I’ve been working hard on an academic theory that I think is a fair, solid reflection of my discipline. As a new Assistant Professor, one of the things I have to do is sort of assemble a sense of my field. I’m in a hybrid, multi-layered area of study, so I wanted to work on an elevator pitch.
If you know me, you know that “elevator pitch” is like saying “slow death” to me. Slow dive to me? I love the utility of Twitter, but I don’t use it because that isn’t me. While I understand how to be professionally brief because I’m trained in that, I am not, by my nature, brief. I am, as I tell everyone, the child of storytellers, part of a grand tradition of using inductive reasoning and metaphor to get to my point.
But I have a truly elevator pitch style elevator pitch:
I am about making stuff.
I almost used the word shit, as in “I am about making shit,” but I wanted to be a little more professional.
Wait, no. I want that word for impact:
I am about making shit.
Now, let me expand it for if it’s not an “walking out of the elevator” pitch.
My cultural background is, at its core, about two things: making useful things and telling stories to hold history and create reality. As a games and Interactive Media scholar, I’m all about doing that with tools my ancestors didn’t have. I’m that new school Indian.
If you’ve seen my work, you’re probably thinking “wait, wait… you’re the game THEORY guy in your program.” And that’s true. For a field that isn’t as big on making it’s own theory, I’m a theory head. But here’s what makes this an interesting thing: I do not believe in theory without practice. I don’t think theory is worth anything if you can’t apply it.
And from a cultural standpoint, I cannot imagine the use of theory that doesn’t let you make something. Cherokee are makers. Most gamers are also makers. Game theory, while important– super important to me– is mostly about understanding how games work so you can make games. In my game theory introduction class, the students have to pull apart a video game and make a tabletop game out of the core of it. Because understanding how it works (the ultimate theory, IMHO– idea dissection) is useless, again IMHO, without then employing it.
And so that’s what my niche is. That’s my place in the academy. I want to help other people learn how to create things. I trade in critical thinking, adaptability, break-it-to-make-it, fail fast and fail again. I love iteration and I love making people dig into something, to look at it from multiple angles, to ask why things are what they are.
Some people think the key to the future is teaching code. That was the fight in my last discipline, in professional writing, as traditionalists feared the coming of mandatory classes in HTML. I taught those classes… but they weren’t classes on HTML. They were classes on how to use HTML.
Some people think the key to the future is training for the “new economy.” I like that phrase, but I don’t know what it means. It’s buzzy. I’ll use it. I know people like it. It has rhetorical force.
Some people think the future is STEM, STEM, STEM. I can’t deny that STEM is important, as I see jobs lingering open while people from the humanities linger jobless.
But here’s what I think the key to the future is. The key to the future is the same key that we had in the past, the one the academy lost somewhere along the way. There’s that stereotype of the renaissance man (gendered, because that’s how those scholars were), the person who can do many things. The triple threat! That was the old key. And it’s the new key. It’s always been the only key.
The key to the future is being able to think critically, adapt, knowing how to evaluate and to create meaning and to make stuff.
That’s all you have to do if you want to educate people well. Teach them to make stuff, and teach them to figure out how good the stuff they make is. Teach them to take something and break it down and make it better. Teach them to understand how users approach a thing, to understand how multiple audiences see a thing.
And make shit. Just make shit. I’ve taught classes on how to make Cherokee baskets. I taught a unit on how to make paper planes and a unit from that on how to make directions to make paper planes. We’ve made games. We’ve made posters. We’ve made videos. We’ve written songs, made podcasts, made mix tapes, remixed everything we could find.
Because that’s how you learn. You have to be doing. Reading is good. I’m a writer. I want people to read.
But doing trumps reading.
And listening and doing while someone is explaining and doing, then turning to someone else and explaining while you’re both doing, is teaching. That’s the pure stuff. Mainline it.
So yeah. I’m Phill Alexander, and I’m all about making shit.