When reading Fullilove’s proposal for education in the digital world from pages 228 to 232, I wondered why she proposed that schools should be extended in both the number of hours and the amount of days that students spend. At first, I thought she proposed this in order to give African-Americans certain skills needed for the workplace, such as trade school, but since she stresses the need for a college degree in order to someday elevate the student’s social class, trade schools couldn’t be the reason. Perhaps Fullilove proposed that children needed to be kept in school longer in order to keep them away from their possibly fractured home life. If that is true, it may explain why she prefers a longer school session instead of the policy where schools teach one half of a curriculum and parents teach the other. I find that hard to believe when there are students who did not learn English as a first language, but outperform many of their peers in school.
Not only that, but in order to learn in the digital world, students need to be actively engaged with the increased amount of stimulation available to the everyday citizen such as video games and social media. If one extends the time in school without changing the way school is taught, then it is the system that is flawed and not the student or race. I wonder what would happen if individuals took a more holistic structure of school instead of the one that exists in many public schools today.
Games can be used as a bridge to create more engaging educational environments that is very different from way individuals are currently used to. For instance, Quest to Learn is a public charter school founded in 2009 which is located in New York City for students grades 6th to 12th and is the first game based school in the world. Their student body consists of 26% Black and 29% Hispanic. This school operates on a method of points and levels instead of numbers that will eventually lead to an average number or a letter grade. Instead of assignments as homework, Quest to Learn uses quests with objectives in order to learn points and experience. The main difference between these two systems is that instead of a traditional bell curve for students, all students at Quest to Learn have an equal opportunity to “level up” into a level that equates into an A. This because instead traditional exams that average up, failing a quest does not damage an average at Quest to Learn. The student who fails a quest would simply have to complete more quests in order to level up to the highest level they can get. This decreases competitiveness as well as pressure, which in some cases can prove detrimental to a student’s development. There are also elements that occur in video games at the school. In fact, the school also has a “boss level” system where students work together in order to accomplish a task. With Quest to Learn’s ability to create a school that is engaging and encouraging to the students it will be interesting to see how different they are compared to the rest of their peers when they graduate and move onto college in 2016.
Although I agree with Fullilove’s statement that there should be a form of community in school, such communities should be achieved though Quest to Learn’s system where students can interact in school and complete assignments both physically and digitally. Or else, how can you educate individuals for the digital world with an analog modality.
