Pedagodzilla in Aberystwyth

At the start of May, we travelled to Aberystwyth on the west coast of Wales for the book launch of Pedagodzilla: Exploring the Realm of Pedagogy. It was the first time the four authors – Mark Childs, Mike Collins, Liz Ellis and I – had met as a group of four, because virtually all work on the book had been done online. The event ran over two days at the university and involved several activities.

Pedagodzilla: The Aber Takeover

The Pedagodzilla team put their integrity in the hands of the good people of Aberystwyth.  We invited attendees to form a team (using self-described roles to break up groups) to design a short segment of a show within a playful structured framework. Groups recorded their contributions, which will go into a special Aberystwyth Takeover episode, to be published on the Pedagodzilla podcast feed.

Pedagodzilla live

A live recording with the Pedagodzilla team. An experimental group session, inviting attendees to submit their own Pedagodzilla-style ‘pedagogy meets pop culture’ questions, to see if the flustered panelists could somehow blag a legitimate answer within a three-minute time limit, in a recorded podcast. Once the recording goes up on the Pedagodzilla site, you’ll be able to hear how we fielded questions on subjects as diverse as Tom and Jerry, Pulp Fiction and The Karate Kid.

Picking Pedagodzilla Panelist Brains

After two days of pedagogic podcasting fun, we invited the audience to pick the brains of the Pedagodzilla team on any subject related to learning, teaching, pedagogy and pop culture.

Why launch in Aberystwyth? The podcast has had lots of support from Aberystwyth’s own Mary Jacob, and show creator Mike is an alumnus of the university. The team has also been pleased to hear that PGCE students at Aber have found the show a useful resource in their studies. As a result, the team felt that Aberystwyth might be a good place to hold a playful launch event to introduce the book to the world, bring the team together at Mike’s favourite university, and run some pedagogic podcasting activities with the community.

Top-ten bestseller

Amazon has multiple diffferent classifications for the thousands of books on its platform. There’s not much chance of a book on educational theory making it into the top ten best sellers, but on 1 May, Pedagodzilla made it to number 9 in the ‘Teaching in Higher & Further Education’ category!

Skipping ahead in time, we also made it to the Top 10 on 30 May, when we were the eighth best seller in Educational Psychology.

Podcasting as pedagogy

Full presentation available on Slideshare.

One of the subjects covered by the 2023 Innovating Pedagogy report was podcasting. As a follow-up to that, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Mike Colllins and I ran a ‘Podcasts as pedagogy: integrating podcasts in teaching and learning’ workshop online at The Open University on 29 April 2024 as part of Scilab (the university’s centre for pedagocial research and innovation in business and law).

Podcasting is experiencing a resurgence, with many educators critically engaging with this medium to ask questions about meaningful integration in teaching and learning. The use of podcasts in education, or ‘podcasts as pedagogy’, has provided a means to explore diverse types of audio content and to exploit their communicative potential for both producers and listeners. In this session we will present podcasting approaches and content types in the context of open pedagogies, centred around a workshop experience led by Mike Collins, Senior Learning Designer and host of the exciting “pedagogic podcast with the pop culture core”, http://pedagodzilla.com

Pedagodzilla: exploring the realm of pedagogy

New book out on 23 April 2024 – available on Amazon for just £9.99.

Have you ever wondered whether Yoda makes a good supply teacher? Or why the von Trapp children so effectively learn to sing? Or how the Council of Elrond does such a good job of working out what to do with The One Ring?
Well, wonder no more because this book contains the answers to those questions and more.

The aim of the Pedagodzilla podcast is to take a learning theory, or approach, or a practice that’s useful to educators and explain it in terms simple enough for us to understand, using examples taken from whatever film, TV show or social media furore takes our fancy. Star Wars, the Muppets, Come Dine with Me, the Predator and the Matrix movies – all have fallen under our spotlight. We take a pointless question that combines pedagogy with something from pop culture, talk about one, talk about the other, then mash them together. It’s a formula that’s established Pedagodzilla as one of the favourite podcasts discussing practice in Higher Education.

And now, the podcast has become a book! For this first volume we’ve taken the episodes that discuss the key learning theories and formed them into a journey through the ideas that inform teaching. There’s a section where we discuss the underlying philosophies behind the different approaches, and where we create a map of the domains, a section where we look at the behaviourist and constructivist models of learning and where they clash, and a final section where we look at social and contextual approaches to learning.

Join our fellowship on our path of discovery. If you do, you’ll cover most of the basics of educational theory, see how to apply these to some practical examples for teaching, get to grips with some of the controversies, and maybe uncover some useless trivia about some of your favourite media things.

And if you want to listen to some of the podcasts on which these episodes are based, you can find them all at pedagodzilla.com

‘Pedagodzilla is a refreshingly playful mash-up of learning theories and popular culture. Drawing on movies, tv shows, and video games, it exemplifies alternate perspectives of learning in a way that is accessible and fun as well as being academically rigorous. There are also many drawings of dinosaurs and at least three references to towels. What’s not to love?’
~ Prof. Nic Whitton, Professor of Digital Learning and Play, Northumbria University

‘This book lured me in with promises of Buffy and now I know the difference between ontology and epistemology! Shiny’
~ Daisy Abbott, Research Developer, Glasgow School of Art

‘The clue to this book’s magic is reflected in the name Pedagozilla. If you have some curiosity about learning and teaching plus a passing interest in science/ fiction and fantasy, then you will love this book … Key theories and their real-world applications are presented accurately and painlessly. You don’t feel the theories going in. The balance and range of ideas is well -judged and the Tips for Practice are insightful and useful … This is a highly original and insightful book that I greatly enjoyed reading, and will be recommending to friends, colleagues, and strangers at bus stops.’
~ Kieron Sheehy, Professor of Innovation Pedagogies, The Open University

Playful Learning: Monumental Consequence

Together with Mark Childs and Mike Collins, I ran a session on the Reacting to the Past game Monumental Consequence at Playful Learning 2023 in Leicester at the beginning of July.

Description

Is art ever worth dying for? In this role-playing game, an invading army has set up headquarters in a building containing priceless art, key to your cultural history. You must decide together – will you risk lives by trying to save the art, or will you simply bomb the church?

What will you be doing in this session:

This role-playing game, developed by Mary Beth Looney and Central Michigan University Press, introduces ‘Reacting to the Past’, an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games that promote engagement with big ideas. While participants must stick to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they are assigned, they must also express those ideas persuasively.

Participants take on a citizen’s role, perhaps as a seamstress, tavern owner, merchant, widow, militia member or other local. Each role has priorities, viewpoints, and alliances. Only some can be on the winning side. Together they must decide whether to ask the civic militia to risk their lives by taking on the enemy to save the town’s cultural heritage, or bomb the church.

Once assigned a role, players view locations and treasures, then introduce themselves. After the opening prompt has been read, they discuss what action to take, focusing on why the art is important to save, or why lives are more important. They then vote. A two-thirds majority leads to action, otherwise a dice throw triggers a random event, followed by more discussion, another vote and action.

When attendees leave this session they will have

Played a great game, thought deeply about different perspectives on cultural history, and know more about the Reacting to the Past pedagogy.

References, web links and other resources:

• Reacting to the Past https://reacting.barnard.edu/ – browse the games, sign up for an event (they tend to be in the USA), join the community and/or sign up for the newsletter.
• Reacting to the past on Twitter https://twitter.com/reactingttpast?lang=en
• An overview of Reacting to the Past, with videos, from the American HIstorical Association https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/reacting-to-the-past
• Chain Reactions – a reacting blog https://reactingconsortium.org/Blog
• Reacting to the Past gamebooks from the University of North Carolina Press
• Get your own copy of Monumental Consequence (25 USD) https://cmichpress.com/product/monumental-consequence-physical-edition/
https://uncpress.org/series/reacting-to-the-past/
• Artist and independent scholar Mary Beth Looney talks about her game, Monumental Consequence, and the value of art and monuments to the societies that create them (53 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy5idbhx-AE&ab_channel=BeyondSolitaire
• Barnard and Columbia undergraduates play “Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945” at Barnard College (5-minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U6L9ERzw0U&ab_channel=ReactingtothePast
• Students—with costumes and trumpet in hand—assume roles in the Athenian Assembly to debate issues as Athens reconstructs after the Peloponnesian War (2-minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clO0uvCgwlM&ab_channel=SmithCollege
• Webb, J. and Engar, A., 2016. Exploring Classroom Community: A Social Network Study of Reacting to the Past. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 4(1), p.n1.
• Lazrus, P.K. and McKay, G.K., 2013. 21: The Reacting to the Past Pedagogy and Engaging the First‐year Student. To Improve the Academy, 32(1), pp.351-363.
• Joyce, K.E., Lamey, A. and Martin, N., 2018. Teaching philosophy through a role-immersion game: Reacting to the past. Teaching Philosophy, 41(2), pp.175-198.

Pedagodzilla at Playful Learning

Along with Mike, Mark and Puiyin Wong, I was also involved in the Pedagodzilla podcast activity at the Playful Learning conference (the picture shows MIke Collins in conversation with Professor Nicola Whitton at the conference).

How does behaviourism help players ‘catch them all’ in Pokémon Go?

In August, I joined the Pedagodzilla team to make the connections between behaviourism and the augmented reality game Pokémon Go in a podcast episode.

In this episode I’m joined by the fabulous Professor Rebecca Ferguson, where we get Misty eyed, Brock the mold and Ash the tough questions (weak pun that one) as we explore behaviourism through the lens of Pokémon Go.

School’s out forever!

The Pedagodzilla podcast blends pedagogy with pop culture to explain complex ideas in an accessible way. Recent episodes include ‘Where Krathwohl meets Krang – Applying taxonomies through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle course design‘, ‘Why does Obi-Wan Kenobi lie to children?’ and, most recently, ‘School’s out forever! How does Problem based learning help Buffy the Vampire Slayer?‘

In the episode, Mike Collins, Mark Childs and I unpick problem-based learning and, as an added bonus, computational thinking. At the same time, we (re)introduce Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the petite blonde who went into the dark alley with the big bad – and kicked its ass (to paraphrase series creator, Joss Whedon). We then put the elements together, answer the question in the title, and discuss how you could apply these ideas to your own teaching without actually incinerating any buildings.

And how would you achieve that? You’ll have to listen to find out.