Those who remember the heyday of the Realm in TPRS can recall the great excitement around the idea of building an entire year of stories around certain medieval/gang/whatever characters, as the class chose. I think I have finally figured out why the Realm didn’t work for me.
Those very characters, as excited as the kids were to be a troll, a baker, a king, a damsel, etc. had no real plot to build content from. They just sat there at their desks, and it was like a soap opera that on some days worked, on others flopped.
I sensed this after only two years of starting the Realm, which was about 2004 when it was in it’s nascent form. I had heard that people had made it work, but when I talked in San Antonio last summer to Tawanna Billingsly from Chicago, who had gotten a very successful gang thing going one year, we both kind of knew, without putting our finger on it, that it was one of those great ideas without wings.
At least this is my opinion, and there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about it for a few years, so I think we can pronounce the Realm dead at this point. What we need when we use comprehensible input to teach our kids is the personalization piece, which, it is true, the Realm had in spades, but we also need a certain emerging of content from the class in a natural way that just didn’t seem to work in the Realm. What does that mean?
It means that the kids, by being bakers and knights, weren’t themselves. They had become characters as per the AIM method, which works wonderfully for small kids whose imaginations are still intact and don’t have the massive self-consciousness, negative or positive, that we see in teens.
When we create content using CI in our classes from 8th grade and up (seventh grade is a whole new topic), we must include that personalization piece to a greater degree than just having a bunch of medieval characters in the room. The kids have to have aspects of themselves, and, especially for high schoolers, we have to have that love/attraction piece going as well. Anne Matava’s questionnaire becomes even more important in how we start each year in the light of that fact.
We need the personalization piece for any CI to work, and the Realm, oddly, wasn’t personalized enough. Personalization is what provides the best story content, and what makes stories and other CI work.