Let's Play A Game: A Classroom Experiment

Adventures in Ethics Pedagogy

A brief break from John Cassian as the semester spirals toward its end.

Teaching Ethics: What Doesn’t Help

I don’t talk much about pedagogy here, but as a professor, it’s what I ostensibly spend a good bit of my waking hours around. If I’m not designing a course (as I was the last three weeks), then I’m teaching one (as I’ve done far too much this semester), or grading (as I did for several hours this morning).

This semester, I’ve been doing something a bit different for me: teaching undergraduates Christian ethics. This is a departure in two ways. First, I spend the vast, vast majority of my time with graduate students, as I’m housed in the Graduate School of Theology. Secondly, when I do teach undergraduates, it’s majors who have some kind of prior commitment to the topic. Even when I did Biomedical Ethics last year, it was to Health Science students who at least cared about the science even if they knew nothing about moral deliberation¹.

But this semester, I was teaching general education students: a smattering of business, nursing, education, and general studies students who all had in common the fact that they needed a gen-ed credit, and that this time worked for their schedule. I was pretty up-front with them: no need to hide the fact that no one willingly signs up for a general education class in Christian ethics at noon when your stomach is rumbling.

It doesn’t take long—even if it wasn’t at lunchtime—to figure out what doesn’t work:

1. Monologues. I bore myself after about ten minutes, much less someone who doesn’t have prior interest in the class. Monologue, lecture-style teaching has been repeatedly shown to be one of the least effective forms of pedagogy, not only because it doesn’t draw on what is bubbling up from the students while the professor is talking, but because it presumes that the best way of learning is passive reception of bulk information.

2. Undirected Group Discussion. Lecturing, and then ending with “well, what do you think?” isn’t great, because it sets a very high bar for most students just being introduced to a topic for the first time. They’re still trying to put together the pieces, much less develop advanced critiques of what’s just been presented.

3. Completion Assignments. There is very little correlation between simply having done an assignment and learning anything. If you’ve done an online training module for work, you know that there is very little correlation between being able to improvise on the values these promote and completing the module. I may know how to keep an email from getting phished, but I don’t know at the end how to be more secure online.

So, I gave up on almost all those things this semester, particularly since it’s a mostly captive audience which needs a general education credit to graduate. We do very small mini-lectures (no more than 10 minute chunks to introduce ideas and big topics), guided table discussions which put those mini-chunks into motion, and group assignments where they have to work out a scenario.

Each class, for example, I pull something out of the news that illustrates the questions at hand. Today, for example, we’re talking about Calvin’s view of government and politics, and they’ll have to ask about restoring voting rights to felons, and how a Christian political vision speaks to that.

Next time around, I want to incorporate more of something I’ve only done one time this semester: games.

Putting the Self at Risk: The Use of Games

There’s lots of literature on using role-playing in pedagogy. I’m a little wary of the concept, in part because the last thing that I want to contribute to is the “gamification” of the world, in which all things are games to win and not actually lives to live well. The point of ethics games, then, is not to “succeed”, but to develop capacities to reason, to feel the issues as opposed to simply thinking them, and to have to give account for one’s actions.

The one I designed was for our week on ecology, to help them see the dynamics of food scarcity. We started the week with a day on the basic contours of a Christian ethic of creation, and then proceeded the next class session to talk about food: that food insecurity is a real thing, affected by climate, conflicts, government corruption, and a lot of other elements.

This is all very abstract at times. So, we played this game.

In a hat, I had 30 slips of paper numbered 1 through 5. There were three 5s, 4 4s, and the rest 3s, 2s, and 1s in equal numbers. Each number represents how food secure they were, with 3 being “secure, but not too secure”, and 2 and 1 being those who have to make tradeoffs. Each table’s students had a random assortment of the numbers as they drew out of the hat. The goal is for each table to, at the end of ten minutes, to raise the total number at their table above 14.

They could go to other tables and ask to trade numbers, appealing in any way they wish, using the kinds of moral arguments we’d talked about that semester. But no one had to trade. After ten minutes of chaos, the ending was interesting: I had expected that there would be, at the end, at least one table under 14, but all tables were able to get a total score of 14 or above by the end. Part of that was I put the bar too low, but part of it was ingeniuity from the students.

One of the rules I put in place, for example, was that you had to trade your whole number: if you had a five and wanted to be generous, you had to trade the whole thing, and not part. One of my students came up in despair saying that he wanted to help his table, but that he couldn’t help those with 1s and 2s—he felt helpless just watching them go from table to table and be rejected. It became an unexpected object lesson in solidarity: that sometimes those with extra (in order to help those with less) have to accompany others, and perhaps put their own security at risk. He began to go with the 1s and 2s and offer his 5 to sweeten the deal.

As expected, tables who started the game above 14 were very reticent to trade, frustrating those looking to boost their table. You could tell that, if violence were a real option, it would have been enacted. But faced with the limit to their actions, tables in need had to get resourceful in their arguments, pulling out toolkits of reason, empathy, and even public shaming: it’s fine and good to say that someone’s not being generous when they are in fact being stingy. The world needs more persistent widows in it.

After time was up, I introduced the twist: at the end, even after the table had 14, they still had members at the table with less than they needed. Some members of the table would be flush with food and some having to make food tradeoffs. This is where I asked them to talk about how they would resolve it. Without me having to ask, the students at each table began to cut their own security down to raise up the most vulnerable, such that each member at the table had enough, but that none was infinitely secure.

They felt the struggle of generosity, and it put their own sense of generosity and justice at risk. They had to get creative about deliberation. They had to look the ones pleading with them in the eye and argue clearly about their reasons. And in the end, they were willing to embrace scarcity for the sake of their own proximate neighbors when they were reticent to do it for other tables.

All of the dynamics of actual giving scenarios were in play, including one that I really wanted to stress: sometimes, the good solution is one which involves self-sacrifice, and not just allocation of resources. They were willing to entertain that once the limits came off, and after having had to work through whether or not to be generous. They embraced a closer proximity to hunger in order that their neighbors had enough.

The payoff for me was one particular table in the middle: earlier this semester, we had talked about utilitarianism, and whether or not it was permissible for one person to suffer greatly to make everyone else happy. Two students eagerly (maybe jokingly?) said they’d happily make a child suffer for the sake of everyone else having a utopia. At the end of the game, I reminded the class of this discussion, and watched as the students’ eyes grew in horror at how this was unthinkable for them.

This is how change happens, I think: slowly, and having our selves put into play. We don’t change all at once, nor should we: to abandon something quickly means we probably won’t hang on to the new thing very strongly either. But seeing the class willingly give up their own security for at least their neighbors in this game was a meaningful step forward.

This is why the slow work matters.

1. It’s not telling on my students when I say that’s pretty par for the course. I can’t think of a course I’ve ever taught where my students didn’t start off from either some version of 1) explicit command, 2) intuitionism, or 3) pragmatic consequentialism. Either they 1) looked for some explicit command to tell them it was wrong, 2) went with their gut, or 3) looked for what would get them to the answer they wanted, regardless of what moral rules it broke.