Applying a few of James Gee's "Learning Principles" to the classroom

Looking through James Gee's "Learning Principles", I've found a few that I could include into the classroom without the use of video games. The learning principles I'll be working with for the sake of this blogg are as follows: 1) #2 - Design Principles, 2) #15 - Probing Principle, 3) #20 - Multimodal Principle, and 4) #36 - Insider Principle.

Gee's "Design Principle" states that "learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the leaning experience", which is why I feel that this principle is expecially important for my students to understand as it relates to the class, and the "video game" aspects that I feel are included in my syllabus. If my students take the time to analyze/understand how I've designed the game, their English 101 class, then they will have the necessary tools to understand how each paper is a build up on the previous and all a piece of the larger puzzle - which is to understand the course subject which is "what is rhetoric?".

The "Probing Principle" allows for an understanding that "Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis". My students are allowed this opportunity, whether they realize it or not, as supported by the different writing assignments of the course. As the class is centered around the question of "what is rhetoric", my students are allowed to probe and apply this question to the world as they know it and form initial ideas, supported by their sources, as to how the world works in regard to how rhetoric is used. At the end of the semester, the students then write their last paper which is an analysis of what they've learned and whether their understanding of rhetoric has remained the same/or changed from the beginning of the semester.

Thinking about the "Multimodal Principle" and how it attempts to show that "meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words," I require my students to complete a multimodal presentation using prezi.com for two of their major writing assignments. This use of multimodality is designed to show my students that with images, texts, symbols, etc...you can achieve the same goals as a writen text when applying meaning.

Lastly, the "Insider Principle" asserts that "The learner is an "insider," "teacher," and "producer" (not just a consumer) able to customize the learning experience and the domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience." From the very first writing assignment to the last one, my students are becoming the "insider", "teacher", and the "producer" as they are continually investigating, and refining, their understanding of rhetoric, in different circumstances, so that they are able to educate the class and instructor on their findings.

I really appreciated Gee's learning principles because they made me realize how much the classroom really is like a video game - and the multitude of similarities there are between playing a game, and being a student in a class and/or being an instructor. I also realized that I pretty much constructed a class based upon a lot of learning principles seen in video games.