Production 3

ABDIKADIR BARE ABIKAR STUDENT NO: 213772773 PRODUCTION 3 27TH JANUARY, PROFESSOR: KURT THUMLERT A REFLECTION ON "PRODUCTION PEDAGOGIES, LEARNING THROUGH GAME DESIGN: In this assignment, I want to reflect on an article by Kurt Thumlert, Suzanne de Castell, and Jennifer Jenson on using production pedagogies as a tool for learning through game design. The article began with the authors coming up with an idea, of using production pedagogies as a tool to use in schools for teaching, as it noted that production pedagogies are premised on the view that people learn best, and most profoundly, through designing “networked” cultural artifacts that have use-value, and that matter to their makers (de Castell, 2016). Their approach on digital making involved learners in self-directed, interdisciplinary modes of situated inquiry, where actors collaboratively research, deconstruct models, and co-construct new knowledge and art as they create, “do things” with, and share digital games - interactive visual novels and critical empathy games, role-playing simulations and non-linear multimodal narrative adventures. The authors argued that production pedagogy can enable learners to reengage with and drive their own learning, both within and beyond formal educational reservations (Thumlert et al, 2018). And thus I was a practical recipient of this pedagogy when I joined a course on cultural technology with my friend in the Dadaab and other students from Toronto, where we studied together and shared a lot of different experiences one of making with technologies. Our technology project is a working tool that can be used in our schools for teaching and learning. According to the writers they noted that production pedagogy for teaching had been marked as an important driver in our educational contexts where digital competencies are promoted in relation to innovation while, at the same time, critiques of society-technology impacts are considered and forms of civic engagement are supported (Thumlert et al, 2018). The pedagogy as a method has really helped me realize my dreams as a provisional teacher, as it facilitated my studies as a teacher and support learners to make and design technartefacts that matter to them. Through this pedagogy, I learned the art of using comic life to teach and learn to design my thoughts through the use of graphic texts. I tried using these tools with learners and it helped me get more experience in using new media and that is why it is a good move and a starting point to help in our learning situation in Dadaab. In my winter course, another form of delivering stories using as a tool so this pedagogy is practical in the field of education educators can use it to activate richer teaching and deeper learning in our schools. Children at early stages need to be given a form of education that will intensify their talent and capacities, so if this pedagogy is used it would educate many learners to see their potential talents and put them into action. If learning is controlled with boundaries like what, Ingold described as an era of delivery which are governed by “expert the students only do what the “experts” want to be done, and this “hylomorphic” view making prevent scents creative input by students (Ingold, 2010). This symbolizes the curriculum of Kenya (the 8.4.4 system) where learners are taught within already finished systems for decades, with no improvements or adjustments, and this limits and lowers the potentials of the future children, and it also kills creativity and autonomy(Nolan & McBride, 2014) as well. It is also noted in the article that “production pedagogy was the vehicle for teacher candidates learning and doing, and the model to carry forward into interdisciplinary classroom practice, where modes of inquiry and design aims are proposed and negotiated by students themselves, with their own justifications for research and making(Thumlert et al, 2018). And this is a pedagogy that we require in our future schools for children to enjoy learning. Learning should not be a reformatory, like a predictable situation for the child, but an interactive situation that will allow the learners to learn new things, and learn as they make knowledge(for example, as a graduate student, last semester, I was struggling with video making, so our professor gave us ideas for how to do the video making and we finally made an impressive video, so the same strategy can be applied to the learners: it would work as it has worked for me, and we learned through trial-and-error and interacted with several video making tools, and sometimes we failed but learned through overcoming mistakes and later succeeded Every immeasurable item or goal? in this world has some challenges, and the challenge to use this strategy in our future schools is that you must be connected to technological devices and knowing the basic skills of a computer, and thus it may ignore some communities and people who are living in the rural areas. This is what the authors did not apprehend very well, but they need to make more clearly consideration on how to support the struggling communities in the world. As a game designer in the future, I am hoping to make use of the production pedagogy method as a starting point for myself and see if I can apply it with a Mogadishu game, that I am proposing as my final project, since most kids can get cell phones I would try to use a mobile-friendly game for rebuilding Mogadishu. This will empower me to be the future practitioner of production pedagogy in Somalia. And as practicing teacher, I would also integrate comic life and video making into my teaching of computer studies to make learning interesting, for students, and I have already started using the comic life in some parts of my teaching, and many students are enjoying of the use of comic life. If my future Somali game works, then this will be one way to work toward imagining a new Somalia, and this teaching methodology will, eventually in the next generation to come, help students make their own studies through production pedagogy.

References Ingold, T. (2010) “The Textility of Making”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp 91–102. Thumlert, K., Jenson, J., & Castell, S. D. (2018). Learning through Game Design: A Production Pedagogy: Building A Modular Online Learning Environment. ICERI2016 Proceedings. doi:10.21125/iceri.2016.1048.