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What chess has given us.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Chess is often cited as a means of promoting cognitive and affective growth in students. We review some of that literature, but we primarily focus on our personal growth journeys through chess, showing what it gave us intellectually and socially, and how it has encouraged us to share this type of growth with others, building a community of learner/scholars. We conclude that teachers who start and participate in school chess clubs and encourage their students to participate in all of the activities of the chess world, including adult chess clubs, will promote their intellectual and social growth for a lifetime as well.

Introduction

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first proponents of the advantages of chess and chess play in this country, but even he is supposed to have lamented, "Chess hath not given me what I hath given it." (Hagedorn, 1958). But in the first American book published on chess, in 1802, Franklin noted the following:

The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it. (Franklin, 1802).

Franklin felt that chess developed three important qualities of mind: Foresight, Circumspection, and Caution, as well as, "And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources." (Franklin, 1802). We propose that chess does give much to its devotees, as the habits listed by Franklin suggest. Using our stories as models, we discuss the growth potential of chess.

Chess and the Community of Learning

Learning is best facilitated by building a community of learners (Katz and Chard, 2000; Kern, 2002; Pringle, 2002), in which learning proceeds from guided discovery (Brown & Campione, 1994). Wenger (1998) has noted that since the beginning of history, human beings have formed communities that accumulate collective learning into social practices-communities of practice. One finds such communities in the old guild system of the Middle Ages and in modern examples such as the German educational system, with its emphasis on apprenticing at an early age. In organizational settings such as health care, physicians, nurses, and other health professionals participate in such communities through activities such as "Journal Club"--regularly scheduled discussions of recent scientific literature amongst the practitioners who must...

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