Desert Island Discs: An Enduring Game in the Classroom

SUMMARY
The Desert Island Discs game (BBC) is celebrated and adapted to a classroom activity, with questions and criteria. Interesting implications in the digital age arise. An example of a desert island list of favourite items is begun.


The Castaway's Choice
What items would you take if you were to be cast away on a desert island. The game can be about books, music, mementos, etc. The idea is that your choice demonstrates your taste, priorities, personal history, or even beliefs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs

The most well-known version has been played on the BBC since 1942. The redoubtable Roy Plomley was the original host of the interview game where each famous guest told the story of his or her life punctuated with musical selections. At the end the castaway also got to take "the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, a favourite book, and one luxury."

The Beeb has generously made all interviews from 1998 available as podcasts ("Yours to keep."). It's one of the greatest treasure troves on the Net. My favourites are A.C. Grayling, Karen Armstrong, and Dame Joan Plowright. You simply must visit this website and fill your pda!

An Enduring Curriculum Game
You can see how a variation of this game can work at all levels and subjects of the curriculum. Simply ask students, individually or as groups, to choose items for their island:

• their favourite tunes (they get a wind-up audio player)
• the most important books they have read so far
• books they have heard about and plan to read
• art works which could fill their own island museum
• photos of family and friends
• games to keep their wits

Agree on the nature and number of the items. Watch their faces when you say that wireless is not available.

Impress on students that they should

• research and make their choices carefully from a larger list of possibilities
• defend their choices to the class in a formal or informal way (you could try the BBC interview format)
• relate each selection personally to their life and times
• make their selections with passion, reason, and imagination

Interesting Questions for Our Times
Today, it is easy to say "I'll just take my terabyte iPod loaded with e-books, playlists, videos, podcasts, and photos." So initially students might see the game as irrelevant at worst or old-fashioned at best. Intrigue them with your own list, ask them to imagine a parent's list, or just discuss what Jack Sparrow would have taken if he hadn't been rescued in The Pirates of the Caribbean.

It is after playing the game that interesting questions arise for both curricular and personal purposes:

• From the choices you made, what did you learn  about who you are and have been?
• Would this game be easier to play if you were of an older generation? Explain your view.
• Did not being able to take electronic devices or content limit your favourite choices? Was this fair? Did it help you discover interesting possibilities?
• How diverse was your list? For instance, did it include different types or genres of music or books?
• How different was your list from your friends? Explain reasons for similarities or differences.
• What did you not have to bring on the island to entertain yourself. For instance, how could you count on your prior knowledge and skills at making your own entertainment or recalling memorized information like poetry and stories.

More than a Game?
Desert Island Discs is more than a parlour game. It's a hypothetical but dramatic scenario that sharpens the wits, illuminates personal history, and explicates personal choices that students are unconsciously and consciously making now.

The idea for this blog came from my watching the film Children of Men (2006) awhile ago. Michael Caine plays Jasper, a tech savvy rebel, who hides in the woods from the authorities of a dystopian Britain. His hideaway contains relics of his former life which sustain him as he cares for his ailing wife. Looking up at my bookshelf, I fantasized as librarians sometimes do, which ten, hundred, or thousand books I would take with me if I had to flee society.

Write me a comment and share your list. I have started my list here and reserve the right to change it if you can remind me what I have missed. There's a bit of Roy Plomley in all of us, I suspect.