term describing an orientation towards research thatpositions it as a practice intended to bring about a change in the domain being stud-ied, and through that attempt reach a deeper understanding of how and why phe-nomena occur, rather than simply recording empirically that they do. Researchundertaken from within this perspective therefore aims to contribute to theory-build-ing work, although theory produced in this way aims to be locally and contextuallyrelevant rather than broadly generalisable (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, &Schauble, 2003). It has proved valuable to researchers exploring the use and devel-opment of technology in school contexts (Bannan-Ritland, 2003; Edelson, 2002), inpart because it acknowledges the interdisciplinary nature of the processes throughwhich technology arrives in the classroom (Winters & Mor, 2008), and because itoffers a way of addressing real-world social situations that are too complex to beadequately investigated through experimental approaches derived from other sci-ences (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004). Alongside other forms of socialresearch, design research recognises that education is a complex, dynamic andreflexive social process, and that the act of research itself contributes to the pro-cesses and phenomena being examined.
A design research perspective was adopted in undertaking a set of research activ-ities with a group of teachers using a game previously developed for use in theschools’ Mother Tongue lessons. The eight teachers involved in the project were a“Learning Team” within the school’s “Professional Learning Community” (PLC), aunit of organisation within Singapore schools in which teachers are given space inthe timetable to develop and refine practice.2 The group were predominantly Chineselanguage teachers with one Malay language and one Tamil language teacher. Theteam were making use of a game developed by a local firm based on an originalidea from one of the group. A series of lessons observations, interviews and work-shops were carried out over the period November 2012–July 2013, generating obser-vation notes, audio-visual data and artefacts from lessons. These data wereiteratively coded (using the Nvivo software) and thematic categories developed as
Table 1. Research activities and data generated.
Activity Data generated Period
Initial use of the game in two lessons Observation notes Nov–Dec2012Audio-visual recording
Interviews with teachers Transcripts of audio recording Nov–Dec2012
4 workshops with teachers Researcher notes Jan–May2013Audio-visual recording
Use of the game with revised lessonplan
Individual pre and post emailinterviews
May–Jul2013
Observation notesAudio-visual recording
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part of the ongoing work of analysis and interpretation proceeding alongside datacollection, informed and sensitised by the researcher’s previously formed beliefs andunderstandings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin,1994; Thomas & James, 2006). An overview of the research activity is presented inthe Table 1.
Focus of the paper
This paper does not offer a comprehensive account of the entire study. Instead, itrepresents an initial, tentative exploration of one particular aspect of the project: theextent to which teachers’ strategies for managing the practical and pedagogic ten-sions arising from the use of the game in formal teaching might be described as partof a “designer” identity. After an outline of the institutional and curricular contextsin which the game was used, two short vignettes drawn from the data describedabove will be presented, illustrating in broad terms the experiences of two teachersin the group and providing material to consider the two questions:
(1) What strategies are employed by teachers to manage intergenerational, tech-nological, operational and pedagogic tensions in the classroom?
(2) To what extent is the notion of being a “designer” visible in their profes-sional practice?
For many of the teachers involved, teaching with ICT presented a sufficiently greatchallenge to eclipse more specific game-related issues: analysing their work in thisparticular context is unlikely to be productive. The two teachers selected experi-enced few classroom management or technical issues, making it easier to discernmoments in the data that speak to the questions above.
Institutional and curricular context
The work described here took place in a government primary school located in thenorth-west of Singapore, one of the areas informally referred to in Singapore as “theheartlands” – it is a “neighbourhood school”, in contrast to more centrally locatedinstitutions. Students are recruited from a variety of socio-economic backgroundsand display a range of academic ability. The school is a “niche” school, in the Min-istry of Education’s (MOE) jargon, specialising in mother tongue teaching and theassociated moral education curriculum. It is one of the first schools to be workingwith the MOE’s new “Character and Citizenship Education” (CCE) curricular frame-work, to be introduced nationally in 2014.
In Singapore, the teaching of students’ “mother tongue” and values-focused cur-ricula have been closely linked since independence, with English represented by pol-icy-makers as an economic necessity, and the other three official languages(Mandarin, Tamil and Malay) represented as repositories of culturally specific valuesnecessary for preserving Singaporean identities in the face of western-led globalisa-tion (Rubdy, 2001; Silver, 2005; Wee, 2010). Within schools over the same period,various overlapping initiatives have addressed policy-makers’ desire for some formof values education, beginning with the subjects of ethics, then civics, then interdis-ciplinary initiatives such as “Education for Living”, the “Good Citizen” and “MoralEducation Programmes for Singapore Schools” projects, the short-lived “Religious
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Knowledge” and “Confucian Ethics” subjects, and finally in 1995 the current“Civics and Moral Education” syllabus, supporting the broader “National Education”framework introduced in 1997 (Chew, 1998; Wang, Khoo, Goh, Tan, & Gopinathan,2006). The forthcoming CCE framework can be seen, then, as the latest in a line ofofficial attempts to negotiate the complex and at times contradictory ideological,economic and cultural forces present within multi-ethnic Singapore. It is not thepresent purpose to explore these tensions, which have been described and critiquedelsewhere (e.g. Han, 2000; Koh, 2006; Tan & Chew, 2004): however, it is worthnoting here that the type of knowledge addressed within the domain of values edu-cation can differ from more traditional subjects. Singapore teaching has often beendescribed as focusing on rote learning and retention of content (e.g. Cheah, 1998;Luke, Freebody, Shun, & Gopinathan, 2005; Tan, 2006). However, in the context ofthis project, teachers represented their learning aims in behavioural and attitudinalterms, rather than focusing on the reproduction of declarative knowledge.
The school has had a relationship with Playware Studios (PWS) for a year priorto the study described here. PWS are an independent game development firm,established in Singapore since 2005, which alongside with their commercial enter-tainment titles have developed a number of explicitly educational titles, sometimesfunded by public agencies such as the Infocomm Development Authority and cre-ated with input from schools and the MOE.3 They have developed a platform forauthoring and playing 3D multiplayer games, which they have branded as“3DHive”. The platform consists of an editor, intended to allow users to design theirown 3D games, a client, needed to play the games, and a server hosting the multi-player games created with the editor. The client and editor have been approved foruse in all MOE schools, and are available to schools through the MOE’s SSOEdesktop. As an early adopter of the system, the school had a game written for themby PWS, developed with input from teachers: this game is the one employed inlessons referred to below. The game is not the focus of this analysis, but a briefdescription of the game will be useful.
The multiplayer 3D game offers students the chance to work in teams tocomplete tasks that require effort from all members. Through these tasks, studentsare given the opportunity to live and experience morally desirable behaviour: this“experiential” approach was represented as a primary pedagogic advantage withinthe school, contrasting favourably with the current “transmission” model of teaching“values”. The backstory describes a “friendly competition” between four animalclans (Courageous Cats, Diligent Dogs, Loyal Lions and Wolf Warriors) to decidewhich should lead them in their new homeland: the winning team is whichever com-pletes the goals first. Teams have to collect 20 mushrooms and 3 magic potions.Mushrooms grow throughout the playing area, while magic potions are generated oncompletion of a house: teams therefore have to gather building materials sufficientfor three houses, and build them. Walking around in the world depletes individualstamina, slowing players considerably. Health potions are scattered about the worldand can be picked up and used by any player to remedy this stamina loss. Playerscan access a number of pop-up screens to view their team’s progress towards theirobjectives, check their inventory and communicate with the rest of their team usingtext-based chat. On the suggestion of PWS, players are able to attack other players,destroy houses that are in the process of being built, and claim other players’half-built houses for themselves.
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it would be very boring if we were to tell the kids “ok this is what you can do, this iswhat you can’t do”, so we just keep the options open for them. Even the attacking, themode of attacking they actually asked us whether we want to have it or not, then on sec-ond thoughts we just thought that we have it, because that will be a teaching point –Teacher A.
These last affordances are central to the pedagogy adopted to support teaching withthe game. The lessons in which the game is embedded aim to foster the followingqualities in students (from the lesson plan teachers created): “graciousness” (similarto a notion of sportsmanship), “respect” (defined as not using “foul language”),“responsibility” (seen in students who “carry out the tasks dutifully”), “teamwork”(“working together towards a common goal”) and “leadership” (both “leading oth-ers” and “self-leadership”). Players have the opportunity to display these qualitiesthrough their actions. The intention was that, while it might be possible to completethe game through negative or destructive tactics, the game was balanced in such away that victory was more certain when acting as a sportsman-like and -focusedteam, although it was not clear to what extent this was true. During the preliminaryworkshops, it emerged that among the group there were differences regarding theprecise way these options allowed the articulation of moral behaviour. For someteachers, their goal was to direct students away from any undesirable behaviour,making no effort to deny that unethical strategies would lead to victory faster butinstead representing the goal of the lesson as not only victory but one gainedthrough morally desirable actions. For others, the game offered a more instrumentalapproach, in which the moral choice (working as a team and foregoing violence)was also the most effective route to success: the compelling reason to eschew in-game aggression was that it wasted valuable time, not that it was intrinsically wrong.In some conversations, other nuances became apparent: one teacher expressedunease that students were presented with a choice at all, being more comfortableoffering them only the option of acting well, while another raised the question ofhow much moral weight actions in a game could claim:
we can’t say it’s wrong, because it’s just a game, right? It’s not real life … So I had alesson with the P4 children so I realise that it’s very hard to teach them it’s not right,it’s just a game. They can do anything during the game trying to win – teacher memberof project group.
On this view, the only real aspect of the game is victory, with actions within thegame revealed as symbolic or fictitious. This ontological position would ratherundermine the premise of the educational intervention, since a good moral actionmay be equally unreal and therefore meaningless.
An exploration of the rich epistemological, ontological, sociological and ethicalquestions thrown up in the development of a game intended to promote ethicalbehaviour is not the purpose of the paper: it is important to observe, however, thatteachers’ understandings of moral action and wider notions of ethical behaviour arecomplex, varied, and likely to be informed in part by sources outside their profes-sional worlds.
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Teacher vignettes
Teacher A
Teacher A is a Chinese language teacher. She attended a workshop run by PWS in2012 introducing 3DHive, in which groups of teachers developed game storyboards.Subsequently her school management asked her to create a game with 3DHivewithin the school, working with colleagues from her subject area within the “Learn-ing Team” framework and the developers PWS. She does not play computer games.When developing the game, she asked her students about the games they enjoy,often receiving demonstrations of gameplay: this is consistent with a self-describedwillingness to learn from pupils. She has a degree in sociology.
Following the initial trial lessons, Teacher A was concerned by the variation shesaw in colleagues’ teaching and resolved to “standardise” procedures for subsequentlessons. Unexpected opportunities for undesirable behaviour within the game (suchas being able to log in under a different team, or using inappropriate language in thechat screen) encouraged her to think about redesigning the game and activities. Inthe preliminary workshops, she took a leading role, demonstrating the game to col-leagues, explaining the pedagogic thinking behind design decisions (such as limitingindividual inventory sizes to make collaboration necessary) and describing studentbehaviour to be aware of. During the period in which the workshops were held, sheindependently developed a detailed lesson plan for her colleagues to follow, andcoached them in its use in the final session. She described feeling nervous beforethe lessons using the game, though she was “prepared for changes and outcomesthat may not go as planned”. There were technical issues in the first lesson that pre-vented the lesson proceeding as planned; but by the end of the second lesson, theclass had covered the desired ground. Teacher A was pleased with students’ achieve-ments, having seen the teamwork, engagement and reflection that she wanted, andnot seen the degree of disruptive behaviour she had anticipated.
Teacher B
Teacher B is a Chinese language teacher. She worked as a software engineer prior tojoining the school, but found the pace of change in the IT world too great. She playsno video games. After the trial lessons, she offered some technical reflections on thegame (it could make use of sound effects and improved graphics) and felt the in-game communication channel was lacking. She suggested adding records of in-gameachievements to students’ school network accounts. She noticed that it would bepossible for players to log in as different team members before any studentsexploited this. From a pedagogic perspective, she was concerned that students mightnot understand that playing the game was intended as a learning exercise, and thatthere were no in-game “punishment” capabilities, making it difficult to “enforcegood behaviour”: her aim was to have students understand that acting morally isdesirable because acting otherwise leads to punishment, which in the game wasproblematic as no negative consequences attended undesirable behaviour. The tea-cher’s role would be to provide praise as a reward, and to set student expectationsso the learning aspect of the activity was clear. She planned to present the desiredvalues prior to playing the game. Teacher B described herself as confident prior tothe lessons, which went as planned, with high levels of discipline and engagementamongst students. She was surprised by students’ use of aliases and dismayed by
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attempts to bully other students in-game, but saw students developing and usingeffective team strategies, and felt they learnt “values” from their use of the game.
Discussion
Even within these two brief descriptions, it is clear that there are many possibleways of “being a designer” for teachers. From the earlier discussion on “design”, wemight summarise some of these ways as: shaping classroom activities and processes,developing classroom resources, contributing to the design of technological artefacts,or acting as an informant in a design process led by others. It might also be expectedthat other identities beyond “teacher” or “designer” are marshalled in the course ofenacting professional practice, and that some of these originate from outside theschool. For Teacher A, her leadership role within the group might have been astrong influence on her approach, bringing with it an expectation that she would beseen as responsible for the perceived success or failure of the project, and conse-quently dampening any appetite that might have been present for a more collabora-tive approach to working with colleagues (though of course this would depend onthe wider expectations in the institution around collaborative working). She made lit-tle explicit mention of design, and offered no particular reason to imagine that shethought of herself as a “designer”. Yet, in Towndrow’s and Carlgren’s sense, sheacted as a designer throughout, undertaking the bulk of the lesson developmentactivity, developing supporting materials and directing classroom practice, and cri-tiquing aspects of the game that she felt impacted on students’ experience. TeacherB, similarly, offered no indication that she considered herself a designer. But hercomments on the games’ technical aspects, informed perhaps by her background asa software engineer, were a contribution to a conversation about design that mightsuggest a capacity to access some kind of design sensibility.
Design, as suggested earlier, can also be understood as a process intended to bringabout some sort of change. In this sense, it is harder to see where teachers acted tobring about more than cosmetic change. Rather, it might be more straightforward toimagine their actions as working to prevent or manage substantive change. Where theintroduction of the game challenged existing pedagogical practice (perhaps throughoffering students alternative moral choices), efforts were largely directed towardsshoring it up (through making the correct choices explicit ahead of the game beingplayed). The workshops offered an opportunity to re-examine the game and the way itsupported – or acted counter to – the learning aims of the group, yet the developers’original structure was retained despite having identified inconsistencies between itsstructure and the goals of the lessons. When tensions between current teaching prac-tice and the requirements of the game became apparent, the response of the group wasto plan ways in which existing approaches to teaching could still be employed. Thework of the group became directed towards managing the disruption of the introduc-tion of the game rather than exploring new forms of teaching practice. Change for thesake of change has no purpose, of course: the intention here is not to argue that alltechnological interventions in schools necessarily demand structural changes, but sim-ply to question whether using “design” as a frame for understanding practice is neces-sarily productive if the idea of “designing” has no visible currency. Whenresponsibility for change is perceived to lie elsewhere (in the hands of a colleagueleading a group, for example or with the developers of a game), the case for represent-ing teachers as designers is hard to make.
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Considering the questions asked earlier, then, the following initial responsesmight be offered. Regarding the issue of intergenerational, technological, operationaland pedagogic tensions within the classroom, while there were some challengesrecognised by teachers (resolving technical issues, or disruptive behaviour withinthe game), in discussions and interviews these were not so much represented as ten-sions to be negotiated as issues to be resolved, drawing on established models ofteaching: undesirable behaviour was managed and controlled using established disci-plinary practices, desired in-game strategies were made explicit, the values the gameaimed to teach were made clear to students before reflection. The risk of technicalfailure remained something seen as inaccessible to this model of teaching: it was notsomething teachers attempted to manage and consequently remained a source ofanxiety. The character of intergenerational differences was consistently assumed tobe in line with teachers’ perceptions of “youth” and accepted with no question. Thetensions that the literature presents were not recognised in those terms, and profes-sional strategies to manage them were adopted with little reflection. The notion ofbeing a “designer” seems equally invisible in this context.
Conclusion
This brief and tentative exploration of the ways in which the identity of “designer”might be part of teachers’ professional identity has been brief, partial and necessarilyinconclusive, aiming to lay down ground for more sustained future investigationrather than provide a definitive survey of teachers’ professional identities. However,there are a number of ways in which it has troubled the notion of “teachers asdesigners”, suggesting some questions about the use of the “design” frame in mak-ing sense of teachers’ work. While teachers here undertook work that might bedescribed as “design”, they displayed little sense of being a designer while doing it,and this perhaps raises issues of agency and intention: must one be conscious of“doing design” in order to be a designer? And given the wider social and institu-tional forces shaping teachers’ activity, how does the individualistic conception of“teacher as designer” fit with the realities of practice? Much of the work supportingthe conception of teachers as designers does so in order to foreground teachers atrisk of being pushed to the sidelines by a focus on new technologies and reorganisedclassrooms: in a context that continues to place teachers at the centre of the school-ing model, such a reconceptualisation of their professional role may be less obvi-ously required. In the work discussed above, a strong professional identity appearedto be a source of support for teachers encountering professional challenge:recognising the value of this, and making a stronger, more visible, case for changesin practice will be necessary for teachers to embrace the identity of designer.
Notes1. For example, these commercial consultancies offer courses for educators with “design
thinking” prominent in their descriptions: http://notosh.com/lab/design-thinking-immersion-planning/ https://www.udemy.com/reinventing-school-design-thinking-challange/,while IDEO have their own “design thinking” project http://designthinkingforeducators.com/.
2. For more information on the way PLCs are linked to Singapore schooling see http://www.academyofsingaporeteachers.moe.gov.sg/professional-growth/professional-learning-communities/an-introduction-to-plcs.
3. PWS funded the development of the game and one researcher’s time.
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