Ron Stadsklev

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About Ron Stadsklev
About Ron Stadsklev
Biographical notes about the author (or in this case the author-compiler) are usually provided to 1) inflate the author's ego, 2) satisfy the reader's curiosity, 3) assure the reader of the author's credentials, or even 4) guarantee his authenticity, that he believes and lives what he wrote. Though we hope here to satisfy all these objectives, we also hope to 5) offer evidence that a life lived in accordance with the broader methods of simulation gaming is not half bad, and that what is good in the classroom is even better outside of it.
Ron Stadsklev, who was born in a very poor area of Minneapolis by parents of slight education, was well-acquainted with the cloistering effect of ghetto life he would later teach to students through simulation games. A sense of where he could go with his education (plus his father's insistence that one place he would go was to college) supplied him with what he would later call autotelic, or self-directed, inquiry that led him to become, soon after graduating from Chicago's Concordia College, the sole teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Alpena, Michigan. The sponsoring church was encouraged enough by Stadsklev's work there to erect an entirely new four-room school with cafeteria, theater, and large gymnasium and to make him the principal. After five years building up the facility, Stadsklev sought further experience as an elementary and secondary teacher (and basketball coach) in the Army Dependent Schools in Bremerhaven, Germany. When he was offered an assistant professorship at Concordia College (this time in Seward, Nebraska), he returned to the States in 1963 to coordinate student teachers, develop the teacher training laboratory curriculum, and teach in the experimental high school.
It was at Concordia that Stadsklev stumbled upon the usefulness of simulation games in the classroom. Certainly he was already familiar with the regular kind: as a boy, he had spent much of his earnings accumulating a closet full of non-educational games, which he played as much for the chance to carefully document the scores as he did to win. Only now, in the sobering light of responsibility and human nature, he found himself "up to here with the inadequacies and meaninglessness of the conventional system. If there really [was] a system, it [was] just to keep jumping from one log to another--survival." Students felt trapped in an endless maze of arbitrary requirements, or a home life or job without promise. Only two things suggested to Stadsklev a way out: his license to experiment with teaching methods, and a paper he discovered by James S. Coleman: "Relationship between Games and Learning." When Stadsklev tried out his new Coleman-inspired Constitution Today game on the most boring part of his history class, the results spurred him to more experiments and an innovative thesis, A Comparative Study of Simulation Gaming and Lecture Discussion Methods, that in 1970 earned him an M.S. in Education from Northern State College in Aberdeen, North Dakota. More importantly, the research for that thesis was probably responsible for landing Stadsklev one of only two prized year-long internships (1968‒69) offered by the Social Science Education Consortium (SSEC) at the University of Colorado, where he "was responsible for becoming a leading authority on simulation gaming and how it relates to the new social studies curriculum being developed." Money was made available to travel anywhere in the country to interview people in the field. Thus began fifteen years as an independent field consultant for such agencies as the Institute for World Order and the SSEC itself, though perhaps the greatest beneficiaries were the students in Stadsklev's high school classes back at Concordia.
The high school was closed in 1973 for lack of federal funding, and as Stadsklev was faced with the prospect of "teaching Pestalozzi" to education majors by traditional methods, he gladly accepted an offer from the University of Alabama as the Director of Experiential Learning Projects at the Institute of Higher Education Research and Service. Though the salary was not much, he was granted a suite of offices and workers, unlimited travel expenses for research, unlimited time off for his own consulting work, and 80 percent of the profits from any writing he might publish! More importantly, he also greatly respected the visionary IHERS director who had hired him. Besides continuing his field consulting, Stadsklev presented papers at numerous symposia, served as editor (and sometimes contributing editor) of several periodicals, and joined the boards of the prestigious Society for the Advancement of Games and Simulations in Education and Training (SAGSET) and the North American Simulations and Gaming Association (NASAGA). Of Stadsklev's several publications, by far the most important is his two-volume Handbook of Simulation Gaming in Social Education (textbook, 1974; directory, 1975), containing articles by Stadsklev himself, James Coleman, Garry Shirts, and others, and (volume two) cross-referencing the salient aspects of nearly all the simulation games about social education known at the time. The books were used as texts in colleges and universities all over the world and earned the University of Alabama, which published them, more money than was contributed by any other faculty member. Stadsklev himself was nominated for Outstanding Scholar of the Year at the University and gained in prestige, not just as a major prophet of the coming kingdom of simulation games, but as the inventor of an indispensable technique for debriefing the students who play them. In 1976 an early federal grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE) allowed him to design and confirm a much-praised simulation gaming method to select guidance counselors for the educationally disadvantaged. His attempt to infuse realism into popular recreation was published by Milton Bradley in 1979 as the American Dream Game.
It is emblematic of Stadsklev's whole life that one of the most important projects he worked on at the University was Project Outer Limits, a sustained investigation into human potential and its consequences for educational strategy. The conclusion of the project was that 1) we have no data to support a strict idea of human limitation and 2) our potential may lie as much in "inner" structures like sub-atomic particles and neurophysiology as it does in "outer" structures external to ourselves. These insights coincide with Stadsklev's emphasis on self-direction, but they also mark the trajectory his whole life has taken. In 1984, when funding for experimental education again dried up and Stadsklev again found conventional pedagogy stultifying, he again sought to reinvent himself, this time in San Diego as founder and owner of an ecology consulting service that introduced recycled paper into the region. Retirement in 2002 has meant only more projects: though gone are the years of boxing, race car driving, and horse breeding, Stadsklev plays regularly with the Senior Olympic Basketball Team and has worked in Poland and New Zealand building houses for Habitat for Humanity. These days he gives as well as he gets in the many discussion groups he belongs to, and continues to invent his own games several months out of the year while working with students in China.
Biographical notes about the author (or in this case the author-compiler) are usually provided to 1) inflate the author's ego, 2) satisfy the reader's curiosity, 3) assure the reader of the author's credentials, or even 4) guarantee his authenticity, that he believes and lives what he wrote. Though we hope here to satisfy all these objectives, we also hope to 5) offer evidence that a life lived in accordance with the broader methods of simulation gaming is not half bad, and that what is good in the classroom is even better outside of it.
Ron Stadsklev, who was born in a very poor area of Minneapolis by parents of slight education, was well-acquainted with the cloistering effect of ghetto life he would later teach to students through simulation games. A sense of where he could go with his education (plus his father's insistence that one place he would go was to college) supplied him with what he would later call autotelic, or self-directed, inquiry that led him to become, soon after graduating from Chicago's Concordia College, the sole teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Alpena, Michigan. The sponsoring church was encouraged enough by Stadsklev's work there to erect an entirely new four-room school with cafeteria, theater, and large gymnasium and to make him the principal. After five years building up the facility, Stadsklev sought further experience as an elementary and secondary teacher (and basketball coach) in the Army Dependent Schools in Bremerhaven, Germany. When he was offered an assistant professorship at Concordia College (this time in Seward, Nebraska), he returned to the States in 1963 to coordinate student teachers, develop the teacher training laboratory curriculum, and teach in the experimental high school.
It was at Concordia that Stadsklev stumbled upon the usefulness of simulation games in the classroom. Certainly he was already familiar with the regular kind: as a boy, he had spent much of his earnings accumulating a closet full of non-educational games, which he played as much for the chance to carefully document the scores as he did to win. Only now, in the sobering light of responsibility and human nature, he found himself "up to here with the inadequacies and meaninglessness of the conventional system. If there really [was] a system, it [was] just to keep jumping from one log to another--survival." Students felt trapped in an endless maze of arbitrary requirements, or a home life or job without promise. Only two things suggested to Stadsklev a way out: his license to experiment with teaching methods, and a paper he discovered by James S. Coleman: "Relationship between Games and Learning." When Stadsklev tried out his new Coleman-inspired Constitution Today game on the most boring part of his history class, the results spurred him to more experiments and an innovative thesis, A Comparative Study of Simulation Gaming and Lecture Discussion Methods, that in 1970 earned him an M.S. in Education from Northern State College in Aberdeen, North Dakota. More importantly, the research for that thesis was probably responsible for landing Stadsklev one of only two prized year-long internships (1968‒69) offered by the Social Science Education Consortium (SSEC) at the University of Colorado, where he "was responsible for becoming a leading authority on simulation gaming and how it relates to the new social studies curriculum being developed." Money was made available to travel anywhere in the country to interview people in the field. Thus began fifteen years as an independent field consultant for such agencies as the Institute for World Order and the SSEC itself, though perhaps the greatest beneficiaries were the students in Stadsklev's high school classes back at Concordia.
The high school was closed in 1973 for lack of federal funding, and as Stadsklev was faced with the prospect of "teaching Pestalozzi" to education majors by traditional methods, he gladly accepted an offer from the University of Alabama as the Director of Experiential Learning Projects at the Institute of Higher Education Research and Service. Though the salary was not much, he was granted a suite of offices and workers, unlimited travel expenses for research, unlimited time off for his own consulting work, and 80 percent of the profits from any writing he might publish! More importantly, he also greatly respected the visionary IHERS director who had hired him. Besides continuing his field consulting, Stadsklev presented papers at numerous symposia, served as editor (and sometimes contributing editor) of several periodicals, and joined the boards of the prestigious Society for the Advancement of Games and Simulations in Education and Training (SAGSET) and the North American Simulations and Gaming Association (NASAGA). Of Stadsklev's several publications, by far the most important is his two-volume Handbook of Simulation Gaming in Social Education (textbook, 1974; directory, 1975), containing articles by Stadsklev himself, James Coleman, Garry Shirts, and others, and (volume two) cross-referencing the salient aspects of nearly all the simulation games about social education known at the time. The books were used as texts in colleges and universities all over the world and earned the University of Alabama, which published them, more money than was contributed by any other faculty member. Stadsklev himself was nominated for Outstanding Scholar of the Year at the University and gained in prestige, not just as a major prophet of the coming kingdom of simulation games, but as the inventor of an indispensable technique for debriefing the students who play them. In 1976 an early federal grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE) allowed him to design and confirm a much-praised simulation gaming method to select guidance counselors for the educationally disadvantaged. His attempt to infuse realism into popular recreation was published by Milton Bradley in 1979 as the American Dream Game.
It is emblematic of Stadsklev's whole life that one of the most important projects he worked on at the University was Project Outer Limits, a sustained investigation into human potential and its consequences for educational strategy. The conclusion of the project was that 1) we have no data to support a strict idea of human limitation and 2) our potential may lie as much in "inner" structures like sub-atomic particles and neurophysiology as it does in "outer" structures external to ourselves. These insights coincide with Stadsklev's emphasis on self-direction, but they also mark the trajectory his whole life has taken. In 1984, when funding for experimental education again dried up and Stadsklev again found conventional pedagogy stultifying, he again sought to reinvent himself, this time in San Diego as founder and owner of an ecology consulting service that introduced recycled paper into the region. Retirement in 2002 has meant only more projects: though gone are the years of boxing, race car driving, and horse breeding, Stadsklev plays regularly with the Senior Olympic Basketball Team and has worked in Poland and New Zealand building houses for Habitat for Humanity. These days he gives as well as he gets in the many discussion groups he belongs to, and continues to invent his own games several months out of the year while working with students in China.
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Blog postIn reply to Chuck Petranek.
On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Ron Stadsklev wrote:
Hello Chuck,
WOW, what a surprise. Glad to hear that you have been so successful. My simulation Gaming career came to an end when Regan was elected and all the money that was going in to soft sciences and education shifted over to hard sciences and military. The University of Alabama had a big meetilng and the president told us of all the cuts that would need to be made. Institute of Res6 years ago Read more -
Blog postIn reply to Geace.
Grace,
Just about a year ago you wrote a very niece comment on my blog. I answered it, but found out today that it never went through because I had not enter the post correctly.
Well, if this gets through and you read it let me know.
I wanted to thank you for all the kind words. I wish I could have got to China to meet you. You seem like a very neat lady. Take care, Ron
7 years ago Read more -
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Blog postI couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
8 years ago Read more -
Blog postI think this is among the most vital information for me.
And i’m glad reading your article. But want to remark on few general things, The website style is wonderful, the articles is really excellent : D. Good job, cheers
8 years ago Read more -
Blog postDear Ron,
Thank you for the generous offer of your book. I downloaded it a couple days ago, perused a few pages just to make sure I could see it all on my computer, and hope to look through it more in the next couple weeks.
Before accepting your offer, I googled you to check on your role in education — these days the independent investigation of whatever is claimed is essential, as it is the only way for us to achieve true confidence in our knowledge, and because much less tha8 years ago Read more -
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Blog postRon, I have shared your book information with MOST Ministries out of Ann Arbor, MI. I have done four mission trips with them. One of their popular outreaches is teaching ESL (English As a Second Langauge) and your teaching methods will be looked at by their staff. Sounds great to me. Thanks, Denny
8 years ago Read more -
Blog postWow– I have been on four mission trips to Europe and Peru –in Europe we taught “English As a Second Langauge” — this theory on teaching is “Right On” — I am excited to study it more and pass it on to our MOST Ministries trainers.
8 years ago Read more -
Blog postRon:
Don’t know if you remember me, but I was a student in your secondary methods class in 1970 at CTC-Seward. I did not find, when I actually practiced as a secondary school social studies teacher, that the class prepared me for a lot of the challenges I faced, but I did remember with fondness and implemented what you taught us about simulations. In fact, to this day as a college professor, I continue to develop and use simulations in my teaching. Now, ironically, I am a teacher of t8 years ago Read more -
Blog postGood for you Ron!! I’ve tried different things, but bungee jumping will NOT be one of them. 😉
8 years ago Read more -
Blog postRon Stadsklev awarded the:
Ifill-Raynolds Award NASAGA October 2014 The Ifill-Raynolds Award, which is a memorial award given for outstanding contributions to simulation and gaming, recognizes one of our members who develops or uses simulation games with joy and serious purpose. This is in the spirit of the NASAGA members it was named for Don Ifill and Gennie Raynolds Don and Gennie brought joy and serious purpose as well as spirit to their work, and specifically to the9 years ago Read more
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Books By Ron Stadsklev
$9.95
The Handbook of Simulation Games in Social Education, presents the “What”, the “Why”,and the “How” of Simulation Games.
• What are Simulation Games?
• Why use Simulation Games?
• How do I create and use Simulation Games?
When this book was first published in 1974. Ron Stadsklev was one of the few pioneers seeking to introduce Simulation Games as a new teaching technique. Now Simulation Games are in the mainstream and this expanded edition is even more salient than ever.
Role playing, games, and social simulations have been around for a long time. In order for the game process to be educational, it must reward participants who understand and interact within the social model effectively. The Model of Autelic Inquiry presented in this Handbook shows how all these elements are incorporated into a Simulation Game. The biggest challenge is developing an entertaining and playable game element without distorting the isomorphism of the social model.
This handbook includes several experiential learning techniques. These techniques can be implemented directly from the material contained within the handbook and do not require a computer. The collection of essays which comprise this handbook illustrate how these teaching techniques are used. This handbook also discusses how to avoid the many pitfalls of Simulation Game design.
For example:
In “The T puzzle game”, participants will experience how frustration effects a person’s ability to accomplish difficult tasks and the emotional change that accompanies certain activities.
“The Land Use Simulation” is a social simulation, designed to demonstrate a process by which people can determine the best way to use their public land.
“The Constitution Today” is a simple simulation game, designed to motivate students to study the constitution in a meaningful and personal way. Students will also be using a parliamentary process called log rolling in order to achieve a high score. This simulation game was used in a comparative study of simulation gaming and lecture-discussion method to determine the amount of knowledge retained over time.
• What are Simulation Games?
• Why use Simulation Games?
• How do I create and use Simulation Games?
When this book was first published in 1974. Ron Stadsklev was one of the few pioneers seeking to introduce Simulation Games as a new teaching technique. Now Simulation Games are in the mainstream and this expanded edition is even more salient than ever.
Role playing, games, and social simulations have been around for a long time. In order for the game process to be educational, it must reward participants who understand and interact within the social model effectively. The Model of Autelic Inquiry presented in this Handbook shows how all these elements are incorporated into a Simulation Game. The biggest challenge is developing an entertaining and playable game element without distorting the isomorphism of the social model.
This handbook includes several experiential learning techniques. These techniques can be implemented directly from the material contained within the handbook and do not require a computer. The collection of essays which comprise this handbook illustrate how these teaching techniques are used. This handbook also discusses how to avoid the many pitfalls of Simulation Game design.
For example:
In “The T puzzle game”, participants will experience how frustration effects a person’s ability to accomplish difficult tasks and the emotional change that accompanies certain activities.
“The Land Use Simulation” is a social simulation, designed to demonstrate a process by which people can determine the best way to use their public land.
“The Constitution Today” is a simple simulation game, designed to motivate students to study the constitution in a meaningful and personal way. Students will also be using a parliamentary process called log rolling in order to achieve a high score. This simulation game was used in a comparative study of simulation gaming and lecture-discussion method to determine the amount of knowledge retained over time.
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