The Fictionalization of Lessons Learned

wo US Army officers; a Hollywood writer and producer; a famous film actor and director; and our host, a local jewelry dealer, are sitting around the table with me at a curiously empty restaurant in Juarez, Mexico. I order a mango fish plate and try to keep up with the conversation, which has drifted toward the Los Angeles real estate market. Notably, I'm the only one at the table with an ambiguous role to play in our mission, a fact that is not lost on our host. He turns to query me, " And what are you doing here? " With as much authority as I can muster with a straight face, I tell him, " I'm the computer scientist. " In fact, our mission is part of an innovative research effort to create prototype leadership development applications for US Army officers in partnership with the Hollywood film industry and researchers at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). In short, we're creating a new genre of Army training films, and exploring their role in interactive technologies for case-method teaching , which is the formal use of stories in classroom instruction. Teaching with fictional movies Case-method teaching has its historical roots in Harvard University's law and business schools. At these schools and others, experienced instructors use compelling cases to illustrate a set of issues, provoke a meaningful classroom discussion , and get students to formulate their own arguments for debate. 1 The US Army routinely uses case method teaching in their schoolhouses. However, this style of instruction has been challenging for the Army when the topic veers away from tactics, techniques, and procedures, and toward the subtle aspects of Army leadership. Army leadership ability is based on tacit knowledge that's difficult to articulate, involving inter-and intrapersonal skills, teamwork, and organizational behaviors that are as much about human psychology as anything else. 2 Crafting compelling and believable stories for case-method teaching for Army leadership development is an enormously difficult task. In 2002, the Leader Development Unit of the Army Research Institute began a partnership with ICT to explore applying talent from the Holly-wood filmmaking industry to Army training. Over the last three years ICT has brought together a remarkable group of writers, directors, producers, actors, professors, graduate students, programmers , and Army subject-matter experts to develop interactive leadership-development prototypes centered on Hollywood-style fictional films. ICT completed the first …