Powerpoint:

creates a format that

* encourages a hierarchy of bulleted notes
* is in a specific predetermined sequential order
* cannot respond to student inquiries

helps the presenter remember their notes

* while often doing great harm to the presentation

encourages students to

* remember key points
* let the professor decide which points should be “key”
* give the correct “answer” as decided by the professor

engourages the use of ridiculous icons that distract the audience

is trapped in linear “slideshow” mode, under-utilizing the possibilities of digital presentation

Edward Tufte has written extensively on the evils of PowerPoint and its effects on our communication and cognition. He begins a Wired magazine article with the catchy phrase, “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Tufte specifically addresses the dangers of PowerPoint in teaching:

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

Just for fun, check out Peter Norvig’s great PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address that illustrates these points.

Of course, PowerPoint has many uses, and while it may have a tendency towards low-resolution, non-interactive, unilinear, information-poor presentations, the real outcome is up to the user. (I have not seen it, but apparently David Byrne has elevated PowerPoint to an art form.)

Personally, I have found the possibilities for technology in the classroom to be tremendous, but I have always found PowerPoint very limiting. Here I would like to briefly share with you a PowerPoint alternative, and hopefully start a discussion where we can share ideas for other PowerPoint alternatives as well as better uses of PowerPoint itself.

As an alternative to PowerPoint, I build a very simple website for each day of class using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is almost as easy as simple to use as PowerPoint, but allows for almost unlimited flexibility.

Here is a screenshot of how my presentations look:

While very simple, the key advantage this layout gives me is the menu on the left side. The menu has links to pictures, short video clips, music, outside webpages, and explanatory pages. This frees me from a total linear presentation, allowing me to jump around through my material to respond to student inquiries. This allows me to run class more like an engaging conversation rather than a dragging lecture.

A Brief Tutorial

I cannot possibly cover all the ways to use Dreamweaver. If you have never used it before, there are some great tutorials here.

To begin, create a folder for your lecture. I name mine by the date, starting with the year so that they end up in order when I sort them by name (e.g. “060411Art” was the name of the folder for today’s lecture on art.) As you create your content, make sure that you keep all of the files you are using in this folder. When you are ready to go to class you will just copy this folder onto a flash drive and take it with you. Any images or video files need to be in the folder or they will not be accessible during your lecture. (Alternatively, you could load your files onto a server and access them via internet, but then you have to be concerned about connection speeds, etc.).

The first file you will create is the frameset (full tutorial here). The frameset defines the layout of your presentation. I like to have a “menu” frame and a “content” frame. You only need to create the frameset once. After that you will be able to just copy and paste it into any new lecture folder you create. I call my frameset “start.htm” because that is what I need to click on to start the lecture.

I make the left frame just wide enough for a menu and no bigger. Along with links, I can also embed sound clips and music in this menu as well, making them accessible at all times. I like to have a song to play while people are coming in that somehow relates to the day’s material, as well as other sound clips or songs that are useful to illustrate points during the lecture.

You can also create a third frame at the top for additional links. If you use Firefox or Opera, you can also preload multiple tabs with useful information so you can jump instantly to pertinent information as it is brought up in class. You might also keep a few tabs loaded with Google, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, and other useful reference sites that can help you respond to student enquiries and give them a sense of the exciting quest learning can be.

Instead of PowerPoint “slides,” you now create simple webpages. Your options are almost unlimited here, so I can’t possibly cover all of them. Personally, I like to keep text and bullet point pages to a minimum, while making extensive use of audio and visual material. The possibilities are limited only by the capabilities of the browser you are using, and in that sense, they are not only enormous (and far greater than PowerPoint), they are also growing quickly.

If a multi-linear presentation sounds too chaotic (and it can be), you can use the left menu as a rough outline and still proceed through your lecture in a linear fashion, but always with the option of jumping forwards, backwards, or sideways as needed. If you choose a linear presentation, the left menu serves the additional function of showing the students where they have been and where they are going during the lecture.

I’m sure this is too incomplete to set you off and running with Dreamweaver, but I hope it is enough to spark a conversation on PowerPoint alternatives. I suspect there are many readers of this blog who have come up with some great ideas for PowerPoint alternatives as well as alternative uses for PowerPoint. If you have any great ideas, please share!

So how do our students view these problems and what do they plan on doing about them? Some students are well aware of these issues and are seriously engaged in finding solutions. Unfortunately, the more common perception among students is that these problems are not theirs to solve. Technology will take care of the environmental problems and those in poverty should take care of themselves. “We” are rich because we are smart, hard-working, and have our head on straight. “They” are poor because they are lazy, not smart, and probably corrupt. In short, our system works. Their systems do not. There is little recognition that “our system” might in some ways depend on those of others and vice versa – that perhaps there is ultimately only one system after all, the world system.

It is almost impossible to say all that and keep the attention of those who don’t want to hear it. These are statements that are destined to always be preached to the choir and not far beyond. Fortunately these statements are really secondary to what we really need from our students: good questions that will drive them to understand more about our world and become active and responsible global citizens working to ensure our clock keeps ticking.

The World Simulation is designed to point the way to the questions, while only tentatively suggesting a few answers. It attempts to bring the entire world into one single room to give students a brief glimpse into how the world works, what the problems are, and how the conditions of one human group are profoundly dependent on the conditions of other human groups, even if those groups may be separated by vast oceans.

In this post I will lay out the basic rules of the simulation. Unfortunately I cannot reveal too much because the simulation relies heavily on an element of surprise and some students may find their way to read this.

The Basics

The simulation is made up of 4 or 5 interaction rounds. Each interaction round runs for about 12 minutes followed by a 3 minute intermission allowing students to take account of what has occurred and to see if they can “feed themselves.” The main rule of the simulation is very simple: in order to survive, at the end of each round each student must have a piece of food (cereal) to eat. This will require either land (represented by a cereal box from which the student can get food) or money to buy food from others. If a student cannot eat at the end of the interaction, their death is marked as a “famine” by the “cultural historian” (see below) and the death decreases the total population of the culture by 5%. The student who starved must go to a nearby land as a refugee and hope for the best.

After the intermission, there is a 3 minute “news update” which I use to draw connections to real world events that are currently being simulated. The news is an audio-visual extravaganza complete with commercials advertising some of the new products being created by emerging imperialists.

At the beginning of the simulation, each group has at least 3 things: a box of cereal representing their “land,” envelopes to be opened at the beginning of each round (providing various challenges or instructions), and a collection of colored notecards representing various resources or goods that they can trade with others (these can represent many things depending on their ethnography, but some examples are white = salt, green = plant materials, orange = obsidian, and pink = shells).

All the props cost me just over $100. The most important props are boxes of cereal. There are three types of cereal in the simulation, each one of them profoundly symbolic. Fruit Loops represent a rich, varied, and nutritious diet. I’m aware of the irony of this, but the multiple colors are what set them apart. Cocoa Puffs represent luxury consumption goods such as cocoa, coffee, sugar, and tobacco. Cheerios represent large-scale monocrop cultivation. Of course, almost as soon as the simulation begins all of the cereals begin to take on different meanings for different people, which is exactly how it should be.

Each culture also has one sacred item, usually represented by a stuffed animal. The meanings they attach to this are up to them.

Populations are adjusted to represent the estimated population of the world in 1450 CE (about 400 million). The population automatically grows in each interaction, simulating the real world’s population growth so that we end the 2nd to last round with 6.2 billion people. (The last round is a special “future projection” round in which we try to solve all of the problems we have created.) Throughout the simulation the population of each group may increase or decrease based on famine, disease, or a shift to a new subsistence pattern (e.g. industrial agriculture would increase the “carrying capacity” and thereby increase the population).

Based on the ethnographies, I create mobility maps for each group showing where they are able to travel. Anybody who travels must carry a mobility map with them and cannot go beyond the boundaries that their mobility map sets for them.

I select 3-5 groups who seem to be on the verge of seeking other areas to explore or colonize. They are given full mobility to travel the entire world and a separate set of instructions with a box of materials that facilitate the colonization of other lands. Their materials include colored flags to mark their conquests, various tools and materials to facilitate production of luxury goods, money, and a special map that tells them where certain luxury goods will grow and where they will not (so Cocoa Puffs only grow in certain areas, Fruit Loops grow better in some areas than others, etc.). I can’t reveal those materials or instructions here because much of the simulation depends on an element of surprise that forces students to find solutions to emerging issues or capitalize on the opportunities given. Starting in the second round, these three groups are also required to find fossil fuels (represented by yellow notecards) to power their industrial revolution. They need to turn in one yellow card at the end of each round or they lose half of their hard power. There are not enough yellow cards in the room to last until the end of the last round (representing 100 years into the future).

Those with money can participate in the world market exchange – a table in the front of the room where groups can exchange money, natural resources and hard power. Exchange rates change throughout the simulation to simulate technological developments, scarcity, and other factors.

Hard Power & the Rules of War

Each culture starts with a certain amount of hard power with which to launch attacks or protect themselves. Hard power is represented on small cards with numbers ranging from 0 to 1,000,000. Each culture has as many as 50 hard power cards with different numbers on them. The total amount of hard power a culture starts with depends on their population, technology, and other relevant cultural factors. When traveling a student should carry some of this hard power with them either for protection or conquest, however they have to strategize because taking too much depletes the amount of hard power others in the group can carry or could leave the homeland completely unprotected. Alliances can also be made, allowing one culture to draw on the hard power of the other and vice versa.

A battle begins when somebody from one culture challenges another. Both sides quickly decide how much hard power they want to use in the first battle and place these cards in their right hand. At the count of 3 each side shows the other the hard power they are holding in their right hand. The side with the most hard power wins the battle and gets all of the hard power expended by the other culture. The war is over when one side surrenders or is completely out of hard power. Terms of surrender are negotiable between the two warring parties but may include a right to hold on to some hard power, money, land rights, etc.

The winner occupies the land and then acts as a colonizer or occupier. The colonizer can tax the people, take the land, force people into labor, or force them to grow different crops.

Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

As I said before, I cannot reveal too much, but this is how the simulation has typically gone in the past 3 trials:

We start by arranging the tables in the room to match our world map as closely as possible:

Emerging colonial powers almost immediately begin exploration and colonization and have colonized most of the world by the end of the second round.

Colonizers often attempt to completely transform local economies. They tax or take the land (the box of Fruit Loops), forcing the local people to work for money to survive. This not only creates a cheap labor pool, it also creates a market for their exports (Cheerios). They use the cheap labor to manufacture luxury goods (Cocoa Puffs and Fruit Loop necklaces).

As the simulation proceeds, the colonies begin to acquire an emerging sense of nationalism and a growing population. Eventually they overthrow their colonizer, or the colonizer finds it too difficult to manage the colony. There are often several atrocities during this phase of the simulation that send refugees to other lands. Several new nation-states also form during this time.

Even as processes of decolonization set people “free,” they still find that they are dependent on a global system of trade in which they are working for low wages and spending all of their money on goods exported from previous colonial centers. The world system of the real world maps onto our simulated world:

Prior to the final round, students are asked to look around at the world they have created. We take a quick survey to determine how our numbers compare to those of the real world. Like the real world, over half of the people in our world are working for very little money and struggle to find enough food to eat. I announce that there are not enough yellow cards to power the fossil fuel economy through the next round. When they open their envelopes for the final round, they find more problems.

The last round often inspires valiant efforts to solve the world’s problems. Some students try to create expansive alliances with other low-wage laborers to drive wages hire. Others stage protests and beg for empathy from the colonizers.

In our simulation, they have only 10 minutes to think through solutions – a trivial amount of time. The solutions we create are likewise trivial. But the questions the simulation inspires are not. And if students leave the simulation asking questions they didn’t ask before the simulation, or begin asking questions in different ways, there is no telling what might happen. Maybe it will inspire them to keep that clock ticking afterall.

I first thought about doing the world simulation when I discovered the Pandya-Chispa game used by the Peace Corps (with other variations used in various leadership and diversity training seminars). In this activity, people are split into two groups and each group gets their own handout describing their “cultural norms” which tell them how to interact with outsiders. The two groups then try to interact using their different cultural norms, resulting in misunderstandings, difficulties, etc. This creates a platform to discuss the challenges and importance of effective cross-cultural communication. I used this game with my students as an “ice breaker” and then started wondering what it might look like if we just expanded it to simulate the entire world.

About 6 months ago I discovered I wasn’t the only one who has ever tried this kind of thing. Starting in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller created a “World Game” which is similar to the simulation we do here. Fuller created the game with the noble cause of critiquing “cold war games” by challenging participants to find a way to make “the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or the disadvantage of anyone.” The development of his World Game has since been picked up by o.s. Earth, which will do a Global Simulation Workshop for you for $3,500 – $8,000. From what I can see on their website, the simulation looks great, but it is designed for 3 hours rather than a full semester. Because of this, it misses out on the most important part of the simulation. As my TA Kevin Champion noted, most of the learning comes from building it, setting it up, and designing it, not in its performance. While I provide guidance in the form of lectures, readings, handouts, and basic rules, most of the actual construction of our imaginary world is done by the students themselves.

I have found that every little piece of the simulation raises questions for the students and me. I find myself asking questions and pursuing information I would have never otherwise pursued, and it all feels extraordinarily relevant and important because it is all fitting into that big picture question about how the world works and why it is the way it is. Why are some people so rich and others so poor? Are the two related? In what ways? How can it be that we produce enough food to go around and yet some people are starving? How will we, as the human species, survive the next 100 years (or 1,000 or 10,000 or 1 million years)? It’s like taking Yali’s Question and pursuing it both as it was taken by Jared Diamond (How the West won) and how it was (more correctly) understood by Gewertz and Errington (Why the West thinks they won and how they – perhaps unconsciously – ensure that they keep on “winning”). All the while I’m wondering (and I hope my students are also wondering) whether or not these are really the right questions to be asking – or if there might not be better, more productive questions to ask.

Questions loom over every single aspect of the simulation, and because I do not know everything and the simulation attempts to simulate everything, I am in the wonderful but awkward position of not knowing what I am doing but blissfully learning along the way. My job becomes less about teaching, and more about encouraging students to join me on a quest.

It all starts with the map, which itself is full of questions. Buckminster Fuller knew the importance of drawing a map one way rather than another. In Fuller’s game, they use Fuller’s own super-cool Dymaxion projection of our real world which does not distort the continents, has no culturally biased “up” or “down” and can be folded in numerous ways to show multiple perspectives. If I ever do use a real world map, it will be that one, but for now I have decided to stick with an imaginary world in order to release the class from attempting to “imitate” world history rather than “simulate” it.

Drawing an imaginary map also has the advantage of forcing me and the students to ask questions, which is what this is all about. The big question here is this: What geographical features are most relevant to performing a reasonable simulation? That is, what geographical features played a role in shaping human history that was significant enough to include on the map?

The first semester I tried this in Fall 2004, we were restricted in our map-making by the fact that we had to use the classroom – which basically looks like a large movie theater with 492 immoveable seats and a stage. We decided to make the aisles between the seats “oceans” and “waterways” while the seats and stage became land masses. Due to these constraints, the first map came out looking like this (with each box in the right-hand image representing a different section taught by a TA):

Although we were constrained, we still found ways to include a number of very small but important features in this map that I cannot enumerate here, but just as an example, we intentionally created a land bridge through the lower middle of the room so that those racing to colonize the world would need to race to find a way to build a canal (such as the Suez or Panama).

Since then, I have gained more support for the project, and we now do the simulation in our Union Ballroom, a large open area that allows us much more flexibility. We can put chairs and tables representing land masses wherever we want in the room, giving us more options for how we draw the map. (You will notice I use the word “we” a lot. This is to indicate that anything “I” do as part of the simulation is always tentative and requires student approval and/or revision). In its most recent incarnation, the map looks like this:

As you can see, the world is divided into a number of different biomes that are reasonably realistic. The shape of the continents is also important, thanks to Jared Diamond’s book which has already been thoroughly discussed here on Savage Minds. After reading Diamond’s book I decided to create one continent with an east-west axis and one with a north-south axis. I am not fully convinced of Diamond’s argument on this point, but I am convinced he has raised an interesting question (raised by others before him), which I like to bring in as part of the discussion. (If any of you know of other resources that could help me add to this I would love to hear about them – and an absolutely devastating critique of using Diamond in this way would also be welcome.)

From the moment the map is introduced, students are asked to imagine themselves within their own particular environment. They are required to do some outside research on their biome and begin to imagine exactly what kinds of vegetation and wildlife they have in their environment.

While all group members should be a part of constructing each aspect of their culture, one person is assigned to each section and is responsible for writing a 500 word ethnography section to contribute to the group’s final ethnography. Sections include communication styles, gender roles, subsistence, exchange, family and household, marriage, kinship, social organization, political organization, art, and religion among others. The resulting ethnography is far too functionalist by today’s standards, but the format serves obvious practical purposes (each student is responsible for part of the final product), and I will admit that I think functionalism can play an important role in helping students understand that different aspects of culture need to be understood in broader cultural contexts. (Again, I welcome critique on this point.)

Each major section takes about one week to cover. I lecture for about 100 minutes/week with the other 50 minutes left for students to apply what they have learned in the construction of their cultures. I have considered changing this ratio (and have even toyed with the idea of abandoning lecture altogether) but the mixture of methods has been effective enough to this point that I am afraid of making such a major revision.

Even the order in which I cover the topics raises important questions. Whatever goes first may be interpreted as being the most important because all decisions the students make about their culture will ultimately be at least partially determined by the first. Starting with subsistence may imply cultural materialism, starting with social structure could imply a crude structural-functionalism, etc. Again, the simple solution is just to let the students in on the question. I let them know why the decision is so difficult and that while every aspect of culture is in someway related to the others, we have to start somewhere.

Ultimately, for the simple reason that the textbook proceeds from infrastructure through superstructure, I follow suit, and it has some nice unintentional payoffs for the simulation.

We begin with communication styles as a way of breaking the ice. I ask them to create special greetings to use among themselves. These serve as micro-rituals of integration and help build a sense of community. Some of these micro-rituals are ridiculously silly, but they serve the important purpose of opening the students up to one another.

The section on subsistence sends us into an exploration of Diamond’s version of Yali’s Question (but not just Diamond’s answers) – exploring 13,000 years of various changes in subsistence strategies to determine what subsistence patterns might predominate in different areas of our simulated world. I then use the exchange section as a way of critiquing Diamond by introducing the difference between gifts and commodities (pointing out that Yali may have been more concerned with how his worth as a human being was perceived by Europeans rather than the worth of the cargo itself). I also use this as an opportunity to foreshadow at least part of the big picture we want to simulate through a discussion of “Coca-Colanization” (using clips from “The Cola Conquest” featuring Sid Mintz) – demonstrating how market economies are spreading and how that affects people in different ways throughout the world.

From subsistence and exchange we move on to various aspects of social structure (family and household, kinship, stratification, etc.). The great learning moment of this process comes when students realize that they cannot even make the decision they are currently trying to make because they have not yet made future decisions. For example, they may discover that their family and household structure not only depends on their subsistence strategies but also on their core values and political organization which we have not yet discussed by that point. This causes great concern and confusion among the students (which is great!). They get stressed, begin to hate me and the whole project, and then it suddenly all comes together and all is good again.

The next great learning moment is when they realize that they not only need to know more about themselves, but also more about others and how they might relate to them. So they begin to understand the importance of interconnections even before the simulation begins.

From social and political organization we move on to a discussion of religion, cultural values, and ideologies which provide a perfect capstone. This final discussion allows the students to provide themselves with guidelines for how they will represent themselves and act in the simulation. I ask them to make a strong effort to abandon their Kansan habits, values, and ideologies and really try to get into character.

For the simulation to work, there needs to be at least one final ritual to ensure the people in each group are comfortable with one another and ready to act out their culture. In the past, I have asked students to invent their own ritual that expresses their core identity to the rest of our world and perform it in front of the class. What they do is of little importance. What matters is that they have a bonding experience. This was very effective, but a few groups created videos instead and these actually served the purpose even better because it forced the students to get together outside of class and do something fun together. This semester I am assigning videos for all groups but may switch back if it doesn’t work out. The videos will be shown the day before the actual simulation, as a way for people to see the whole world that we have created and begin to imagine what might happen on the big day.

So that’s roughly how we create our world. As one student once joked just before the simulation, “It took us 13 weeks to create this world. We’ll destroy it within an hour.” More on that hour in the next post …

This little corner of the blogosphere seems to be the perfect place to begin a discussion about some rather strange teaching habits I have picked up in the past couple years. Lately I find myself doing such bizarre activities in the classroom that I can scarcely refer to myself as a “teacher.” So this is my “anti-teaching” philosophy, illustrated with a short description of the “World Simulation,” a massive class activity that provides the primary structure for my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course here at Kansas State University. On the surface, the World Simulation appears to be little more than “just a game” but underneath is a good deal of theory – both pedagogical and anthropological – which I look forward to discussing here over the next two weeks.

The Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course here is – in a word – huge. It is taught in 2 formats (rotating Spring/Fall) – one with 200 students, the other 400. I once thought the large size was outrageous and probably unique, but have since discovered that such large classes are commonplace, especially at state schools. The rest of this short description will probably also sound familiar to many of you if you replace “Kansas” with your own state. About half of the students are from rural Kansas while the other half are from suburbia. Very few of them have any significant experience with cultural diversity. Most of the students have never traveled outside of the United States and many have never left Kansas. There are usually only a handful of majors in the class, and about two handfuls of students who know what “anthropology” is before they walk in on the first day. The class fulfills several requirements, so many students arrive with the hope of putting forth the minimal effort required to get the grade and get out. I used to think of all this as a tremendous challenge – perhaps even somewhat hopeless. Now I see it as an opportunity, and an advantage. Anti-teaching seems to thrive on chaos.

Disclaimer: Before I go much further in my description of “anti-teaching” I might say that I do not recommend it for everybody, nor do I think anti-teaching is necessarily superior to teaching. Both must co-exist, for together they are greater than the sum of their parts. If you are a “teacher” please do not take offense to my anti-teaching philosophy. All I am attempting to provide is a necessary companion to traditional teaching.

Teaching is about providing good information. Anti-teaching is about inspiring good questions. Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it struck me that if we are ultimately trying to create “active lifelong learners” with “critical thinking skills” and an ability to “think outside the box” it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where to start. I have read and heard a great deal of advice on how to ask good questions of students – non-rhetorical, open-ended, etc. – but nobody has ever told me anything about how to get students to ask good questions.

When I talk about “good questions,” I mean the kind of questions that force students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. Oftentimes the answer to a good question is irrelevant – the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to the best questions is another good question. And so the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.

Unfortunately such great questions are rarely asked by students, especially in large mandatory introductory courses. Much more common are administrative questions such as, “What do we need to know for this test?” This may be the worst question of all. It reflects the fact that for many (students and teachers alike), education is a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create. I don’t think it is the student’s fault for asking this question. As teachers we have created and continue to maintain an education system that inevitably produces this question. If we accept Dewey’s notion that people learn what they do, the lecture format which is the mainstay of teaching (especially in large introductory courses) teaches students to sit in neat rows and to respect, believe, and defer to authority (the teacher). Tests often measure little more than how well they can recite what they have been told. Hoping to memorize only just as much as necessary to succeed on the test, they ask that question I never want to hear – the one exception to the rule that “there is no such thing as a bad question.” Frustrated with this question, and hoping to get my students to ask better questions, I decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that create lifelong learners rather than savvy test-takers.

Since I dedicated myself to this task, I have found myself slowly transforming from a teacher to an anti-teacher, developing methods that subvert the traditional lecture format and trying to create a learning environment more conducive to asking good questions. I eventually came to the conclusion that “teaching” is a hindrance to learning. The word, “teacher” in itself suggests that learning requires teaching. In fact, the best learning almost always occurs in the absence of a teacher, for it is then that students are free to pursue with great passion the questions that are meaningful and relevant to their own lives. Soon after I set out on this course I found a book that seemed to resonate with my philosophy, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. Borrowing from Marshal McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” Postman and Weingartner argue that the environment (or “medium”) of learning is more important than the content (the “message”) and therefor teachers should begin paying more attention to the learning environment they help to create. The emphasis is on “managing” this environment rather than teaching per se.

This is not in any way a cop out of “real” teaching. In fact, approaching a class of 400 as a “manager” is a tremendous task. It would be much easier to simply give in to tradition and deliver a standard lecture. But while the sheer numbers of students are a burden in one sense, there is also tremendous potential. Think of the knowledge and life experience that is in that single room, if only I could find a way to harness it! I wanted the students to be fully engaged, talking to one another, grappling with interesting questions, and exploring any and all resources to find answers (and more questions). I wanted them to really get a strong sense of the importance of what we discuss in cultural anthropology. I wanted them to expand their empathy, to actually try to experience the life-worlds of others. Above all, I wanted them to recognize their own importance in helping to shape an increasingly globally interconnected world society.

So that is why I set out to create the World Simulation. Students are asked to imagine the world in the classroom. We create a map that mimics the geographical, environmental, and biological diversity of our real world. The map is laid onto a map of the classroom, and students are asked to imagine themselves living in the environment that maps onto them. The class is divided into 15-20 groups of about 12-20 students in each group. Each group is challenged to create their own cultures to survive in their own unique environments.

The course is laid out in a fairly traditional way, proceeding from subsistence and exchange through kinship, social organization, political organization, and ending with religion and art (from infrastructure through social structure and ending with superstructure). I am not completely comfortable with this layout, for fear that the “message” may be that environment determines technology which determines social structure which in turn determines superstructure. Fortunately, this has not been the message. The creativity of the students in creating their cultures subverts any simple monocausal determinism (just as human creativity does in the real world). Environmental determinism is just one theory on the table as students try to create a reasonably realistic culture that could exist within their given environment. To add realism, students are required to provide comparisons to real life cultures at every step along the way, justifying why they have chosen to construct their culture in one way rather than another (sometimes creating elaborate histories to explain some unique characteristic). Three weeks before the end of the semester, all groups have completed their culture and submit a final ethnography to me. I read these over, and begin planning the main event: the world simulation.

The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It all takes place in large room where all of the “cultures” interact with one another with props for currencies, natural resources, and other elements that recreate the world system. I will explain this in more detail in a future post, but essentially we attempt to *simulate* (not “act out”) world history in an attempt to understand the underlying social and cultural processes that interconnect us all. The ultimate goal is to allow students to actually experience how the world system works and explore some of the most important questions now facing humanity such as those of global inequality, globalization, culture loss, environmental degradation, and in the worst case scenario, genocide.

The simulation is recorded on 5 roaming digital video cameras and edited into one final “world history” video using clips from “real world” history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together during the last week of class and have amazing moments together as we contemplate our world. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom – profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future … and one humanity. We find ourselves as co-creators of our world, and the future is up to us. It is in this environment that even the worst questions take on all the characteristics of the best: What do we need to know for this test?