KyEdRPG Spotlight: Dan Burkey and using TTRPGs as "Structured Improvisational Art"

 

Headshot from Dan Burkey's website.

I first met Dan Burkey virtually.  Dan, who has a strong background in theater and performance,  reached out to share about his artist-in-residency offerings in northern Kentucky, but more to the point, he had come across my work with "Polyhedral Pedagogy" -- using tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) in education.  As it turns out, Dan had also been using TTRPGs with students as part of his substitute teaching, and he regaled me over Zoom with some of his tales.   We finally met in person when he attended a "Dungeons & Desks" professional learning day I co-facilitated in Louisville, part of an ongoing regional series.

Dan contacted me recently to let me know about an educational resource document he had made along with the latest success he was having implementing a simple TTRPG rules system with students.  With that, I knew we needed a full-blown interview!

Enter Dan, stage right...

Dan, welcome to Edtech Elixirs!  Please share your educational and artistic journey. 

I graduated from Centre College in 2009 with a degree in Dramatic Arts, a rough cut of my first feature film (a noir adaptation of Euripides’ Medea) and a strong Liberal Arts interdisciplinary mindset. It was the middle of the Great Recession, and I started substitute teaching while I worked on various creative projects and sorted out what might come next. With my theatre background, I couldn’t help finding ways to liven up sub plans every day: singing, juggling, showing up in character as an eccentric scientist, etc. This caught the attention of the Étude Group schools, a public charter network in Sheboygan, WI, that focuses on project based learning and arts integration. In 2014, they brought me on as an artist-in-residence to work alongside teachers to interpret academic content through a dramatic lens. I earned my teaching certificate in Theatre Education from UW-Milwaukee, then continued at Étude as a certified drama teacher for 6 years- mostly at the K-8 level, but also some high school classes. I taught drama, filmmaking, animation, script writing, and game design, usually working with grade-level teams and other arts specialists to weave together form and content. Our projects included student-written plays about settlers coming to Wisconsin, games designed to simulate bird migration and population dynamics, and creative drama journeys through the human body with the Magic School Bus, among many others.

In parallel with my work at Étude, I was developing my career as a theatre director. I started Mad Yarn Theatre Company to produce offbeat plays at Paradigm, the local coffee shop and hub of Sheboygan’s creative community. We became better known for our MadCap 24-hour Play Festival, where teams of writers, directors, and actors created plays from scratch in a single day. I also worked with Warped Dance Company over several years to develop an aerial dance adaptation of The Nutcracker (in the process I invented and performed a new form of aerial unicycling).

After the pandemic and the birth of our first child, my wife and I moved to Northern Kentucky to be closer to family. After a couple years finding my footing in the area, I started working as a teaching artist with American Legacy Theatre and The Carnegie, and I remembered how much I love collaborating with other educators to bring vibrant learning into their classrooms. Last year, I was accepted to the Kentucky Teaching Artist Directory, which means that schools and libraries can apply for Kentucky Arts Council grants to bring me in for programming. I typically consult with teachers to create and facilitate drama, creative writing, and media arts (including game design) experiences that are tailored to their specific classrooms and curriculum.

This year, KAC grants are funding three of my projects: guiding students to make and perform a dramatic sequel to The Giver at St. Cecilia in Independence, introducing tabletop game design concepts to patrons at Campbell County Public Library, and making storybooks come alive through creative drama with youth at Kenton County Public Library. In addition to grant-funded work, I can also contract separately for residencies with schools and nonprofits. So far, my work has taken me to Kenton, Boone, Campbell, and Pendleton Counties, but I’m open to working within about a one-hour radius of Covington. There’s more information on residencies at my website, danburkey.com.

When I’m not doing a residency, I continue to practice substitute teaching as a structured improvisational art form, along with various writing and game design projects.

What a lovely set of experiences you've had!  Tell us more about your personal experience with playing tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs).   What was your first TTRPG?

My first TTRPG was a homebrew fantasy thing my high school friend made up on a road trip. It had no dice, and as GM he would just say how he thought actions would resolve. We also did a lot of freeform boffer LARP- live action roleplaying while fighting with foam swords. This guy in our class was seven feet tall and his actual name was Hrothgar; he played a troll and wielded a war hammer made out of a couch cushion folded in half and covered in duct tape on the end of a long PVC pipe. We were the coolest people we knew.

I didn’t get back to TTRPGs until about 10 years later when I became a drama teacher. I was looking for ways to scaffold character creation for improv and scene devising with middle school students.  A friend introduced me to Fiasco, a GMless indie RPG by Jason Morningstar, and we tried it out at game nights with a couple other teachers. Content-wise, the game is hilarious but not appropriate for middle school (it’s designed to emulate a Coen Brothers style crime caper gone horribly awry). But its mechanics opened my eyes to some brilliant ways to start a story: a network of character relationships, a shared problem, and some objects and locations to get the imagination running. The game’s rules actually shaped my approach to playwriting and improvisation. The latest version trades out dice and roll tables for a card-based engine that smooths out setup and features a “Let’s Not” card (like the X-card safety tool) to empower players to reshape any story content that gets in the way of safe and enthusiastic fun.

These days, I have three small children, so most of my roleplaying is freeform improv adventures in the yard chasing bad guys and pirates. My oldest is getting big enough to enjoy more structured games, so we’ve tried some simple RPGs, including Super City with the VRBS system.

You mentioned that TTRPGs opened a door for you to teach improv and scene creation with students.  Can you tell us more details on how you made that work? 

When I first got the idea for using TTRPGs in the classroom, I was teaching a middle school drama class and using the technique of improvisational devising to create scenes. Instead of having one playwright create a script and then give it to actors to perform, the devising process shares the story creation work with the whole ensemble. In our version, each actor created a character, then we put those characters into different situations to see how they would respond. I wanted to get students thinking about their characters’ lives beyond a job description, so I looked at the idea of character sheets from the TTRPG space. You could call this “Elemental Infusion” on the classroom RPG spectrum- we used the character sheet to fill out character ideas, but we didn’t run the whole creation process as an RPG.  [Dan is referring to the Depth of TTRPG Infusion Framework from my book. -- Adam]  I started researching other ways we might bring together drama and TTRPGs.

Last fall, I got to do an arts residency with students at Prince of Peace Catholic School in Covington, and I really got to put my research into practice. We played the game Super City by David Garrett, and adapted it to fit the settings and problems with their science and social studies units. This was in their STEAM class, so after the residency, they used the stories from our games to inspire visual art pieces.

You’ve already mentioned VRBS and an example TTRPG that uses that rule set, Super City. From our previous conversations, I know it was created by David Garrett, the system is free under Creative Commons, and that you are a big fan of it!   Can you tell us more about how VRBS works, and the advantages of VRBS over other TTRPG rules or systems?  

VRBS – by the way, I usually pronounce it “verbs”** – presents the ideal balance of flexibility and structure to teach students the core loop of traditional TTRPGs. Players take action to respond to a problem in character, roll dice to find out how well it worked, and take turns until the team solves the problem or fails. For years, I couldn’t find anything in the goldilocks zone between games with daunting three-pound rulebooks and games that assumed too much improv skill and previous knowledge of RPGs to work with beginners (especially without a GM). A typical VRBS game (rules, scenario, character sheet, and space for note-taking) fits on two sides of a sheet of letter paper, but it gets players straight into the action.

Instead of traditional stats, each character starts out with 3 verbs they are good at doing. In Super City, David Garrett’s game about students at a superhero school, these are themed as your character’s superpowers. So maybe you start with Fly, Blast, and Lift. The scenario has roll tables for setting, problems, and citizens to save, so you roll up a situation and someone describes it (the game can be played with a GM or with players sharing the GM role). On your turn, pick ANY verb and say how you use it. If it’s a verb on your sheet, you have better odds of success, but you can try anything you can imagine. In our example, you could Blast the giant robot’s processor and get a bonus to your resolution roll. Or could try to Interrogate it, which would be riskier because you don’t already have that skill.

Resolution happens with a 1d6 system, which makes it accessible to anyone who can find a standard die. Add any bonus points from the verb you used to your roll. Whether you succeed or fail, you get to describe what that success or failure looks like. A total of 5-6 is a Success. A 7+ is a Big Success- describe how it’s even better than you expected, and add one point to the team’s Energy pool (Energy is a team resource- if it runs out, the scene ends in failure). Rolling a 1-4 is a failure. When you fail, lose one energy, describe how something unexpected happens when you do the verb, and gain a bonus point for the verb you failed at.

The fail-forward mechanism is where the game really shines as a learning tool. Characters (and all humans!) learn through their mistakes. This is what makes stories interesting. The game highlights this important storytelling lesson; it rewards players with improved chances on future dice rolls (an extrinsic reward) and the chance to describe their character’s failure and how it affects the story (an intrinsic reward). If you try a new verb and fail, you get to add it to your sheet with a bonus point. The only way you can get new skills is by trying something new and failing at it!

VRBS is adaptable by design, thanks to the System Reference Document (SRD) that powers the mechanics of the game. D&D is like a luxury sports car: to tinker with it you need to consider a lot of different systems and mechanisms that all interact to make it work. VRBS is like a hot rod: there aren’t a lot of moving parts, so anyone with a wrench and a blowtorch and a free Saturday here and there can modify it and make something unique that will run pretty well. So I’ve found lots of ways to hack it for the classroom.

It sounds like VRBS would be great for younger students, but have you also used it with older students? Can you share other examples of how you’ve used VRBS in schools?   

During my residency at Prince of Peace, I ran Super City with two groups of students during their Art and Technology block: a 3rd-4th grade combined class and a 5th-8th grade class. I wanted to support students in independent GMless (or, more accurately, co-GM) play, so I divided the duties of the GM into four roles. Each role received a card listing their duties and a tool to help carry them out:

• The Scene Setter used roll tables to choose the next scene situation and was also in charge of describing it.
• The Note Taker summarized main events for each scene so that stories could be adapted into comic book form later.
• The Goal Setter used a problem progress bar tool I made (not native to VRBS, but helpful for collaboration) to set a difficulty (number of successes) for each scene’s problem. 
• The Peacemaker resolved disagreements using the questions: Does it follow the rules of the game? Is it helping all players feel safe and comfortable and have fun? Does it make sense in this story world? 

[Dan is describing an innovative "Student-Led" role-playing experience, one of the "degrees" from my Degree of TTRPG Facilitation Framework. I love how he's taken what can be a complex task and structured it in a way to "share the burden" amongst the students!  -- Adam]

We also used a version of Beau Jagr Sheldon’s Script Change tool to empower students to pause the game and call for a re-do on choices that overstepped the boundaries those questions imply.

We started with a couple play sessions to learn the game- once with me as GM, and once with the shared GM roles in place. Then we started folding in academic content. Using a Chalk Talk routine, we brainstormed setting, character, and problem ideas to get characters interacting with ideas from science and social studies units. The 3rd-4th grade class was studying US regions, so students’ ideas included landmarks (San Andreas fault, farm in Kansas), jobs related to regional resources (lifeguard, miner), and natural disasters common to different areas (earthquake, tornado).

In 5th-8th grade, students were learning about cell structures in their life science unit. We generated ideas that used a city’s buildings and institutions as a metaphor for a cell’s organelles based on their functions. Combining different students’ ideas, Cell City became an archipelago of island neighborhoods in a sea of cytoplasm, surrounded by a seawall representing the cell membrane. It included an Endoplasmic Reticulum Airport for transporting goods between the islands, a Ribosome factory that supplied local KroGoo stores with food goo, a Mitochondria power plant, and it was controlled by a nucleus: a giant neon sign that sent out reminders about the laws of the city (the DNA). After a few sessions of adventures with individual super squads, we finished with a whole class showdown when the Nucleus got a virus that sent the Nuclear membrane guards to attack the whole city, while at the same time a giant bacterium was attacking the cell wall. Students were invested in the story and characters because of their independent play sessions, but the whole-class session allowed everyone to share out their character actions and pursue shared goals. As a facilitator, the whole class session gave me an opportunity to assess how students were approaching gameplay, and also call out great examples of the Cell City metaphor in action.

I also had a chance to adapt Super City for an AP French class at Boone County High School during a residency with American Legacy Theatre. We started out trying to do more improv-based work, but we ran into some challenges. It was a tiny class divided between three fluent heritage speakers and two non-native speakers. As a result, class discussions often involved three students chatting comfortably in French while the other two struggled to keep up or get a word in. The uneven comfort with conversation was especially challenging for improv, with the triple challenge of understanding a scene partner, deciding what to say, and how to say it in French. 

The TTRPG structure brought us a softer approach: giving each player a turn to describe what they are trying to do, then roll the dice to determine the outcome and describe what it looks like. This gave a natural rhythm of spotlight shifting that allowed everyone to share and get help when needed without feeling like it was interrupting the flow of the story. Since the current vocabulary unit was about Self-Discovery (describing strengths and weaknesses, comparing the inner and outer self, etc.), I translated and expanded the Super City character sheet to include descriptions of each character’s secret identity to target the unit’s grammar and vocabulary in a new context. It worked especially well with the small student-teacher ratio. I could see this being a good rotation station style activity in a larger foreign language class (a great way to practice transitive verbs in particular!).

I put an outline of my hacking process and links to the tools I created into a document and resource folder to help other educators hack VRBS games for their classrooms. Hopefully others can join the quest!

In June 2025 you attended a “Dungeons & Desks” PD facilitated by Kalli Colley and myself.  You told me in previous talks that you found it valuable, which I'm glad!  How did something you learned there help you in your educational work?   

For starters, it was a great example of hands-on PD that uses the methods to teach the methods. We were playing educational games pretty early in the session, cycling through small-group and whole-group discussion as we reflected on the rules and the various stages we played through. One of the example games that stuck with me was a simplified D&D-powered scenario that recast the dynamics behind the Mayflower Compact into a space mission. In the scenario, a small group of scientists doing planetary research ends up stranded with a larger group of workers who just want to survive.  [The TTRPG is one I  adapted from a simulation scenario created by Teach Democracy; the simulation is also described in my book. -- Adam] The experience showed the power of pre-generated characters and Auto-GM scenarios for guiding a story.  ["Auto-GM" is another example from the Degree of TTRPG Facilitation Framework. -- Adam]  By bolting down a lot of variables in character creation, it opened up focus on the debate at the heart of a significant historical moment. I recently heard a talk by Susan Haarman through Tabletop EDU, who described the gaming table as a micro-democracy, and connected gaming to John Dewey’s idea of a “dramatic rehearsal” for civic life. Putting those two ideas together, I like the idea of a whole-class campaign structured like a representative democracy.

Coming from a drama background would be a huge asset for playing or running TTRPGs.  If nothing else, I would think it gives you confidence to model for, and lead students in, role-playing and structured imaginative storytelling.  But what if we don’t have a background in theater?  If we are educators wanting to use TTRPGs but we aren’t actors or directors, what can we learn from the dramatic arts? 

I think the biggest thing I bring over from drama is a sense of playful collaboration. Inside the magic circle of a game or the given circumstances of a scene in the rehearsal room, we have a lot of freedom to try new things, make mistakes, and then try something different. We get comfortable doing silly acting exercises, then use the safety of that space to experiment with ideas for telling the story. As a director, I try to empower my actors to make their own choices by helping them understand the stakes and situation their character lives in. Then I can ask them what they would do instead of telling them what to do. 

Some of the best GM advice I’ve read is to ask your players questions about the world, and then incorporate their ideas into play. It lightens your cognitive load, honors the creativity of the people around you, and gets others invested in your shared journey together. It’s equally good advice if you’re a teacher, a director, or any other role where your leadership guides someone else’s experience.

A side note on the subject of verbs: one of my favorite drama tools is action analysis (sometimes called beat analysis). Actors can break down a scene based on their character’s motivation, objectives and tactics, each expressed as a verb. I think this process primed me to see the VRBS system as a bridge between TTRPGs and dramatic storytelling.

How have students reacted to your educational TTRPGs?  How do you know their learning is more vibrant, deeper, memorable?

We closed each game session with a Stars and Wishes share-out, and students were always excited to share the highlights of their characters’ actions throughout the session. I was also intrigued by the way that the Cell City setting worked for students in various stages of the middle school developmental mind warp. For kids in the thick of the change, who often struggle with abstract thinking, there was a concrete task to latch onto, with a small menu of go-to choices to lean on. At the same time, the setting creation process let the students who were still in younger imagination-brain mode share wacky ideas and allowed students who had crossed over and regained their capacity for metaphorical thinking to apply it in a way their peers could relate to.

In the AP French class, I could tell the TTRPG was an effective learning tool because everyone was naturally applying their language content in a new context. Students at all levels of fluency were seeking out new vocabulary words to describe their superpowers and their impacts on the story world.

What’s next?  What would you like to try with TTRPGs in classrooms that you haven’t done yet?  

I have so many ideas! The structure of whole-class and small group play could be used to simulate representative democracy in a whole class setting. We saw a little of that with different superhero teams joining together, but it would be interesting to lean into that dynamic more specifically.

After reading Hamlet’s Hit Points by Robin D. Laws, I think it would be interesting to adapt the VRBS system to explore different ways an existing literary or dramatic scene might play out. The book shows a way to analyze a text by finding the inflection points of a character’s rise and fall. It would be interesting to actually roll some dice on an action at each inflection point and see where you end up.

My two-year-old daughter loves bugs, and as we were watching some ants together I got the idea to use nature observation as a tool to identify animal-action verbs for a game of heroes who merge with other creatures.

In a math class, I think there’s also a lot of potential in examining different probabilities in various card and dice resolution systems. It could be used to make stronger choices for a crunchy RPG session, or it might be used to show how designers choose different layers of probability to match their system to the stories they want to tell. Stories of bold risk-taking often use luck-pressing systems, card-driven prompt games offer variety in a predictable structure, and stories of gradual personal growth often give level-up bonuses to make success more likely over time. This might be a good hook for students with literary strengths who might have trouble relating to the world of numbers.

In any case, I’m always open to the adventure of making new discoveries with other educators. One of my secret powers as a teaching artist is sharing the planning load for weird new ideas, then helping unpack the surprises that emerge.

Dan, I am thoroughly impressed by your structured Polyhedral Pedagogical approach! A school would be lucky to have you as a teacher or as an artist-in-residence.   I usually end these KyEdRPG Spotlight interviews with a variant of the same question:  What advice would you give to a teacher who wants to start using TTRPGs in their own classroom?

First, don’t feel like it has to be a huge undertaking to plan. If you can engage your students in building out the game world with you, they will be more invested in it and it’s less prep up front. Build onto students’ ideas and ask questions that lead toward specificity and imagery, or show where the danger is in a place or situation.

Second, make sure to model the gameplay as a whole class before breaking into smaller groups. Take a day to teach the “what is this thing we’re doing” and another day to layer in any tools you are using to support GMless or co-GM play. I like to use a giant die we can toss to whoever is taking a turn in our first learning session.

Finally, remember to have fun and show that you’re having fun! Your energy and enthusiasm feed your players.

A big thanks to Dan Burkey for taking the time to be interviewed!  If you would like to work with Dan, be sure to reach out via his website.

Kalli and I will be leading our next educational TTRPG session as a FREE two day workshop at the Frazier Kentucky History Museum on June 11 and 12, 2026.   For more details and a registration link, visit here.  Hurry -- seats are limited!

**Correction 4/20/26:  In the original interview, Dan shared reading in an old blog entry that VRBS may have stood for "Virtual Reality Battle System."  David Garrett, the creator of VRBS, explained in an email to Adam that VRBS was never an acronym, nor was "Virtual Reality Battle System" a phrase he used.  As Dan himself said, Garrett just pronounces it "Verbs." I've now amended my entry to avoid perpetuating the error.   Additionally, inspired by Dan, Garrett has now made four of his VRBS games (Super City, Spookytown, Dweomerdale, and .Agent Purrvocateur, all of which are appropriate for young players) free for digital download!  Find them at the Amalara Game Studio online store.

Creativity, AI, Utopias, and the Cultivation of "Guild-Like" Powers

Yesterday, I was part of a recording session for the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast, co-hosted and produced by Dr. Matthew Worwood and Dr. Cyndi Burnett.  (Special thanks to both of them for having me as a guest, and please consider a subscription!)  It was an invigorating conversation, and a topical one, as valuing human creativity in a world of artificial intelligence seems to be something that has a particular urgency in the here and now.   Let's examine AI and creativity separately first.

Dr. Cyndi Burnett, right before the recording began.  I was part of the photo collage of guests, celebrating the podcast's recent fifth anniversary!

When we examine a snapshot of artificial intelligence today, it seems necessary to pull out the quote marks.  We may take some comfort that for all of AI's remarkable speed and agility to "write" or "draw" or "ideate," it is essentially a highly efficient pattern-maker and builds its product-making programmatic skill on the backs of human ingenuity, and a fair share of its generated images and videos still fall into the AI slop category of questionable quality.  (Whether those platforms fairly compensated or even appropriately cited the human ingenuity that trained it, or whether AI is worth the environmental impact, is a whole other ball of wax I'll set aside for the moment.) However, people have also argued what products humans have made are deemed worthy of the label "art" for thousands of years, and here begins a deluge of debates as we consider AI's output alongside humanity's.  Are we as humans not also a product of our times, influenced (subconsciously or not) by all that came before us?  How do we define the purity of a so-called "original thought"?  Can a first-grader be called a writer, even if their handwriting is uneven and their thoughts are fairly trite?  Does a text qualify as a literary novel if it is self-published, full of typos and cliches, but has a million downloads?  When do the air-quotes end and the scepter is deigned by some credentialed institution to bestow someone or something as a true writer, writing, art or artist?  If Chaucer is a rulestick with which we should judge Western literature, how do we evaluate the writing output of a human child, or a popular hack, or a machine in comparison?  

Of course, wherever you may land on the spectrum of philosophical debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence (and to be clear, I have concerns about AI on several levels even as I use it and see its potential strengths), we all must agree that AI today is the worst it will ever be, performance-wise.  We have to remind ourselves that ChatGPT -- or at least the version 3.5 that was born on November 30, 2022 -- is not even four years old.  Even if you think all it does is connect pre-existing dots and wave a wand dispensing ephemeral digital parlor tricks, ChatGPT (and its various LLM siblings) is already pretty impressive for an immature digital child-bot not old enough to be in kindergarten yet.   (For the record, my anthropomorphism -- and other juxtapositions of human and machine above -- are meant to provoke thoughtful debate that will only grow more heated as lines blur while AI capability grows.  With that said, in a world where people talk with machines that are often sycophantic and merely mimic human feelings, we need to be repeatedly reminded that artificial intelligence is not a person. It's refreshing to hear a company like SchoolAI decide to make their chatbot Dot no longer have a cute face, because "[s]tudents need to know when they're talking with AI.")

We can now move on to another question that requires air quotes: what do we mean by "creativity"? In the world of education, we sometime suffer for want of common nomenclature in defining creativity, in the same way we struggle in agreeing on the same definitions of "engagement" or "collaboration."  There often is a shoulder-shrug of you know it when you see it level of understanding, and that applies to most of us when we try to define something as squishy as creativity.  Perhaps more problematic is the onerous task of recognizing creativity in students, or even more difficult, cultivating it.  A beleaguered teacher might ask, What gives me the right to judge or teach others about creativity, when I may not consider myself creative in the first place?  To put it mildly, it's a big challenge.  And yet, I believe most of us agree that if public education is to endure and thrive, it must do a better job for its learners at nourishing the human-centered notions we value, such as joy, relationships, and yes, creativity.

The scholarship behind creativity, particularly in education, is huge, and I would not pretend I could encompass or summarize all of that brilliance in a single blog entry.  But luckily, we have a good start with my recent podcast hosts!  Dr. Burnett is the director of Creativity and Education, which offers a "Five-Point Star model" on how to pragmatically bring creativity into your classroom:  Understanding Creativity, Recognize Your Own Creativity, Support a Creative Environment, Bring Creativity Into Your Lessons, and Teach Creativity as Its Own Skill.  Dr. Worwood, along with Dr. James C. Kaufman, designed the CAUSE Model of Creative Languages (Connect, Apply, Understand, Share, and Express), and they "consider how an individual’s varying levels across these five Creativity Languages (innate, proficient, independent, basic, or dormant) may influence creative behavior, choice of domains to pursue, and potential eventual success."  Until their article, I hadn't heard of the Four C Model of Creativity (designed by Dr. Kaufman and Dr. Ronald Beghetto).  What I found useful in that Four C Model was the idea that creativity doesn't have to always be equated with genius, which makes being creative feel elitist and impossible to reach or teach.  Instead, Kaufman and Beghetto describe a continuum of creativity:

• "mini-c": anything "new and meaningful," although perhaps limited to only personal value
• "little-c": "[w]ith appropriate feedback, advancements are made and what was created might be of value to others"
• ,"Pro-c": "the ability to be creative at a professional level and in a professional venue"
• "Big-C":  something that "will be remembered in the history books"

As an educator, that already gives me relief; not every act of creation must have a "Big-C" level of impact.   At minimum, we are all capable of "mini-c" and "little-c" moments and can recognize and encourage them in others.  

But how do we foster creativity in a world where AI threatens to simplify (or, perhaps more apt, sloppify) inventive human thinking?  The theme of the April 2026 issue of Educational Leadership is "Igniting Curiosity in Schools," invoking another "c" word strongly related to creativity.  In the article "Sparking Curiosity with Applied Intelligence" by Elizabeth Agro Radday and Matt Mervis, the title draws the distinction between students passively using AI and actually applying it to solve authentic questions and problems:  "When students use AI, they rely on it to provide an answer, often bypassing productive cognitive struggle. When students apply AI, they expand their curiosity and creativity and become creators. In these cases, AI is part of the solution to a larger, messier problem that cannot be solved or answered with a simple prompt."  While they point out a study where college graduates are struggling to find entry-level positions thanks to AI phasing out such jobs, they also rightfully put some of the blame on traditional school systems. "The automation of low-level tasks," warns Agro Radday and Mervis, "the very 'clerk work' we often assign in schools, is already having a disproportionate impact on young people entering the workforce."  We need instructional environments that encourage students to be creative, not compliant cogs mindlessly completing transactional tasks.  If we keep treating students like machines, they will be replaced by them.

Naturally, this connects to late 19th century utopian novels and William Morris.  But hear me out, I can explain.

Back in 2001, I wrote a "hyperessay" for an English undergraduate University of Louisville course on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  I want to emphasize this was created in HTML when hyperlinking text felt almost transgressive, barely three years after I had gotten my first personal computer (Windows 98!).  My thesis was that you gained a deeper understanding of Twain's novel if you contextualized it within the utopian fiction written in the same time period (1871-1891) as Yankee's publication (1889).  As part of my research, I read several utopian novels, one being William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891). 

The 1800's was the Industrial Age.  For most people of the era -- like Yankee's protagonist Hank Morgan -- technology was welcomed, inspiring, and unquestionably viewed as progress.  It therefore should be no surprise that tech was not only foregrounded in many of the utopian novels of the 19th century, but that two-thirds of all utopian novels were written in the 1800's (Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 1962).

News from Nowhere, however, was different.  William Morris is a fascinating Britain whose influence continues into the present, even if his name may not be well known in the United States. A Romanticist, artist, socialist, political activist, and prolific multi-genre writer, Morris was a close friend of poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Morris's wife was his muse, and likely more) and a lover of architecture, medieval times, Icelandic sagas and Arthurian legends.  He was also a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, eschewing manufactured goods for handmade ones.  These passions were clear in Morris's utopia, situated in a London of the future, but with a de-emphasis on impersonal tech replaced by a strongly pastoral, bucolic setting of artisans.  That said, these utopians were not total Luddites -- they simply put technology in proper perspective. As one character puts it, "[W]hatever is made is good, and thoroughly fit for its purpose. Nothing can be made except for genuine use; therefore no inferior goods are made. Moreover, as aforesaid, we have now found out what we want; and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them. All work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery; and in all work which it is a pleasure to do by hand machinery is done without."  (A fun aside:  Morris also wrote high fantasy stories such as the novel The Well at the World's End [1896], inspired by Grail quests and Arthurian knights.  If Morris's resistance to the Industrial Age and love of Nordic sagas aren't enough clues that J.R.R. Tolkien was influenced by him, consider The Well at the World's End also has a "King Gandolf" and a horse named "Silverfax.")

Surrounded by the belching smokestacks of British industry, Morris turned toward the pleasures of the tactile and handcrafted.  One hundred and thirty-five years after News From Nowhere was published, we see Morris's aesthetic play out today.  We seek vintage forms of pleasure ourselves. Vinyl record sales have never been higher, and wired headphones are making a comeback, part of a larger "analog lifestyle" movement.  In education, many schools are banning cell phones during classtime and are having, as a recent The New York Times article put it in its title, "Chromebook remorse."  Fear and/or frustration over AI is fueling analog over digital instruction. I have strong opinions on both sides of this divide.  As a Digital Learning Consultant, I often see this as overreaction and a problem resulting from mis- or overused tools during the pandemic that have created lingering and triggering fatigue of edtech, and lament that technology isn't being implemented with the intentionality it needs to leverage student learning.  As an author who recently wrote a book encouraging tabletop role-playing games in the classroom, I also appreciate the appeal of face-to-face student interaction using old-fashioned paper and pencil (and dice!).  As a social media consumer who is inundated with AI slop videos in my feed, I can certainly sympathize with those who want a return to quaint times where we did not have such a "vast quantity of useless [digital] things," produced quickly, amazingly, pointlessly, and soullessly.  

So, in the face of such a morass, what do we do and how can we move forward? As we ultimately return to the notion of creativity, I'd like to offer one possible answer on the subject as I complete threading the multiple topics of this blog entry together (from the seemingly random Chaucer reference in the beginning to the Middle Ages to Morris to Tolkien to TTRPGs like the world's most famous fantasy-themed game).  But first, a quick flashback to our podcast recording.  Matthew and Cyndi discussed how barriers and boundaries increase creativity, even as logic presumes that it should constrain it.  I couldn't agree more.  It's the same thing that powers the best of games.  Take chess, for example.  Despite what superficially seems to be the limitation of rules that you can learn in minutes (how each chess piece moves differently on the board), the creative possibilities and strategies of playing chess are nearly endless, and it can take a lifetime to master.  We cannot think outside of the box without the box in the first place.  

Here is where artificial intelligence steps in, for good or ill. It may have its place, but we must be careful that it does not wipe away all constraints and with it, the chance for complex thinking.  AI can potentially give us god-like abilities with a keystroke, but creativity will suffer if such synthetic omnipotence is used without a greater purpose. Also, omnipotence is boring.  If a "problem" can be answered with AI that easily, what kind of problem was it really?  There is a quantum difference between solving a linear equation on a worksheet and an authentic challenge that needs mathematical thinking to be solved.  The former just needs a machine (and perhaps not even AI, but a pocket calculator).  The latter needs us.

And this is where looking back to the medieval age may give us a way through. In the spirit of William Morris, perhaps we can start an Analog Artisanal movement.  In the urgency of our present circumstances, we do not need god-like powers, but guild-like powers.  We need teams of humans, talking through our differences of opinions, working collaboratively, holding each other to the highest standards, looking for ways to apprentice the next generation to build our future world with care.  Digital tools may certainly help, and AI may become a collaborative partner of that neo-guild.  However, inspired by Morris's utopian outlook of technology, we should keep a proper perspective on how our analog and digital worlds blend, and who's in charge.

We need to celebrate and cultivate the creativity that lives within each of us, knowing that we will only hone our craftsmanship after mentorship, practice and failure.  We may still need a forge or an anvil to get there.  But we should never mistake the anvil for the blacksmith.

When the podcast is published in May, I will update this blog entry with a link!