Syllabus-revamping time this year coincides with the last few quiet, pre-soccer-season weekends available for paint-balling with my son. With both BT Omegas and class prep on the brain, thought I’d reach out for ideas on how to integrate class trips to the arena into a course on the laws of war.
I’ve done this once before, when I taught “War and Gender” back at Drake University. In that case, the students organized it as an experiment in sex-specific tactics on the field. They ran variations, pitting all male and all-female teams against one another, or working in mixed-gender teams. It was voluntary, so more boys showed up, though the girls who self-selected in were just as likely to beat the boys. There was also some ‘finding’ that teams with girls on them were more cooperative and less devil-may-care. I used it mostly to help them think critically about making inferences from small-N non-controlled experiments, but it was also great to see them self-organize some class-related fun.
I’ve also known a colleague or two to use paintball a little more systematically as a pedagogical tool. At the same time, I don’t know how common this is and haven’t seen an article in International Studies Perspectives or anything describing the value or pitfalls of this approach for different kinds of classes.
So my bleg is three-fold.
1) First, have any Duck writers or readers used paintball pedagogically (or been in a class where it was used) and if so how did the prof make it work as a teaching tool (v. just a fun class-building activity)?
2) Second, is anyone aware of scholarly articles or resources on using paintball to teach international relations, international security, or military affairs? (I’m certain there are military and law enforcement training materials that use paintball to teach small-unit tactics, but what I’m looking for is pedagogical strategies for supplementing liberal arts political science courses with paintball for students who like to study war but may have never picked up a gun.)
3) Any specific ideas on teaching Rules of War in particular through paintball? The course is about the Geneva Conventions and more broadly the role of ethical norms in armed conflict. Here’s a link to last year’s syllabus.
4) If you think this is a horrible idea (particularly as a required activity) please expound.
Can I take your class?
It depends. What kind of paintball gun do you own?
Believe it or not, I have absolutely no paintball experience at all. It is a part of my education that is sorely lacking. Need to add it to my bucket list (https://saideman.blogspot.com/2011/08/geek-bucket-list.html). Checked off diving this year, high ropes courses a few times the past couple of years. Paintball is obviously next.
Regardless of whether or not it is a “good idea,” you will almost certainly have to check with the University OLC before assigning it as either voluntary or mandatory. I would be shocked if you could make it mandatory without opening you and/or UMass open to a lawsuit.
Doh!
Agreed. You could consider adding it as a 1 credit Honors supplement to the main course. Students who have no desire to participate would not be in a position where they would feel compelled to “volunteer” for any reason (e.g., not doing well in the main course), as performance and participation the supplemental course would have no bearing on the grade for the main course and they would have had to have signed up before the end of add/drop.
I wish you had done this in the Spring. :-)
Ah, this is a great idea, thanks Wes.
If I manage to integrate it, you can join us! :)
I have a nerf-gun and I fire it to taunt my colleagues. One of my students actually wrote us a peace treaty. TEACHING AWARD PLEASE!!!Â
Also, although there is a paintball complex in the heart of central London, I’m not convinced that this would really work outside of a (North) American context.
The idea of a game in which people point guns at each other, however harmlessly, bothers me somewhat. Partly for the same reason, I’m not a big fan of Civil War (or other) battle re-enactments. It’s one thing to suggest that people who study war/peace have some acquaintance with the technical or other aspects of real weaponry; but paintball, on the basis of my limited knowlege of it, seems to be little more than a live-action version of a video game.
“knowledge” not “knowlege”
Hmm. Interesting point. I actually wouldn’t argue that using paintball equipment teaches much in terms of actual firearms technique. I was hoping being in a field scenario might have something to teach in terms of the cognitive processes at play in a “live-fire” situation, and how that would affect the implementation of ethical norms that we study in the abstract. Maybe it wouldn’t even work for that…
I’m with LFC in feeling a little uneasy with “pointing guns at other people for credit.” Plus, if you get hit with a paintball, it hurts, and “pain for credit” strikes me as a problem for the university, as well as a problem for student reactions. For my money, if I wanted students to get a sense of “live fire” experiences, I’d have them play a team FPS of some sort.
In my intro World Politics class students play a modified Risk game I created called “Diplomatic Risk,” in which there are some structured negotiations and varying victory conditions (since Risk as written is basically an all-offensive-realist all-the-time world conquest game). Besides the fact that it’s wicked fun to play, the reason I feature this game in my class is because I want people to get an experience of trying to achieve objectives in a situation of intense strategic interdependence, not because I think Risk (even my mod) is a particularly good representation of how world politics works (although my version is better than the out-of-the-box version for that purpose too). I could have achieved the same objective with something that looked less like “world politics,” but it’s an easier sell for a World Politics class than, say, having everyone play Chess or Go or Hearts or whatever. (After all, _Wargames_ taught us that you can learn about global thermonuclear war by playing tic-tac-toe, right?) My point is that the pedagogical value of the exercise is, I think, more about the experiential shape of a conceptual domain than it is about empirical accuracy or mechanisms that might actually be at play in the field.
Not quite sure about the ‘not inflicting pain’ argument. Good learning always comes with some form of pain, and whether that is mental or physical seems of less relevance to me. Its ‘learning through experience’, which goes beyond cognition, I like that. It provides a new dimension (did your strategy change with the perspective of actually feeling some pain? ) and a source for reflection on the nature of knowledge.
Yes, I buy that. Thanks for pressing me to be more precise: what makes me uneasy about the paintball exercise is that I am not sure what purpose the pain serves. I am fine with pain that is, shall we say, functional, as when one of my colleagues teaching a literature class on extremes takes her class to a high ropes course — pain and soreness and probably humiliation is a virtual certainty for at least some of the students, but it teaches something about limits and confronting them. Learning is often painful, but I think that we as teachers have an obligation not to cause pain needlessly.
FWIW, I play in a tank top, and don’t find getting hit particularly painful. But then I guess one externality of studying what I study is that I keep perspective. I guess part of the purpose of the exercise is to give students perspective.Â
That said, it’s all in how students would perceive it, so it’s true that if they might perceive this as an unfair and unnecessary infliction of pain or risk then that might undermine any teaching advantages. I guess making it voluntary rather than required would be a minimum safeguard…
I re-read this and it sounds much snarkier than I intended. Apologies; wasn’t trying to imply that anyone in this thread lacks ‘perspective.’ Wish I could edit comments in Disqus…
If I were teaching a course on battlefield strategy I might think about paintball for precisely these reasons. But most of what I teach is about argument and the complex challenges of encountering others; for that purpose I am not sure that the pain would be warranted. And I would certainly not want to introduce even the possibility that someone in the class might use the paintable activity and the pain it can cause to get revenge for something that happened in the classroom — that might create a very chilling atmosphere, and I’d want to avoid accidentally creating that. It’s difficult enough to create a safe classroom speaking space as it is!
Is there any way that one could find out how you play you version of risk? Â Sounds interesting and could be useful.
Mshirk, I am going to write a pedagogical article — probably for ISP — about this exercise after I run it again this semester, and at that point I’ll post the modified rules on kittenboo.com and link to it from Duck. The basic idea is that I supplement the usual Risk sequence of get armies — take territory — fortify with “negotiate the order of play and deliver World Council resolutions” preceding that sequence and “declare your diplomatic status with respect to other teams” after it. Plus, teams have individualized victory conditions, and a few other surprises …
Thanks! I look forward to it!
Am reposting a suggestion from my brother (a non-academic unattuned to OLS issues but an avid paint-baller):Â
“Something that might work is putting everyone on a small field and then observing how many people ask for close range surrenders vs shooting people point blank (something you know all about :p ) . The rules say ask for a surrender…however the target does not have to surrender, which puts the risk on the attacker. Coupled with the fact that its instinctive to turn towards loud noise like someone yelling “SURRENDER!” and its also instinctive to assume someone turning on you with a gun in their hands is a threat, there is plenty of “grey” area here to evaluate. Things to look at and evaluate might be… % of attackers who ask for surrenders vs shooting point blank% of those asked who surrender% of those asked who kill the attacker after being asked to surrender% of those asked to surrender who are then shot Not sure how you would monitor all those things…one way would just be to have a debrief at the end and ask people to share their stories…”Thoughts on this? Bear in my what I’m trying to teach is a) something about the conditions under which ethical norms trump pure cost-benefit analysis, and how to know this empirically and b) how challenging the implementation of such norms is in field conditions associated with armed conflict.At same time FWIW, I found today this interesting article, which suggests that trying to teach students lessons about the real world by extrapolating from simulated exercises may be a nonstarter… https://jcr.sagepub.com/content/50/5/757.short
What about allowing students who didn’t want to play paintball to participate as neutral observers? I’m not sure if the area you go to is set up for this–but if it has sidelines, they could watch the game as the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc. You could run some rounds with observers and some without and see if it changed paintball players’ behaviors.