Education and Entertainment Two sides of the same coin
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my name is naomi
and my work requires me to do many
different things
i make documentary films about social
and political themes
i design immersive and interactive
experiences through media
i have experimented with virtual reality
storytelling
and recently i am teaching myself
ludology
just the act of studying and playing
games
and i’m really lucky to be able to
follow my curiosity
it’s a fortunate place to be
but this approach also requires me to be
a lifelong student
i constantly need to learn new skills
upgrade and involve my thinking
but all this learning is self-initiated
that means that i don’t use school to do
them
i use the internet don’t write me off
just yet
back when i was in school i felt
demotivated
and uninspired like i didn’t have a
choice
over what i got to learn back then
learning for me was just a means to an
end
the end being exams i had this
dysfunctional belief
that my grades would determine my future
and i didn’t have very good grades and
so i didn’t feel entitled to the life
that i wanted
what i didn’t realize back then so
there’s never really an
end to learning especially in the world
we live in now
at the pace at which it is evolving we
constantly need to adapt
to new knowledge and new skills
so i had a bit of unlearning to do
it might be important at this point to
distinguish between learning and
schooling
the truth is that i wasn’t bad at
learning
it was just bad at learning in the way
that it was prescribed in school
and it isn’t just me this is the
experience of countless students out
there
even today there are some reasons for
this
our schooling system was built in a
different era
the industrial revolution had created a
need to rapidly teach
a lot of people very specific skills
create mass literacy and we
industrialized learning too
but we lost something in transition
we lost the ability to pay attention to
individuals
and their personal learning journeys
but the industrial revolution is done
and we live in a post google post
wikipedia age
on the internet reality is no longer
stagnant
lifeless unadaptive like how it is
in a textbook or a lecture
we now have the world’s information the
tip of our fingers
this is just indicative of how complex
our world has become
and to meet these challenges the 21st
century needs new skills
it requires us to be more creative while
solving problems
and not just following orders it
requires us to think more critically
about the information we consume not
really memorize it through root learning
anymore
we need to collaborate across
disciplines not to stay confined
in our neatly designated fields
we need to understand things effectively
in order to be able to communicate
at scale so when we have
already recognized all of this
why have our institutes fail to adjust
to these methods
let’s ask ourselves a question as a
community
one that would benefit not just us but
more importantly the generations that
come after us
how might we foster a better
relationship towards learning
through methods that meet the demands of
the 21st century
while being in a profession that is all
about creating experiences
and telling stories there have been some
interesting takeaways that i have had
and some of these takeaways might lend
itself
to enhancing education as we know it
have you noticed that adults and
children
alike never feel like it’s a chore when
they watch a movie
or play a sport or do something that’s
considered fun
this is what differentiates
entertainment from education
let’s take a look at films as a medium
everybody recognizes its capacity to
entertain us
to absorb us in its stories we need to
be able to acknowledge
that these stories have the power of
transmitting ideas
consciously or subconsciously through
its plot
or its characters we can relate to
perspectives
of those outside of ourselves and tap
into what is known
as empathy sure we can learn about the
histories of a place through a text
or hear about how climate change affects
us through a lecture
what we what but what we miss out on is
what is happening to people
under the surface the thing is that we
are hardwired to learn
through one another’s experiences
back in the stone age our ancestors
sat around a fire exchanging anecdotes
that were crucial to our survival and
reproduction
and that helped us navigate the world
think of stories as a vessel
that store and transmit crucial
learnings
or a map that indicates to us social
moral behavior
teaches us values in character but they
can also entertain us
delight us move us anger us make us
question
take for instance a documentary called
an insignificant man
this was the first film that i worked on
professionally
and it transformed the way i saw stories
forever
for those who don’t know the film
explores the rise
of a novice party called the aam agni
party
and the journey of a regular common man
known as arvin kejriwal
who becomes the first time chief
minister of delhi
we can all relate to the story of an
underdog fighting an
uphill battle that seems to have
overwhelming odds
right a story that leverages the human
experience
of struggling and overcoming something
that is larger than ourselves
and hence being a conduit for larger
ideas and conversations
in the screenings that we had across the
country film
actually triggered conversations such as
is democracy just limited to our ability
to vote
once in five years or is it more than
that
how much participation or regular people
should a democracy allow
we saw conversations like these opening
up not just among audiences in
india but worldwide audiences came from
countries that experienced
similar political upheavals and exchange
those stories with one another
imagine a whole political lesson be
broken down to students
through first-hand experiences of people
all around the world
can do discourse like this exist in the
pages for textbook
imagine how this approach through
stories would help
better in honing skills like
communication and critical thinking
civic engagement is a very important
topic but how we impart it to people
gets kind of boring students sit at
their desks
and learn definition after definition
but never learn
how this participation will affect and
change
every aspect of their lives
but imagine if these lessons were to be
imparted to students
by literally transporting them to a
historical event
that demonstrates these concepts that
completely engulfs them
immerses them we did exactly this with
virtual reality
this is a film called right to pray that
i worked on as an editor
it was the first ever vr documentary
that came out of india
and shows us a certain struggle for
rights and resources
the film puts you in the shoes of women
from shabarimala
who are fighting for the right to enter
places of worship
places that they have been barred from
because of patriarchal notions of purity
and tradition
to feel a part of that struggle to feel
like you’re encountering it
first hand can maximize empathy
we also made a virtual reality
experience called cast is not a rumor
which drops you in the center of dalit
protests that broke out
in gujarat once again
it encourages you to see the
perspectives of those
whose voices are otherwise unrepresented
in formal education
these stories give you the opportunity
to know yourself
by stepping outside your own mind and
seeing yourself in relation to the world
empathy is the driver for radical social
change
and that is going to be necessary for us
to transform our societies
visual storytelling mediums make ideas
durable
they act as a good segue to put into
context
information that might otherwise seem
remote and unrelatable to us at first
we just need to find ways to make
empathy more habitual in education
so we can help students answer the
question
so what why should i care
just like how humans are hardwired to
tell stories
we’re also hardwired to engage in play
you see games from the beginning
teach us how to pursue a goal and
different ways of approaching that goal
it provides us with tools and incentives
to either solve that mystery or win that
battle
or find that treasure similar behavior
can be observed
when you put a kid in a playground
let’s say that they’re climbing a jungle
gym for the very first time
and they figured out that they need to
climb all the way to the top
to be able to slide down
and once they have figured this out it’s
probable that they would do this again
and again but maybe this time
they would do something slightly
differently try another path
or another section of the jungle gym
they might fall
but they intuitively understand that
this failure is not
absolute because in play
there is no such thing as screwing up
it’s a safe and supportive environment
to try
test and tinker
i’m lucky to be in a professional
environment where every day feels like
what school should have felt like
i experiment with different mediums and
play around with my ideas
my current challenge is now
experimenting with how stories and games
can come together and act as a catalyst
for change
i’m building a story based game module
that could help tweens
teenagers and young adults build
critical thinking skills
when encountering fake news on the
internet
for some time now the internet has been
contaminated with misinformation and
disinformation
and we need to ask ourselves how often
do we question the source of our news
do we ask who is creating this
information we see on social media
or our whatsapp groups how often do we
end up passing along this information
without having critically analyzed it
the internet unlike school does not
adhere to a curriculum
of carefully crafted material
but if this was cool we would have all
failed that test
it’s nice to look at education and
entertainment in binaries
for one must support the other to
maximize engagement
and immersion but this also puts a lot
of responsibility on an entertainment
industry
that needs to see the value in their
stories in shaping
individual beliefs and societies
stories tend to promote harmful notions
of patriarchy
or violence or poor social conduct and
sexual conduct this just further cements
dysfunctional beliefs
that our society already struggles with
if we simply looked at entertainment
with the same length of responsibility
that we do to education
the quality of the content that we
create in demand as a country
would automatically improve
so today if i would like to leave you
with any singular thought
it would be that education and
entertainment are not two separate
entities
but two sides of the same coin modern
media
we have the responsibility as lifelong
learners
to demand better stories better ideas
and better values from both our
education
and entertainment systems in our country
thank you
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