Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)

Naqvi
					, Rahat

The Eleventh International Conference on Learning,
Havana, Cuba, 2004

JCAC Editor

Contributors
277
Acknowledgements
Supervision as a Creative Act first appeared in the Journal of Curriculum and
Supervision, 1989, 5 (1), pp.60-70. It is reprinted here with the kind
permission of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.


English

Acknowledgements

99
Notes on Contributors
ELIZABETH DE FREITAS teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Prince
Edward Island. She is the author of the novel Keel Kissing Bottom and has published
a variety of arts-informed scholarly articles. de Freitas can be contacted at
edefreitas@upei.ca
SANDRA DELUCA is a registered nurse, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Educa-
tion at the University of Western Ontario, and coordinator of the Western-Fanshawe
Collaborative Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program, Fanshawe site. Her research
interests include cross-disciplinary knowledge development in health professional
education and pedagogy; critical narrative and critical autobiographical narrative
research; critical phenomenological research in health professional education and
practice; and college/university collaborative curriculum development. Her cur-
rent research includes aesthetic representation (poetry, theatre, narrative response)
as location for knowledge development in health professional education and prac-
tice. DeLuca can be contacted at sdeluca@uwo.ca and at sdeluca@fanshawec.on.ca
RACHEL HEYDON taught secondary English and elementary special education in
schools throughout Ontario. She is now Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Edu-
cation, University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include a critical in-
terrogation of the treatment of children who have been identified as “reading dis-
abled”, early multimodal literacy practices, intergenerational learning and teacher
development. She is the First Vice-President of the Language and Literacy Research-
ers of Canada. Heydon can be contacted at rheydon@uwo.ca
CORNELIA HOOGLAND is a writer (poet and playwright) and scholar (she
teaches at the University of Western Ontario). She recently launched her fourth
book, Cuba Journal: Writing and Language (Black Moss Press, 2003) in Canada, Cuba
(Iberomericana Festival) and in the Philippines (International Women Playwrights).
An earlier version of Cuba Journal as well as selections from her third book of po-
etry, You Are Home (Black Moss Press, 2001), were shortlisted for CBC radio literary
awards and performed by the World Cultures Theatre in Exeter, England. Hoogland
has written extensively about the arts of poetry, story and drama. She can be con-
tacted at chooglan@uwo.ca
LUIGI IANNACCI taught mainstream and special education in a range of elementary
grades in Ontario. He is currently in the final stages of completing a doctoral de-
gree in Educational Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His research in-
terests include first and second language and literacy acquisition, critical
multiculturalism and critical narrative research methodology. He is the Second Vice-
100
President of the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada. Iannacci can be
reached at liannacc@uwo.ca
CARL LEGGO is a poet and Associate Professor in the Department of Language and
Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia where he teaches courses
in writing and narrative inquiry. His research focuses on the experiences of educa-
tors, especially how to promote heartful and hopeful relationships in educational
communities. His poetry, fiction, and scholarly essays have been published in many
journals in North America and around the world. He has written two collections of
poems, titled Growing Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill (Killick Press, 1994) and
View from My Mother’s House (Killick Press, 1999) as well as a book about reading
and teaching poetry, titled Teaching to Wonder: Responding to Poetry in the Secondary
Classroom (Pacific Educational Press, 1997). He taught in high schools in Newfound-
land for nine years before joining UBC in 1990. He now lives joyfully with his wife
Lana in Richmond near the Fraser River. Leggo can be contacted at carl.leggo@ubc.ca
RAHAT NAQVI is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, Division of Teacher
Preparation at the University of Calgary. She teaches courses on Second Language
Pedagogy, Literacy and Diversity in Classrooms at the Graduate and the Under-
graduate levels. She is part of the Language Research Center at the University of
Calgary that specializes in the Professional Development of Language Teachers.
Naqvi can be contacted at rnaqvi@ucalgary.ca
KARLEEN PENDLETON JIMÉNEZ is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in educa-
tion at York University. Her research interests include writing pedagogy, commu-
nity learning theory, and anti-homophobia education. Her dissertation combines
these interests in a study of the Toronto Latina writing group Lengua Latina. Her
work can be found in the collection Getting Ready for Benjamin: Preparing Teachers
for Sexual Diversity in the Classroom. Pendleton Jiménez can be contacted at
pendleton_jimenez@edu.yorku.ca
SHARON J. RICH is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Au-
thor of several textbooks for classroom use, she has also spoken at both national
and international language conferences. Her current research interests include an
investigation of the development of online communities. Rich can be contacted at
srich@uwo.ca
LESLEY SHORE is an Assistant Professor of Intermediate/Secondary English
Education at OISE/UT. Though she grew up in Winnipeg and graduated from
the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Education, she has taught almost all grades
(elementary and secondary) in public and independent schools in Ontario. Shore’s
research areas include: adolescent girls and reading, critical thinking through
Holocaust literature, media and cultural studies, philosophy of literature, caring
pedagogies and teacher development. She is the proud mother of three humane
and literate adult children. Shore can be contacted at lshore@oise.utoronto.ca


Contributors

Patteson
					, Ann

 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 1    Number  2   Fall 2003 
 
 
121 
  
 
 
“The Hours” Is About Moments: 
A Film Review 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ANN PATTESON 
Queen’s University 
 
The Hours opens, reaches its apex, and ends in suicide. Still, it is a 
cinematic celebration of life, not death. The film is based on Michael 
Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name 
(Cunningham, 1998), which was, in turn, based on Virginia Woolf’s (1925) 
novel, Mrs. Dalloway. 
 Woolf described her writing of Mrs. Dalloway as “a devil of a 
struggle” (Bell, 1972, p. 100). She wished to create a work that would 
portray the “true reality” of “life and death, sanity and insanity”, as well 
as “criticize the social system, and … show it at work, at its most intense” 
(Bell, pp.99-100). In another diary entry, Woolf described how, largely 
through stream-of-consciousness writing, she dug out “beautiful caves” 
of memory, thoughts, and feelings that exposed her characters’ 
“humanity, humour, depth.” She went on to say, “The idea is that the 
caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment” 
(Woolf, 1923, p. 263 as quoted in Showalter, 2000, p. xxviii).  
 The moments Woolf created in her novel shimmer like the old 
fashioned artificial icicles that used to hang on indoor Christmas trees: 
from one angle they sparkled and shone; from another angle, they were 
leaden. In rendering a single day in the seemingly un-heroic life of an 
upper class woman who was preparing to host a party, Woolf focussed 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
on a character whose actions could at one moment appear admirable and, 
the next, trivial. It was this flux of experience, seen from different points 
of view, that Woolf captured. It was also the fleeting moments of 
connection with others that she celebrated, and the ambiguous role 
women played in occasioning moments of connection that she puzzled 
over. Woolf, presaging her own death, dared to present the notion that 
one has the right to chose “not to live” when the connections are no 
longer possible. The film, The Hours, like Cunningham’s novel, is 
masterfully faithful to Woolf’s vision. 
 The Hours presents us with a single day in the lives of not one, but 
three twentieth century women. Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is the 
modern-day embodiment of the figure of Mrs. Dalloway. She is a 
successful contemporary New York book editor whose life and psyche 
are enmeshed with those of her one-time lover, the prize-winning poet 
Richard (Ed Harris). On the day we see her, Clarissa is preparing to host a 
party for Richard, who has been awarded a prestigious prize for his 
poetry.  
 Richard has bestowed the 
name of “Mrs. Dalloway” upon 
Clarissa, not only because she 
shares the first name of Woolf’s 
character, but because, like her 
namesake, she spends much of 
her time organizing and hosting 
social events. Richard is dying of 
AIDS, and Clarissa passes much 
of her day either actually caring 
for him or carrying him in her 
mind, to the extent that she fails 
to cherish other aspects of her 
life, including her present 
relationship with her lover, Sally 
(Alison Janney). Clarissa feels 
most alive when she is with 
Richard, but can be suddenly 
catapulted from assurance into 
despair when Richard brings his 
poet’s scrutiny to bear upon her 
life. Streep’s performance is 
suitably unsettling: We are not 
sure what to think of her as she 
122 
  About Moments 
  ANN PATTESON 
 
vacillates between genuine 
excitement about her party and 
self-doubt.  
 Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a fragile, bookish, young woman, is 
perhaps the most tragic figure of the film. In a Los Angeles suburb in 
1951, Laura tries to live the roles of mother to her young son (Jack 
Rovello) and wife to Dan (John C. Riley). Moore is remarkable in her 
ability to convey, mainly through facial expressions, the relief of fleeting 
moments when Laura feels herself settle into the conditions of her life and 
then to register Laura’s despair when she cannot sustain her contentment. 
Laura longs mostly to retreat to her bed to read Mrs. Dalloway. Eventually 
she considers suicide as her only escape from a world where she is so ill 
at ease. Laura’s actions are accompanied by the heartbreaking, mute gaze 
of her child: He can feel his mother slipping further and further away like 
a drowning swimmer who is just beyond the grasp of rescue.  
 The film’s third central female character is Virginia Woolf (Nicole 
Kidman). In the years following World War I and her most recent bouts 
of mental illness, Virginia has been “confined” to the relative calm of 
Richmond, a London suburb. On the day we see her, Virginia anticipates 
the arrival of her sister, her niece, and her nephews for tea, while she 
struggles to write her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia longs for the city life 
her novel depicts and that her sister inhabits, even though she knows that 
the frenzy of London would undermine her mental equilibrium.  
 The film moves skillfully among the lives of the three women, using 
a variety of unifying techniques that rarely seem contrived. Laura 
Brown’s longing for her bed, the view from above of Clarissa gazing up 
through the open hatch in the ceiling of the elevator car, the coffin-like 
apartment in which Richard lives, the garden walls that encase Virginia’s 
path to the train station and passage to London, all echo the original Mrs. 
Dalloway’s chaste, narrow bed. All speak of the isolation and 
stultifications that the film’s three female characters struggle to overcome.  
 Roses also figure strongly among the unifying images of the film. 
Clarissa purchases “buckets of roses” for the party she is having in 
honour of Richard. We are torn between thinking that she has captured 
the true spirit of celebration, and feeling that she has displayed an 
outlandish extravagance that borders on hysteria. Laura’s husband buys 
roses for his wife even though it is his own birthday, an act that Laura 
sees as another example of her own failure to provide. Virginia places 
roses on a funeral bier that her niece and nephews have built for a dead 
bird. The roses, in that they speak both of life and death in their 
  123 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
ephemeral beauty, are one of the most eloquent and most-oft repeated 
visual symbols of the film. 
 All of The Hours’ central characters share impassioned kisses with 
other women. Virginia kisses her vibrant sister, Vanessa (Amanda 
Richardson,) as the latter departs Richmond for London. Laura’s attempt 
to comfort her ill neighbour (Toni Collete) turns into an intimate embrace, 
and Clarissa finally acknowledges her love for Sally with a hungry kiss. 
These scenes have attracted much attention from film critics simply 
because they have “lesbian content” (e.g. Burns, 2003; Ebert, 2002), but it 
is the underlying meaning of these moments of contact that is most 
important. The kisses portray, above all, the impulse to seize, hold onto, 
and drink deeply of the vitality of others’ lives. No matter what 
orientation we bring to them, these moments may be inherently erotic.  
 Philip Glass’s score, with its marked four-four time and its sparse 
rolling broken chords, suggests the relentless flow of time as each of the 
women moves through her day from waking, party preparations, 
alternating moments of joy and despair, and, finally, to sleep again. The 
music rises and modulates, like churning waves, as we see, in the often-
silent faces of the characters, hints of what resides in their personal and 
private “caves.” 
 And there are the characters who slip beneath the waves, or who 
retreat so deeply into the caves that they cannot re-emerge. Laura, we 
eventually learn, leaves her family to become a librarian and live among 
books in a far off city. Richard says that he is tired of “staying alive” for 
Clarissa and lets himself fall to his death from his apartment window. We 
know from the film’s opening moments that Virginia, too, will eventually 
psychically and literally slip beneath the waves as insanity threatens to 
overtake her.  
 Like the film’s Laura, Virginia is numbed by “the suffocating 
anesthetic of the suburbs.” Unlike Laura, she does not wish to retreat 
from life, but, rather, entreats Leonard (Stephen Dillane) to allow her to 
once again feel “the jolt of the capital.” The railway platform scene 
between Virginia and Leonard, where they argue about returning to live 
in London, contains some of the finest moments of the film. Kidman is 
stellar in her desperation, and Dillane’s performance of Leonard’s 
anguished acceptance of Virginia‘s choice to lead a life that will most 
likely kill her is heart-rending. We hear Woolf’s own voice as much as 
that of the film’s Virginia when the latter says, “You cannot find peace by 
avoiding life, Leonard.” We know that Virginia does, indeed, pay the 
ultimate price for wanting to savour, rather than avoid life. Just as the 
shell-shocked war veteran, Septimus Smith, dies in Woolf’s Mrs. 
124 
  About Moments 
  ANN PATTESON 
 
Dalloway, it is the ones for whom the moments of connection are too 
overwhelming, maddening, or simply finished who die in The Hours. 
 Few stories make the transition from the page to the screen so 
successfully as does The Hours. The movie’s success is a testament to fine 
acting, Woolf’s inspirational work, Cunningham’s enthralling book, 
expert direction by Stephen Daldry, a fine script from David Hare, 
imaginative production design, and seamless editing. This is a finely 
crafted film worthy of viewing more than once.  
 As educators, we can take lessons from The Hours. The film teaches 
us humility, reminding us that each human being we meet possesses “a 
beautiful cave” of thoughts, feelings, and life experiences that we can 
only glimpse. Likewise, the film causes us to ponder our own dedication 
to fostering classroom and collegial relationships that truly welcome and 
draw individuals out of their solitude. We are reminded that lives and 
living are rarely straightforward, but are, rather, ambiguous. The Hours  
prompts us to consider the creative impulse that may be fed and 
sustained through the exploration of that ambiguity and to wonder what 
moments of beauty we may have missed in the drive to achieve 
mandated curricular outcomes. And, the fact that we can still hear the 
voice of Virginia Woolf through the layers of decades, Cunningham’s 
book, and the film reminds us that art transcends time to add radiance to 
the moments of our lives inside and outside the classroom. 
 
References 
 
Bell, Q. (1972). Virginia Woolf: A biography. (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth  
 Press. 
Burns, S. (2003, January 15). Hours and hours. [Review of the film The  
 Hours]. Philadelphia Weekly. Downloaded on 10/10/03. 
 http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/article.asp?ArtID=5000/.  
Cunningham, M. (1998). The Hours. New York: Picador.  
Ebert, R. (2002, December 27). The hours. [Review of the film The Hours].  
Chicago Sun-Times. Downloaded on 10/10/03. 
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2002/12/122702.
html.  
Showalter, E. (2000). Introduction. In V. Woolf (1925/2000). Mrs.  
Dalloway. London: Penguin Books.  
Woolf, V. (1925/2000). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin Books. 
  125 


"The Hours" is About Moments. A Film Review

Luce-Kapler
					, Rebecca

Orality and the Poetics of Curriculum

Bai
					, Heesoon

Learning from Zen Arts: A Lesson in Intrinsic Valuation

 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 1    Number  2   Fall 2003 
127 
  
Notes on Contributors 
 
HEESOON BAI, PhD, is Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She 
teaches in Philosophy of Education, and her research interests are in ethics, 
epistemology, ecology, and Asian philosophies. She has published widely in academic 
journals and edited volumes on topics ranging from democratic education to Zen 
aesthetics. Her most recent publications are in Canadian Review of Art Education, 
Paideusis, Educational Insights, and Encounter. Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser 
University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada, V5A 1S6. hbai@sfu.ca  
 
ELLEN DISSANAYAKE is an independent scholar and lecturer who brings together 
theories about aesthetics, human development, psychology, and evolutionary biology in 
order to understand why humans have an “aesthetic imagination” and to explain how 
play, ritual, fantasy, and art-making have an essential evolutionary value. She is 
presently a scholar of the Walter Chapin Simpson Institute for the Humanities at the 
University of Washington. edissana@seanet.com
 
BETTY HANLEY, PhD, is Professor of Music Education in the Faculty of Education at 
the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC where she teaches music education courses in the 
undergraduate elementary and secondary teacher education programs and in the 
graduate program. Her current research interests are curriculum, music pedagogy, arts 
policy, and the unification of music education associations in Canada so they will speak 
with one voice. bhanley@uvic.ca
 
EILEEN HARRIS, PhD, is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s 
University, having recently completed her PhD at the University of Ottawa. Her varied 
teaching experiences include elementary school, graduate courses in education and 
psychology and creativity training workshops for corporate clients. Her research 
interests are research methodology, strategies to enhance creativity, arts education and 
professional development for teachers and other professionals. harrise@educ.queensu.ca
 
RITA L. IRWIN, EdD, is Professor and Head of the Department of Curriculum Studies in 
the Faculty of Education at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, where 
she teaches art education, curriculum studies, and arts-based educational research. Her 
most recent passion is exemplified in her work with graduate students. Together, they 
are creating a unique form of arts-based research called a/r/tography which combines 
art and writing through the roles of artists, researchers, and teachers 
researching/creating in and through living inquiry. rita.irwin@ubc.ca
 
REBECCA LUCE-KAPLER is Associate Professor of language and literacy in the Faculty 
of Education, Queen's University.  She is the author Writing With, Through, and Beyond 
the Text: An Ecology of Language (forthcoming from Lawrence Erlbaum), The Gardens 
Where She Dreams (Borealis, 2003), and co-author of Engaging Minds: Learning and 
Teaching in a Complex World (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000).  luce-kar@educ.queensu.ca
 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
ANN PATTESON is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. 
The focus of her research is teacher change through art-making experiences. Her 
research has led her to a particular interest in the relationship between ethics and the 
arts. annpat@adan.kingston.net
 
KATHARINE SMITHRIM, PhD, is Associate Professor of Education at the Faculty of 
Education at Queen's University, Kingston, where she teaches music in the pre-service 
program and courses in arts education at the graduate level. Her current research 
interests are music in early childhood, teacher transformation through the arts and the 
spiritual dimension in teaching and learning. smithrik@educ.queensu.ca
 
RENA UPITIS, EdD, is Professor of Arts Education at Queen’s University, where She 
teaches courses on music curriculum methods and on research methodologies. A 
musician and composer, she worked as a music teacher in inner city schools in Canada 
and the United States and has been a studio teacher of piano and music theory for over 
30 years. Her research interests include music and mathematics education, and teacher  
and student transformation through the arts. upitisr@educ.queensu.ca
128 


Introduction

Egan
					, Kieran

What is Curriculum?

De Castell
					, Suzanne

Jenson
					, Jennifer

47
Serious Play
SUZANNE DE CASTELL
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Volume 1  Number 1  Spring 2003
Serious Play:
Curriculum for a Post-Talk Era1
SUZANNE DE CASTELL
Simon Fraser University
with
JENNIFER JENSON
York University
I knew I was in a state of epistemic emergency when I overheard myself (invariably a bad
idea to listen) assigning in a doctoral seminar in Contemporary Curriculum Theory the
task of seeing who could find the best picture of a woodbug on the internet. It just so hap-
pens that there aren’t actually many woodbugs on the internet to choose from, and a kind of
epistemic vertigo sets in when you stop to consider that this is actually a knowable proposi-
tion, an empirical truth which, contrary to every logical truth about possible black swans
and limits to induction, actually encompasses the entire universe of possibilities. Because
although real black swans and virtual woodbugs are supposedly very different, they are,
epistemically, frighteningly the same, and with this realization erupts simultaneously into
consciousness both the remarkable fact that I actually know something (about how many
woodbugs there are on the internet) which is not just a little bit true, but True of the Entire
Universe. In that dizzying moment when Truth on the internet meets virtual woodbugs, it
helps to recall Simone Weils’ observation that “the entire universe is nothing but a meta-
phor.” (1942/1970, p. 98). In curriculum, what we most need is to learn more about the
ways our tools work semiotically, like metaphors, to re-cast and re-configure both the forms,
and the contents, of human intelligence.
• • • •
Working increasingly in a convergent digital medium which operates
transformatively upon contemporary knowledge, skills and representational
apparati, traditional learning tasks and hierarchies—even their physical
locations within schools and classrooms—are being superceded by
interdisciplinarity, spatio-temporal mobility, developmental heterogeneity,
multimodal literacies and computer-based learning tools and resources.
48
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
All this is by way of pronouncing an end to the linguistic turn in which the
knowable is commensurate with the sayable, and a beginning to multimodal
epistemologies, with language clunking reductively along on the epistemic
sidelines, where its limits and impediments to comprehension and capability
go, as they say, without saying. The primary instrument of our times is digital
code. Its new ontology is simple: whatever is, exceeds its linguistic expression.
And its accompanying paradigm shifts, methodologically, are
interdisciplinarity, representational convergence, and a further shift towards
recognizing the unreliability of “the image” in much the same way the “the
word” became highly suspect—think of the “Blair Witch Project”—a film that
couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been so familiar with documentary form/
s in cinema and so ready (as an audience) to “accept” that as a “genre” of truth.
Curriculum: Contents Under Pressure
Under pressure to “integrate technology into the curriculum” (an interest-
ingly far cry from earlier proclamations of technology’s ability to “trans-
form” curriculum), education has found itself hard pressed to conceive of
what such an “integration,” let alone anything approximating a “transfor-
mation,” could look like. And so technology’s principal use in curriculum
development has had little to do with transformation and far more to do
with its principal appeal to educational administrators: its unprecedented
capabilities for surveillance, control, and documentation—all basically forms
of record-keeping—and so of “educational accountability.” However the fa-
tal deficiency of technologically re-mediated curriculum so conceived is first
and foremost the matter of content, more precisely, instructional technology’s
deferral of content, its primary lack, which renders technology’s potential
contributions to curriculum quite simply baffling for many of us accustomed
as we are to text-based knowledge, however obediently and unreflectively
consumed. Educators and “instructional designers” seeking to embrace new
technologies for education who eschew any need for a radical epistemic re-
thinking of educational knowledge, or who construe educational
technology’s use as “putting your course materials on-line” have fallen prey
to the dangers of mistaking properties of language for properties of mind,
and properties, in particular, of written language for properties of knowl-
edge. This profound “bewitchment of the intellect by language,” as Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1948) designated philosophy’s distinctive corpus of dilem-
mas, aptly characterizes the intellectual betrayal that comes of doggedly
clinging to the “textual preferences” of traditional school knowledge.
To the extent that human intelligence is reductively misrecognized as
language, and language in turn misrepresented as the literal and formulaic
textual forms and fragments most susceptible to becoming clearly and tightly
49
Serious Play
SUZANNE DE CASTELL
specifiable “learning outcomes” and “performance indicators” taught and
tested, the public school’s traditional mission, that of equipping a nation’s
children with a literate, educated sensibility, has succumbed: today, in many
respects it seems that, far from inculcating youth with a sophisticated tex-
tual and linguistic fluency and facility, schooling has alienated an entire
generation from its own language.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the colonization of critical educational
discourse by the languages, thence the concepts and practices, of business.
It’s worth spending some time looking at what “getting down to business”
in the New Economy has meant for education, first in terms of the “ac-
countability” imperative which is at base responsible for the reduction of
knowledge to literal and formulaic words, fragments and sentences whose
raison d’être is often just the ease with which they can be evaluated, then
calibrated in terms of productivity (greatest bang for the educational buck,
in terms of teacher time and school resources “invested”) and second, in
terms of a ready calculation of comparisons, to determine and to document
the distribution and relative “competitiveness” of learning outcomes as these
are differentially instated in student bodies.
A third and further dimension of what is lost to education by getting down
to business is the dimension of “play” that Joseph Addison (1711) long ago
characterized as wit: an essential accomplishment of any well-educated per-
son, this playful aspect of human intellectual life distinguished the well edu-
cated person from one merely, literally and prosaically, schooled. An ability
to master conventions and rules—of language, of mathematics, of art, in-
deed of any educational field or form, so well, so thoroughly, and so pro-
foundly, and to work with those rules well enough not merely to follow
them correctly but to turn them around, inside out, to “delight and surprise,”
to show their limits by applying them up to and beyond those limits: this is
what wit demands. Technologically re-mediated curriculum so far has largely
rendered education “witless,” by eroding and finally eliminating that play-
fulness which makes formal schooling an engine of intelligence rather than
obedience. Without play, education becomes a force of compliance, not in-
telligence, and in this sense what we most urgently require of schooling to-
day is that it can once again teach us to play, not to obey.
Then what happens to curriculum when we challenge our most advanced
students with tasks that not so long ago appeared in the nursery? When our
most serious work looks more and more like child’s play, we surely must
realize that we have, whether boldly or, rather, without any real compre-
hension at all, gone where no woman has gone before, because these are
highly educated adults we are asking to find virtual woodbugs. So what is
this digitally (re)mediated transvaluation of epistemic values all about, and,
most importantly, where is it taking us?
50
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Where it’s been taking some of us working with new media is away from
the colonized languages of instruction by which we have been betrayed,
away from its schooled articulation, and away from “work,” into conver-
gent multimedia, intuitive, embodied competence, and play. Indeed it’s
possible to see gaming and play as a new paradigm for curriculum research
and development. Over the last two years, I have worked in collaboration
with Jennifer Jenson on a computer game design and development project,
Ludus Vitae. Rather than, in good critical spirit, eschewing the commercial-
ization of education, we have set out to embrace what the market can teach
us2 —and what it has been/is “teaching” today’s youth: in particular, we
have begun to look to commercially produced entertainment-oriented com-
puter games, asking what of educational value we might learn by taking
gaming and play seriously.
And so we’re asking how the commercially, financially and culturally
successful world of electronic gaming might offer important strategies for
education. How, for example, do games “teach” their tools and techniques
to players by contrast with the ways classroom-based instruction teaches
subject-matter knowledge and skills to students?
What we see in commercially produced computer games is an extremely
effective programming of learning opportunities which not only bypasses
teaching but, more radically, bypasses linguistic articulation altogether.
Young players don’t need to be told how to play, or what the game is about.
They don’t need to read about it, they don’t need models or examples or
mentors, and they certainly don’t need teachers. Gaming teaches gamers
about itself through immediacy and interactivity rather than display and
exposition; its focus is on negotiating an immersive environment rather than
on stand-alone task completion. Games use narrative rather than proposi-
tional organization, and in game play, activity structures replace epistemic
and disciplinary structures. Subject positioning and character formation in
game contexts is accomplished through role enactment rather than self-rep-
resentation, and gaming provides for its players a very different politics of
engagement which shifts the experience of locus of control from teacher or
educational program (“feedback”) to the player (“consequences”). Gaming
depends upon even as it also develops lightning speed perception and re-
sponsiveness, and it works at a somatic, intuitive, post-articulate level. Fi-
nally, by contrast with lessons, games afford players a greatly enhanced
quality and kind of freedom: gaming culture encourages and enables soli-
darity beyond/outside the game (chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.) with the
player, not the teacher or program, having autonomy over interaction (degree,
kind, with whom, etc.).
The sum of all these elements is a curriculum of playful immersion within
an environment that, although much must be learned within and about it in
51
Serious Play
SUZANNE DE CASTELL
order for players to succeed, places the player in control of her character
and its activities. Gamers navigate through a complex environment in which
learning is incidental to and a by-product of their action and interaction
both within the game environment and beyond it as they participate in chat and
help-seeking both on- and off-line to compete, collaborate, communicate
and fantasize about the game and their roles in the worlds it makes real,
tangible, and even tactile. This phenomenon is sometimes described as
“stealth learning,” whereby players learn subliminally or incidentally
through rule structures, tasks, and activities within the game (Prensky, 2001).
No educational purposes are served by driving a wedge between work
and play, learning and pleasure, discipline and passionate intensity. Indeed,
a reclamation of the classical connection between “learning” and “playing”
is long overdue. The central purpose of curriculum designers, from that
standpoint, is to understand what gaming environments have to contribute
to digitally mediated educational activity, to harness those capacities, and
reorient them to educative ends. But this means far more and other than
simply tacking on traditional school-defined learning outcomes to unre-
lated computer-based stories and puzzles.
We refuse this kind of instrumentalist means-to-ends deployments of gam-
ing resources for learning, which typifies current so-called “educational
games.” Instead, we see play and learning as mutually constitutive and their
conjunction, therefore, as transformative of both. For game play, at its best
and most powerful, is engaged seriously, with effort, commitment, and de-
termination, and this, like any serious engagement in learning, affords plea-
sure, excitement, immersion and playfulness, creating a zone of automatic-
ity, of flow, in which far more is learned than can be written or said about it.
In an article on computer game design, Rieber and Matzko (2000) define
“serious play” as “purposeful, or goal oriented, with the person able to modify
goals as desired or needed.” Most important, they add, “the individual views
the experience of serious play as satisfying and rewarding in and of itself and
considers the play experience as important as any outcomes produced as a
result of it” (p. 16). Serious play, then, is a process of immersion: the players’
attention, fully engrossed and absorbed in the activity results in significant
learning. As such, serious play and schooling are frequently at odds.
The cultural environment of schools today, in so many ways antithetical
to the immersiveness of play, insists on timed activities, with no room for
“losing track” of time by being absorbed in reading a book or solving a
math problem, on curriculum designed mostly to “survey” a subject area,
with little opportunity to study one or two subjects in depth, and with goals
and immediate feedback (both punishment and rewards) often withheld
from students positioned in institutionally sanctioned power struggles with
their teachers.
52
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Educational game development has ignored what commercial gaming
exploits, fosters and understands well—that games are fun and engaging
because players are not continuously “held back” but instead are encour-
aged to develop knowledge and skills quickly, learning without being taught,
from and within the environment of the game, with success promptly re-
warded without being judged. And educational game developers equally
ignore the fact that gaming is not a discrete activity or set of activities, but a
culture and, for many people, a whole way of life, in just the same way that
education—though probably not schooling—can be.
What might it mean to create and sustain an educational culture drawing
upon the powerful tools of the current culture of commercial gaming?
What if we embarked on the digital re-tooling of curriculum by asking,
not how we can include technology as an extrinsic educational component
with which to entice and seduce students in order to complete school tasks
in no significant way altered by that technology, but how we can devise
educative engagements which immerse students in the least pedantic, the
most demanding, and the most engaging forms of intelligent participation
in fields and forms of human endeavor? First, we might then see just how
educational serious play can be. And more profoundly, in pursuing learn-
ing activities whose value resides in the engagement itself and not in its
extrinsically defined “learning outcomes,” we might begin to reclaim from
a pervasively commercialized institution of formal schooling, the educa-
tion it appears increasingly to have abandoned in favor of the development
and credentialing of job skills. Ironic and fitting indeed that it should be
through play that educational goals might now be recovered and reclaimed.
Notes
1 The arguments about and examples of game-based learning proposed herre can be
followed up in an extended paper, “Serious Play”, by Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer
Jenson, in Journal of Curriculum Studies (2003).
2 Here I’d just like to mark the important distinction between exploring up what the
marketplace has to offer to education, and attempting to re-make education as market-
based commodity. One seeks to learn from business; the other seeks to become business.
References
Addison, J. (1711, May 11). Wit. The Spectator, 62.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital game-based learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Reiber, L.P., & Matsko, M.J. (2001). Serious design for serious play in physics. Educa-
tional Technology, 1, 14–24.
Weil, S. (1942/1970). First and last notebooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1948). Philosophical investigations. New York: Macmillan.


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The Eleventh International Conference on Learning, Havana, Cuba, 2004

Acknowledgements

Contributors

"The Hours" is About Moments. A Film Review

Orality and the Poetics of Curriculum

Learning from Zen Arts: A Lesson in Intrinsic Valuation

Contributors

Introduction

What is Curriculum?

Serious Play: Curriculum for a Post-Talk Era

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