The Worldview of Farmcraft

One thing that I've noticed in the repetitiveness of the program is that I'm beginning to contemplate and analyze little things a lot more. It's the same way in every learning environment: college students don't really start learning in their classes until they know where their classes are and they have the rhythm down; the first few days at work are spent figuring out the buildings, breakrooms, and workplace style. If your mind is too preoccupied with where to go and what to do, it doesn't have enough time to really consider the content. We are creatures of habit and creatures of ritual.

I'm comfortable with Farmcraft, and can therefore focus on content and interactions more than just trying to remember everything. I'm sure that when I teach my first Autumn Adventures I'm going to be spending a lot of time just trying to get it right, remember what to say, remember where to go.

Today, I started to think about what I was asking the students. For a number of stations I found myself asking, "what can we get from corn?" what can we get from chicken?" what can we get from apples?"

How utilitarian!

I tried catching myself a number of times and mentioning that we can also just get the pleasure of the thing itself, the intrinsic value.

During our class last semester we mentioned a number of worldviews/perspectives about the environment, including conservationist, utilitarian, preservationist, etc. My largest concern with teaching from such a utilitarian perspective is that it considers anything unusable as unimportant and leads to thinking that coal and oil are here only because "what can we get from it?".

Perhaps during the "what do we get from each animal" question-set I'll start asking it in a different way, perhaps "what would people on the farm keep/grow ______ for?" It asks the same thing without being quite as utilitarian.