In 2001, David Gauntlett, a professor of media studies in Britain, began mailing out an odd little side project: trading cards with the faces of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Anthony Giddens instead of athletes or cartoon monsters. Each of the twelve cards, which arrived once a month, featured a portrait of a theorist along with a summary of their theories. For a while, the entire thing read more like an inside joke from a hobbyist than a legitimate teaching tool.
In Britain, the cards were never widely used in classrooms. They garnered some attention, sparked a wave of fan-made imitations of Marx, Said, and de Beauvoir, and received a New York Times article. However, British higher education, with its emphasis on tutorials and essays, didn’t quite know what to do with a deck of cards meant to be played like trumps, where Duchamp’s ability to confuse everyone in the room might clash with Foucault’s “special skill” of dismantling old paradigms.
Strangely, American professors appear to have discovered the true value of the cards. In some U.S. undergraduate seminars today, instructors use trading-card formats not only for critical theory but also for history, civics, and even early childhood education units. Students are asked to summarize a person, event, or concept onto a single card using a predetermined set of prompts: who they were, what they believed, why it mattered, and what’s still unresolved. Most college writing assignments don’t require the kind of compression that this structure does.
This works especially well in American classrooms for a reason. Compared to the earlier British tutorial model, U.S. higher education, particularly at the community college and state university levels, places a greater emphasis on active-learning strategies and visual scaffolding. College instructors searching for something in between a flashcard and a full essay have quietly embraced tools like ReadWriteThink’s Trading Card generator, which was first developed for K–12 literacy work. Although it’s a tiny, nearly unintentional migration, it follows a larger American tendency to materialize abstract concepts.
Additionally, there is the baseball card factor, which may seem absurd at first. American students are taught that cards are a way to condense a person’s life into a few facts and a single, defining image. Baseball cards, according to linguist Mary Louise Pratt, serve as authentic teaching tools that help young readers create narratives out of sparse data. Gauntlett’s theory cards land in a society that is already ready to take cardboard biography seriously, whether or not he intended that lineage.
This does not imply that the British version was unsuccessful. Gauntlett’s deck is still available for purchase, printable, and occasionally referenced in media studies curricula. However, it’s difficult to ignore the disparity: an idea designed for British students largely remained a curiosity at home, while American teachers, operating in a system that rewards short, visually anchored assignments, transformed the same format into something more akin to a habit.
It’s really unclear if this will become a long-term pedagogical fixture or just another fad in education. No one is pretending that trading cards will take the place of research papers. However, it’s instructive to see a modest, somewhat quirky British experiment find its strongest foundation thousands of miles from its origins.
