Reflection on Choice and Messy Learning
Early on in my PhD, back in 2019, seven years before the final submission, I gave a presentation that brought together some of my initial thinking. This post outlines some of the key ideas from that moment and how my colleagues Laura Trufi-Prats and Michael Gallagher offered encouragement and some important advice.
The title of the presentation was Designing for Learner Choice. I began with a reflection on the 20-year anniversary of the June 18th 1999 protest, Carnival Against Capitalism, coordinated primarily by the Reclaim the Streets group.
A still from the presentation showing a Reclaim the Streets party and protest in the 1990’s
This felt relevant not only because I think it is important to connect with colleagues through aspects of identity that are not always visible in professional contexts, but also because it connected directly to the subject of the presentation: the power of free choice and non-formal learning spaces. For me, the party and protest were both examples of this.
In the presentation, I moved between a formal academic framing and a more personal, almost confessional, appreciation of creatively chaotic environments.
After showing clips from Reclaim the Streets events, and trying to walk a fine line between enthusiasm for these wild-looking spaces and maintaining a professional tone, I began to look for themes in the findings that had emerged so far.
How I advanced choice as a common factor
At the time, I tried to pull these ideas together quite formally. The table below summarises some of the key ideas I presented at the time.
| Theme | Description | Examples / Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Choice as a motivating factor | Learner choice is framed as designing a learning experience with multiple pathways. Allowing choice between these pathways can be highly motivating. | Participants choose what features to add to their games, including code, art, music, or gameplay changes. |
| Choice to incorporate interests and identities | Learners work in ways that allow them to bring in their own interests and identities. | Participants draw on games they enjoy and reference cultural materials from home and friendship groups. |
| Choice and ill-structured problems | Learning tasks are intentionally open, with no single correct solution. This supports deeper engagement and collaboration. | Example task: create a game that promotes environmental awareness and behaviour change. |
| Choice and free choice learning | Free choice learning recognises that people spend significant time outside formal education. Supporting motivated learning in these contexts is valuable. | Family participation extended learning beyond structured sessions. |
| Choice to create peer learning opportunities | A diversity of pathways encourages learners to share knowledge and support each other. | Peer learning emerged organically through the organisation of the space and targeted facilitation. |
| Choice as a factor in learner autonomy | Choice supports the development of learner autonomy within a community. | Learners moved from guided participation towards more independent roles. |
Keep learning sketchy
You might still be wondering how that introduction about Reclaim the Streets connects to game making and learning design.
Part of the answer lies in something we used to describe as sketchy. There was always an element of borderline illegality, a kind of cat-and-mouse dynamic with authorities, but also a productive looseness. That sense of “sketchiness” is something I later recognised in the learning environments I was trying to create.
One of the ideas that sits underneath this early framing, but which I didn’t yet have the language for, is the importance of this kind of sketchiness. By that I mean resisting the urge to over-polish too early, and instead creating artefacts and environments that invite participation.
A sketch, in this sense, has a number of useful characteristics:
- It is incomplete, making it easier to add to
- It is imperfect, making improvement visible
- It is quick, requiring minimal time investment
- It is cheap, lowering the barrier to entry
- It is messy, often requiring collaboration to understand
Looking back, many of the choices I was designing into the sessions were really about enabling this kind of sketchy engagement. Participants were entering into something unfinished and being invited to shape it.
A bit of tough love
After the presentation, both Laura Trufi-Prats and Michael Gallagher gave me some advice: do not use choice as the main framing, find a better way to present the findings.
Although I reacted a bit grumpily at the time, they were right. Looking back, there are three main reasons.
Firstly, choice has been shaped by its association with free-market approaches to education, and for many it carries problematic connotations.
Secondly, while the term is flexible, as shown in the table above, it is also vague, which does not sit well within a PhD context.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it is too passive a way of describing what was happening. It does not capture the active, co-creative nature of the learning environment.
So I moved away from “choice” as a central concept and began to focus instead on a socio-cultural understanding of agency.
Looking back at my notes, you can already see that agency better captures what I was trying to describe.
Extract: Those earlier experiences of open, loosely organised social movements, including events like Reclaim the Streets, had a particular quality of shared exploration and boundary pushing. They were spaces where the outcomes were collectively produced, often explicitly via a “bring what you expect to find” invitation.
This begins to point towards what I later described as transformative agency, where participants reshape the activity itself.
Extract: The framing of “sketchy learning” connects to a more complex understanding of autonomy. It is easy to treat autonomy as an individual trait, but in practice it is socially produced.
This anticipates later ideas of relational agency, where autonomy emerges through interaction.
A question that has stayed with me since is how to bring some of that “freedom feeling” into learning environments. Creating spaces where learners can explore, test limits, and shape what the activity becomes.
This question became central to both my understanding of agency and my approach to learning design. It is explored further in Chapter 5 and in later work such as the REEPPP framework.
So while I no longer use “choice” as the main framing, I still recognise what I was reaching for. The challenge is not simply to give learners more options, but to create environments where they can take part, shape what is happening, and build something together. This shift from choice to agency becomes central in other blog posts in this series, particularly in how gameplay design patterns begin to organise activity within the learning environment.